Reporting on Burma, then and now

This week on 60 Minutes, Bill Whitaker and his team travel to Burma, where the country's pro-democracy opposition party is expected to triumph in next month's election, advancing Burma's political transformation. But this wasn't the first time Whitaker had been there -- and this isn't the first election in Burma that promised change.

In 1990, when multi-party elections were held for the first time in 30 years, Whitaker reported from Rangoon for CBS Evening News.

Visiting Burma in 1990 "was almost like stepping back in time," he says, noting that the streets were quiet and no buildings were taller than the gilded Shwedagon Pagoda. In the video below, he explains some of the differences he saw when he returned this year.

In 1990, Burma was just starting to shake off the strictures of a repressive military regime that had jailed hundreds of opposition leaders. One of those leaders was Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest and would remain so for most of the next two decades.

Still, her opposition party won the 1990 election by a landslide. "People were literally dancing in the streets," Whitaker says. "I'd heard that before, but I had never seen it before." But in the following days and weeks, after Whitaker and the foreign press left, the generals nullified the results of the election and remained in power. "That brief moment of hope was quashed," he says.

In this week's story, produced by Rachael Morehouse and Henry Schuster, Whitaker interviews Aung San Suu Kyi, who is now free and a member of Burma's parliament. Her pro-democracy party is poised for victory in next month's election, but she seems less than certain about her country's future, especially since the military wrote the constitution in such a way that it automatically retains a quarter of the seats in parliament even before the voting.

"Do you believe that Burma is on the path to democracy now?" Whitaker asks her.

"It's not firmly on the path to democracy," she says. "I think it's democracy as seen by military authoritarian leaders."

Burma's President Thein Sein, a former general, assures Whitaker that this election will be nothing like the one in 1990. "I believe that there is no chance for something to happen-- like the situation in 1990," the president told him. "I firmly believe the elections this year will be free and fair."

For Whitaker, this time does seem different. "The way the constitution has structured the legislature, change will come slowly," he says. "But change is coming. It truly is."