Archive for the 'Burma' Category

The fearless young men who risk their lives to document Burma’s genocide

Published
by
asianwindow
on March 7, 2010
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Mac McClelland at Mother Jones:

Blood rubies: Burma's dictatorship is making a killing selling off natural gas and a wide variety of other valuable resources to China, India, Thailand, and the West—all to the tune of $6.7 billion a year. Click on the image to see the slideshow at Mother Jones.

“Do you want a cigarette?” I ask Htan Dah, holding up a pack of Thai-issue Marlboros. We are sitting on opposite sides of a rectangular table, talking over the spread: three bottles of vodka, two cartons of orange juice, plates of sugared citrus slices, nearly empty bottles of beer and bowls of fried pork, sweet corn waffles, pad thai, a chocolate cake. We share the benches with two guys each, and half a dozen others hover.

The men are all in their 20s. Most of them are solid and strong and hunky; their faces shine because they’re drunk, and it’s July. They could be mistaken for former frat boys unwinding after another tedious workday.

Except that they’re stateless. They are penniless. They speak three or four languages apiece. Two of them had to bribe their way out of Thai police custody yesterday, again, because they’re on the wrong side of the border between this country and the land-mine-studded mountains of their own. Htan Dah’s silky chin-length hair slips toward his eyes as he leans forward. My Marlboros are adorned with a legally mandated photographic deterrent, a guy blowing smoke in a baby’s face, but it doesn’t deter Htan Dah. Nor is he deterred by the fact that he doesn’t smoke. Tonight, he is flushed with heat and booze and the virility and extreme hilarity of his comrades. Tonight, as always, he is celebrating the fact that he’s still alive. He takes a cigarette. “Never say no,” he says, and winks at me. More:

Myanmar’s colonial treasures threatened

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 14, 2010
in Burma, Heritage and Travel
. 0 Comments

From the Wall Street Journal:

Yangon: The colonial buildings of this once-grand city are scattered about like tombstones in a neglected cemetery—unnoticed, and often unwanted, relics of a lost era.

Yangon is home to one of the largest collections of undisturbed colonial architecture in the world, with some neighborhoods left almost exactly as they were when the country gained independence from Britain some 60 years ago. But the buildings, already crumbling after years of neglect under a repressive military regime, face an increasingly uncertain future.

A government decision to move Myanmar’s capital from Yangon to a remote redoubt named Naypyitaw in 2005 has left several of the most important buildings almost totally abandoned, accelerating their deterioration. Meantime, resurgent investment from China and other Asian neighbors is triggering interest in development—including the possibility of building shopping malls and apartment blocks where old structures now stand. More:

The trader of shadow fortunes

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 6, 2010
in Burma, Business and India
. 0 Comments

Everyone knows about the illegal lottery business. Few know who runs it. In Tehelka, Shantanu Guha Ray uncovers Santiago Martin of Myanmar:

Every few nights, as a nation dreams, contract employees of Kolkata-based courier companies heave brown bags onto nondescript railway station platforms across Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. These jute sacks hold no prosaic cargo, but literally millions of lottery tickets worth hundreds of crores, each ticket a sultry — and illicit — promise of riches. Troops of young boys swarm onto these sacks; dividing their contents among themselves, they cycle off into the approaching dawn. That day — and every day — lottery tickets worth Rs 40 crore will be sold across India. Lotteries are legal in just 12 states and five Union territories; in the other states, tickets are clandestinely sold at nondescript tea stalls, cigarette shops and newspaper vends. Illegal lottery tickets account for a whopping 60 per cent — Rs 7,200 crore — of the Rs 13,000 crore gambled every year on lottery tickets.

Presiding over this illegal empire of eternal hope and callous numbers is Santiago Martin, 42, a Myanmarese whose interest in paper lotteries are perhaps as old as he is. The day Martin was born, his Yangon-based parents won a super lottery, getting $1,000. “He proved lucky for his parents,” says T Arumayagam, who worked with Martin in Arunachal Pradesh where lotteries are legal, before he shifted to Coimbatore. More:

Aung San Suu Kyi, a leaking roof, and the brother who won’t let her fix it

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 4, 2010
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi lives in this house on University Avenue in Yangon, on the shores of Inya Lake. The military has blocked off University Avenue since 1999, making the house inaccessible to anyone without special permission. Yangon, Myanmar, 1995. Image: tap tap tap /cc

Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

The dispute between Ms Suu Kyi and Aung San Oo, her elder brother and only surviving sibling, dates back to 1988 when their mother, Khin Kyi, living at the white, colonial-style building located in Rangoon’s University Avenue, suffered a stroke. As the health of their mother, the wife of Burma’s independence leader Aung San and a woman who served as Burma’s ambassador to India and Nepal, worsened, Ms Suu Kyi returned to Burma from her home in Oxford to care for her.

Nine months later her mother suffered a second stroke and died in late December, by which time the country’s fledgling democracy movement had already mounted fierce challenges to the government, in which up to 6,000 democracy activists had been killed.

Ms Suu Kyi, who had first encountered the protesting students when they brought wounded comrades for treatment at the hospital where she was caring for her mother, was swept up in the struggle. She began addressing huge crowds, and was quickly acclaimed the legitimate heir to her father as the champion of Burmese freedom.

According to her lawyer, Mr San Oo said that she could continue to live in the family home for as long as she wanted, only stipulating that if she sold it, he would receive half the proceeds. Nothing more was heard of the matter until 2000 when Ms Suu Kyi’s brother, who by this time had taken US citizenship and emigrated to California with his Burmese wife, launched a legal action in the Rangoon High Court for the house to be divided. On that occasion, Ms Suu Kyi’s lawyers were successful and defeated the action but the following year, her brother, who is an an engineer, filed suit again. The matter is still pending. More:

Rapping at the Burmese Junta

Published
by
asianwindow
on January 7, 2010
in Burma, People and human rights
. 0 Comments

From Asia Sentinel:

The chain-link gate slides open to reveal a group of young shaven-headed Burmese men and two girls sitting outside a house in Mae Sot, a scruffy town on the Thai side of the Thai-Burmese border.

All are members of Generation Wave, an underground group dedicated to overthrowing the repressive military junta that has ruled Burma since 1962. The odds are against them, as they have been against a long series of movements harboring in Mae Sot and Chiang Mai in Thailand. Nonetheless, Generation Wave has a certain amount of panache, attempting to reach Burma’s youth by using rap and hip hop music and graffiti to inspire others to stand up to authority

“We’ve cut our hair Saffron style,” said Aung Min, one of GW’s founders, referring to the failed Saffron Uprising in 2007, in which tens of thousands took to the streets, led by Buddhist monks, only to have at least 135 people and possibly more shot down by the military. “If something happens in Burma we can go in there quickly and mingle with the monks.” More:

Laughing through the junta’s gag

Published
by
asianwindow
on November 12, 2009
in Burma and Entertainment
. 0 Comments

Myanmar’s famous comedy troupe, unable to publicly stage its satirical routines, still pokes fun at the ruling generals nightly at home. From the Los Angeles Times:

moustache_brothers Mandalay, Myanmar – The generals, to put it mildly, can’t take a joke.

But the Moustache Brothers make their living mocking fools, including those who wear military uniforms. So they have drawn a battle line in this country’s long struggle for democracy with a small stage that cuts across their cramped living room, site of the three-man comedy troupe’s nightly performance.

The military regime silenced street protests last fall by arresting and, in some cases, shooting peaceful demonstrators. That has left dissidents such as comedians Lu Zaw, Lu Maw and the lead satirist of the family, Par Par Lay, to tend the embers of opposition by poking fun at the regime.

In the past, the junta that rules Myanmar — also known as Burma — has tried to shut them up too, hoping to intimidate them with prison terms, hard labor and torture. But the comedians are exploiting a loophole in a ban on their act by staying on the attack at home, in English, with biting humor that ridicules the junta as a bunch of bumbling thugs, thieves and spies. More:

Aung San Suu Kyi: 5,000 days in captivity

Published
by
asianwindow
on July 5, 2009
in Burma and human rights
. 0 Comments

To commemorate Aung San Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday on June 19, The Irrawaddy invited its readers to submit their artwork featuring the Nobel Peace Prize winner. The sketch above is by the artist Ko Khaing.

To commemorate Aung San Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday on June 19, The Irrawaddy invited its readers to submit their artwork featuring the Nobel Peace Prize winner. The sketch above is by the artist Ko Khaing.

Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:

Today, like most days, Aung San Suu Kyi will sit and wait. She will spend the day with the two women she has been detained with since 2003. That she is being held in a “guesthouse” in the grounds of Rangoon’s Insein jail, as opposed to her lakeside house where she has spent the past six years, makes little difference; she has no television, radio or phone. But today is special, and for the most dismal of reasons. It is the 5,000th day of her incarceration.

Ms Suu Kyi is being held at the prison, having been charged with violating the terms of her house arrest after a mysterious American swam to her home and spent the night there. In truth, the only crime committed by the graceful opposition leader was to win an election two decades ago. Even now, the junta is terrified that this slight 64-year-old widow has the power to do something they have never been able to do: lead and unite the people of Burma without the threat of force. That is why she is kept a prisoner, out of sight but never out of mind.

Yesterday, in a move that underlined the regime’s fear about Ms Suu Kyi’s latent power, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was refused permission to speak with her. On a controversial visit to Burma to try to convince Senior General Than Shwe to release more than 2,000 political prisoners and restart dialogue with the opposition, Mr Ban said his request for a meeting with Ms Suu Kyi had been turned down. “I pressed as hard as I could. I had hoped that he would agree to my request, but it is regrettable that he did not,” he told reporters. “I am deeply disappointed that they have missed a very important opportunity.” More:

When she’s 64

Published
by
asianwindow
on June 29, 2009
in Burma
. 0 Comments

aung-san-suu-kyi1Thanks to Sanjoy Narayan of the Hindustan Times for this brilliant link to 64 for Aung San Suu Kyi. The website is a place where you can leave words of support for Burma’s imprisoned democracy leader who turned 64 on June 19 this year.

Writes Sanjoy: Already, the website has garnered messages from people from around the globe-politicians, actors and celebrities but also individuals who have pledged their support and demanded the release of Suu Kyi who has been under detention for much of the past 19 years.

You can visit the site to read, hear and watch the hundreds of messages left by people, including luminaries from the world’s power list like actor George Clooney, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Czech leader Vaclav Havel, football star David Beckham,  actor Daniel Craig, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President of the Maldives M Nasheed, author Salman Rushdie, actor Julia Roberts, UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron, Madeleine Albright, Steven Spielberg, Orhan Pamuk and several others.

There are tweets from Yoko Ono, a video from Richard Branson plus a blog that’s regularly updated on the website.

To send your own message or to link to the site click here.

Do not forget Burma

Published
by
asianwindow
on June 28, 2009
in Burma and human rights
. 0 Comments

Laura Bush — yes, former First Lady and wife of poor, reviled Dubya — emerges a champion of an unlikely cause in The Washington Post

free-burmaFor two weeks, the world has been transfixed by images of Iranians taking to the streets to demand the most basic human freedoms and rights. Watching these courageous men and women, I am reminded of a similar scene nearly two years ago in Burma, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks peacefully marched through their nation’s streets. They, too, sought to reclaim basic human dignity for all Burmese citizens, but they were beaten back by that nation’s harsh regime.

Since those brutal days in September 2007, Burma’s suffering has intensified. In the past 21 months, the number of political prisoners incarcerated by the junta has doubled. Within the past 10 days, two Burmese citizens were sentenced to 18 months in prison. Their offense: praying in a Buddhist pagoda for the release of the jailed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. That is only the tip of the regime’s brutality. Inside Burma, more than 3,000 villages have been “forcibly displaced” — a number exceeding the mass relocations in genocide-racked Darfur. The military junta has forced tens of thousands of child soldiers into its army and routinely uses civilians as mine-sweepers and slave laborers. It has closed churches and mosques; it has imprisoned comedians for joking about the government and bloggers for writing about it. Human trafficking, where women and children are snatched and sold, is pervasive. Summary executions pass for justice, while lawyers are arrested for the “crime” of defending the persecuted.

more

[Pic: Jurablog's photostream under creative commons]

In Burma, two hidden worlds

Published
by
asianwindow
on June 20, 2009
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Irrawaddy readers from around the world have submitted their favourite portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi to commemorate her 64th birthday. Click on the image to visit the site.

Irrawaddy readers from around the world have submitted their favourite portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi to commemorate her 64th birthday. Click on the image to visit the site.

Amid privations, its regime prospers by trading with China and India. From the Wall Street Journal:

This grandiose new city has four-lane highways that are largely empty, a gems museum with sapphires and a zoo with air-conditioned Arctic habitats for penguins. Government officials reside in high-security compounds that can’t be visited by foreigners.

A five-hour drive to the south, residents in Yangon get by with hours at a time of no electricity. Their once-grand city is filled with collapsing Victorian mansions and abandoned colonial administrative buildings. Roads are often impassable during monsoon rains, and most cars date to the 1980s or early 1990s. Some taxis are so worn out that they have holes in the floorboards that allow passengers to see the road rushing by underneath.

The divide between Myanmar’s shining new capital, home to much of its military elite, and its commercial capital underscores the failure of a decade of U.S. and European sanctions, efforts to break the country’s military regime by cutting it off from doing business with much of the Western world. Instead, the country’s leaders and top businessmen have survived and even thrived by replacing Western buyers with Asian ones. Trade with China has more than doubled over the past five years, and sales of natural gas and other resources to Thailand, India and other Asian powers are also growing quickly. In the process, the regime has only tightened its grip. More:

The Lady by the Lake

A visit to Aung San Suu Kyi’s neighborhood. From Newsweek:

After the trial of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi began, I visited Rangoon. The road barriers and heavy security outside her home, which I’d seen on a previous trip, were gone. “She doesn’t live there anymore,” my taxi driver told me as we drove past her compound gate. What was once a tightly controlled thoroughfare was now just like any other potholed road in Rangoon, Burma’s biggest city and former capital (which the regime calls Yangon). A very bored-looking policeman sat outside the residence. After he ordered me to walk on the opposite side of the road, I gave him a thumbs-up in response-and got a toothy smile and a wave. Two blue police trucks were parked by the house with riot shields fastened to the sides. But the place seemed almost deserted, as if nobody expected Suu Kyi back any time soon.

What a contrast compared with the tight security I encountered in March, when Suu Kyi was still under house arrest. Back then she was due to be released on May 27, having spent 14 of the past two decades in detention, ever since her return from Britain in 1988. I took a local taxi-a beaten-up old wreck of a thing, as are most of the other cars and trucks on Rangoon’s roads-and simply asked the driver to take me near “the Lady’s house.” It wasn’t an enormously long distance to the far end of University Avenue, but the driver’s silence and my own apprehension made it seem longer. More:

Suu Kyi ‘crackling with energy’

Published
by
asianwindow
on May 21, 2009
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Burmese democracy leader leaves her home for the first time since 2003 as ’secret’ trial begins. Phoebe Kennedy in Rangoon in the Independent:

After nearly six years hidden from sight, suddenly yesterday Aung San Suu Kyi was back on public view – tranquil, composed, yet “crackling with energy”.

Until yesterday Burma’s democracy leader was being tried in secret, somewhere deep inside Rangoon’s Insein prison. Then without warning or explanation, the generals threw open the doors of the court to diplomats and even a handful of (local) journalists.

Hardly anybody has set eyes on Ms Suu Kyi since she last disappeared behind the doors of her home in July 2003. UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari has met her a couple of times, at his insistence, as have the senior leadership of the National League for Democracy (NLD), her party. In November 2007 she came out of her home to pay respects to thousands of monks demonstrating against the regime who had succeeded in getting as far as her villa. But that’s it. More:

American ‘fool’ gets Suu Kyi into more trouble

Published
by
asianwindow
on May 15, 2009
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Burma’s detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been charged with violating the terms of her house arrest after an American man swam across a lake to gain access to her compound. Her trial has been set for May 18.

An AFP report says the 53-year-old American, John William Yettaw, is said to be a Mormon and Vietnam War veteran “with a quixotic world view.” The Nobel laureate campaigner’s chief lawyer said, “he is a fool.”

Detained American Visited Suu Kyi Before?

The opposition newspaper Irrawaddy said the American who swam across the lake to Suu Kyi’s house, may have made another secret visit to her last year. A report in the paper, quoting Burma’s state-run newspapers, says:

“Yettaw swam on the night of May 3 to the lakeside home of the 63-year-old Suu Kyi and left the same way on the night of May 5, before being arrested the next morning. The swimming distance between the house and where he was arrested is about 1 1/4 miles (2 kilometers).

“The reports said the man was found with an empty 1.3-gallon (5-liter) plastic water jug-presumably used as a floatation device-as well as a US passport, a flashlight, pliers, a camera, two $100 bills and some local currency.” Click here to read the full report.

He was on a “spiritual quest,” says his family

The Telegraph, UK, quoting the daughter of the American man who swam across the lake to Suu Kyi’s house, says he was already psychologically scarred by the Vietnam war, and “tipped over the edge by his 17-year old son’s death two years ago.”

“He probably thought he would be in and out and no one would know, because that’s what happened before,” said his wife, Betty Yettaw, referring to a previously unknown visit last summer when Mrs Suu Kyi’s maids turned him away without seeing her. More:

Burma’s orphans of the storm

Published
by
asianwindow
on May 11, 2009
in Burma
. 0 Comments

From the Sunday Times:

When three-year-old Su Myat Khain wakes up crying in the middle of the night, it is her brother Kyaw Kyaw Min, now 16, who cradles her and tries to comfort her. Su Myat Khain is still too young to understand that her parents’ quick thinking saved her life when Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma’s Irrawaddy delta last May, but that they never made it to the temple where they sent her and her two brothers. That night, unable to cross the village as the waters rose, they took refuge in their home, but were swept to their deaths by the devastating storm.

Kyaw Kyaw Min hugs Su Myat Khain close to his chest. “There are so many responsibilities now,” he says, sitting outside his makeshift home, with its flimsy tarpaulin roof, in a village in the southwest of the delta. “I have to look after my younger brother and sister. I feel like their father.” More:

American man swims across lake to Suu Kyi’s house, spends three days there

Published
by
asianwindow
on May 7, 2009
in Burma
. 0 Comments

From the Times:

aung-san-suu-kyiAn American man has been arrested in Burma after allegedly spending three nights at the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s detained opposition leader.

John William Yeattaw, 53, was fished out of Yangon’s Inya Lake early on Wednesday after returning from a visit to Ms Suu Kyi’s lakeside home, according to the Myanma Ahlin newspaper. He had confessed to swimming across the lake on Sunday evening and sneaking into her home, the newspaper reported.

Today, more than 20 police entered Ms Suu Kyui’s compound where she has been kept under house arrest for more than 13 of the past 19 years. The compound is tightly guarded and she is not allowed visitors, aside from her doctor.

“He secretly entered the house and stayed there,” the newspaper reported, saying that he swam with an empty 5-litre plastic water jug, presumably to use as a float. More:

Burma uprising and the secret cameramen

Published
by
asianwindow
on March 19, 2009
in Burma
. 0 Comments

It began as a ‘nice little project’ about life in Burma. Then the riots erupted. In The Guardian, director Anders Østergaard on the secret cameramen who helped him tell the full story:

Burma VJ was supposed to be a modest little film: a half-hour, low-key yet intimate portrait of Joshua, a 26-year-old Burmese video journalist, or VJ. Joshua had decided to do his bit for a better Burma by taking his video camera, usually concealed, on to the streets of Rangoon to document what he could of everyday life. When we started work on the project, in early 2007, the footage Joshua was able to show us was, frankly, totally uneventful: little reports on street kids, life in his village, the miserable state of the railways.

More:

Beyond Mandalay, the road to isolation and xenophobia

Published
by
asianwindow
on December 25, 2008
in Books and Burma
. 0 Comments

In the New York Times, a review of “The River Of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma” by Thant Myint-U:

Burma has the dubious distinction of playing host to the world’s longest-running civil war – it began with independence in 1948 and still goes on – and its most durable military dictatorship. If not for North Korea, Burma might also claim top honors in two other categories, most isolated and most xenophobic, but it could still win the prize for most misunderstood.

Geographically remote, politically retrograde, economically backward, Burma, today called Myanmar, struggles on, burdened by one of the largest armies on the planet and desperate for help. In “The River of Lost Footsteps,” Thant Myint-U offers at least a little understanding, “an introduction to a country whose current problems are increasingly known but whose colorful and vibrant history is almost entirely forgotten.”

More:

Burma eats its young

Published
by
asianwindow
on November 24, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

George Packer in the New Yorker:

burmaIn a just world, the names Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi would be as well known as Steve Biko and Adam Michnik. These two leaders of Burma’s 88 Generation students, now in their forties, have spent almost their entire adult lives in prison for organizing pro-democracy demonstrations. After a short period of freedom, between 2005 and 2007, they and their colleagues were jailed again for staging a long walk around Rangoon, in August of 2007, in protest of soaring transportation prices-a gesture that sparked the so-called Saffron Revolution, the largest demonstrations in Burma since 1988, both times put down in blood.

After Aung San Suu Kyi, these two men are the leaders of Burma’s democracy movement, and a source of intense admiration and inspiration among the young Burmese I met on two trips there earlier this year. Ko Ko Gyi is the political strategist of the movement; Min Ko Naing is its charismatic soul. A friend who met Min Ko Naing after his release in 2005 told me how the former prisoner shed tears as he described the death of his only cellmate, a cat. Other Burmese and Americans speak of Min Ko Naing as having a special glow that raises him above the ordinary run of humanity. But because of Burma’s obscurity, the rest of the world has never heard of them.

More:

Not such a hero after all

Published
by
asianwindow
on November 11, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Aung San Suu Kyi made the world take notice of Burma’s struggle for democracy. But her failure to react to recent key crises means that many of her followers now question her ability to lead the fight against the military junta. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy in the Guardian:

suuAung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma, is the world’s most famous political prisoner. She has spent the best part of the past 20 years under house arrest, detained by the military dictatorship she opposes. Her current imprisonment began in May 2003, when her convoy was attacked and 70 of her supporters killed by a militia of government-sponsored thugs known darkly as the Masters of Force. She has been confined to her Rangoon home ever since.

Suu Kyi was born into the family that drove Burma’s independence movement: her father was General Aung San, who was murdered by his political rivals in July 1947, shortly after negotiating his country’s independence from Britain. Suu Kyi was pushed into politics in 1988 after thousands of students protesters were gunned down on the streets of Rangoon – when she delivered her inaugural speech at Rangoon’s Shwe Dagon Pagoda on August 26 that year, a crowd of 500,000 came to hear her. A nation held in a headlock by a junta since 1962 fell behind her gutsy message of hope, and she led the NLD to a landslide election victory in May 1990, winning 392 out of 485 seats.

More:

Burma’s bloody trade

Published
by
asianwindow
on October 29, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Rajeshree Sisodia recently entered Burma, where she spoke with workers dependant on the country’s exploitative jade mining industry. Here she reports for newstatesman.com:

Imperial green jade is unique to Burma – and jewellery made from it can sell for millions of dollars on the international market.
But the country’s mining industry is built on suffering: forced and child labour, land confiscation, drug abuse, sexual exploitation and environmental damage – all of which, according to pro-democracy campaigners, have scarred the trade.
More than 20,000 people migrate, or are forced to work for mine companies which are either partly or completely owned by the nation’s military leaders and its business partners.
From mining, to cutting, polishing, trading and selling, the regime’s generals control the gem industry with a vice-like grip. Profits from the lucrative trade filter down only as far as the junta, which spends around US$330million a year on arms – roughly twice the amount it invests in health and education combined. This in a nation ranked among Asia’s poorest; the average person earns less than US$1 a day.

More:

Burma’s Fleeing Masses

Mark Fenn / Far Eastern Economics Review

With his good looks and fashionable clothes, 27-year-old Su could pass for an Asian pop star, or perhaps the small-time kickboxer he used to be back home. In fact, he works illegally as a waiter in a small restaurant in central Bangkok-one of an estimated two million migrants who have left impoverished Burma to seek a better life in Thailand. Fleeing poverty and sometimes brutal oppression at home, they often find themselves living in the shadows, persecuted and exploited in Burma’s wealthier neighbors. Not that Su considers himself a victim. A member of Burma’s Karen ethnic minority, he speaks English in staccato, half-finished sentences punctuated with swear words. He hates the Burmese junta and is a fervent supporter of the struggle for Karen independence. Su admires Burma’s imprisoned democracy icon and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as Che Guevara-and Rambo. In the latest Rambo film, released this year, the hero teams up with Karen rebels to take on the Burmese army. Pirated DVDs of the film, circulated underground, were reportedly a big hit in Burma. “I like the Rambo style,” says Su, smiling.

More:

After Saffron Revolution, all is black in Myanmar

Published
by
asianwindow
on September 25, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Rajeshree Sisodia in The National:

Yangon: In many ways this is a story of failure. Of a government that failed to deliver on long-made promises of freedom and democracy; of a people who stood up not once but twice against repression, and were cut down both times; and of an international community that champions human rights but has so far failed to turn rhetoric into reality.

A year ago, spiralling inflation and growing political repression in Myanmar led tens of thousands of people, including Buddhist monks and nuns, to take to the streets in peaceful protest. The mass demonstrations, known as the Saffron Revolution for the colour of the monks’ robes, were brutally suppressed.

On Sept 27 2007, soldiers and riot police, armed with assault rifles, tanks and smoke bombs, opened fire, killing about 50 people. Thousands were rounded up and detained.

It was as if a mirror had been held up to reflect the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations, or 88 Generation uprising, when thousands of students protested to demand multiparty democratic elections. The dissent two decades ago was similarly smothered; thousands paid with their lives.

More:

Kawthoolei: The Karen’s long wait

Published
by
asianwindow
on September 5, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Italian photojournalist Massimiliano Clausi in Himal:

Massimiliano Clausi

Photo: Massimiliano Clausi

For the past thirty years, millions of Karen villagers in Burma have been living a precarious existence, regularly being displaced from their huts into the surrounding forests and state-controlled relocation sites. All the while, the Karen have continued to struggle against a military-run state that exerts absolute control over their movement, land, farming, produce and every other aspect of their lives.

The Karen are an ethnic minority living in the forestlands along the Thai-Burmese frontier, who trace their lineage back to Tibet. Since 1948, when Burma broke free from British rule, the Karen have been fighting for independence through an armed group, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), overseen by the Karen National Union (KNU). This makes the Karen struggle one of the longest wars for independence in the world today.

More:

Locked in Burma

Published
by
asianwindow
on September 4, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

After 13 years of detention, Aung San Suu Kyi perfectly represents the suffering of the Burmese people, effectively trapped in the world’s biggest prison. Pressure is building on the UN to act. Simon Tisdall in The Guardian:

It is hard to imagine what life must be like for Aung San Suu Kyi, locked up inside her Rangoon home, separated from her children, denied visitors, her phone line cut, her mail intercepted. Burma’s opposition leader, whose 1990 election victory was annulled by the military, is now in her 13th year of detention. She has been held continually since 2003. In June she spent her 63rd birthday alone.

Unconfirmed reports suggest Suu Kyi, who has suffered health problems in the past, is unwell again. Her lawyer, Kyi Win, who was allowed to see her last month, quoted her as saying: “I am tired and I need some rest.” Following her refusal of a food delivery, there is also speculation the pro-democracy campaigner and Nobel peace prizewinner has begun a hunger strike. Her lawyer said her weight had fallen below the 7st she was known to weigh in 2003.

While uncertainty surrounds Suu Kyi’s plight, there is nothing at all ambiguous about Burma’s political, social and human rights situation one year after the junta brutally suppressed the Buddhist-monk-led “saffron revolution”.

More:

The agony of Burma’s dumped children

Published
by
asianwindow
on August 11, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Children in Burma separated from their parents by Cyclone Nargis, continue to survive on their own, very often because they simply cannot afford the bus fare that will reunite them with their families. Heather Mark reports for the Sunday Times.

IN a filthy destitute village, half an hour outside Rangoon, three-year-old Than Than Nues was dumped days after Cyclone Nargis had ravaged her home in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta and made her an orphan.

The toddler, who lost both her parents when 12ft waves swept through their home in Bogalay, a coastal township, was carted off in a government lorry and handed over to strangers. Villagers, who struggled to feed their own families from their meagre rice paddies or from working in a factory on a daily wage of just 75p, were forced to provide for the extra mouths.

Last week underfed children played in the mud-filled main street, still trying to forget the traumatic night in May when they saw their closest relatives swept to their deaths.

more

A new generation of activists arises in Burma

Published
by
asianwindow
on July 21, 2008
in Books and Burma
. 0 Comments

Network strengthened by Junta’s crackdown and post-cyclone bungling. From The Washington Post:

Rangoon: They operate in the shadows, slipping by moonlight from safe house to safe house, changing their cellphones to hide their tracks and meeting under cover of monasteries or clinics to plot changes that have eluded their country for 46 years.

If one gets arrested, another steps forward.

“I feel like the last man standing. All the responsibility is on my shoulders. . . . There is no turning back. If I turn back, I betray all my comrades,” said a Burmese activist who heads a leading dissident group, the 88 Generation Students, named for a failed uprising in 1988. He took command after the arrest last August of its five most prominent leaders.

More:

The road to ‘Animal Farm,’ through Burma

In The Washington Post, a review of Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin:

Fresh out of Eton, George Orwell spent five years in Burma as a policeman in the colonial service. He left in 1927, fed up with “the dirty work of Empire,” but the country never quite left him. It provided the material for the novel “Burmese Days” and one of his most famous essays, “Shooting an Elephant.” In his final days, as he lay dying of tuberculosis, he sketched out a novella, “A Smoking Room Story,” about a young Englishman changed forever by his experiences in colonial Burma.

More:

‘To be busy helps them forget’

Published
by
asianwindow
on July 7, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Burma’s storm survivors cobble together a meager future. From The Washington Post:

Two months after a cyclone savaged the fertile Irrawaddy Delta, in Burma’s southwest, the bones of drowning victims still clutter the muddy banks of waterways.

One bamboo stick at a time, survivors in hundreds of flattened villages are struggling to rebuild their lives. For shelter, they squeeze several families into a single tent. For drinking water, they collect monsoon rains that trickle off tarpaulin roof coverings into buckets or salvaged ceramic vases. For food, they cook communal meals with rice, beans and oil from handouts. Sometimes it is spoiled.

On a recent visit, one village looked as if it had been carpet-bombed, a cratered landscape of muddy pools, debris and the remains of water buffaloes. A few hundred feet away, villagers sawed and hammered at planks salvaged from the wreckage. A teenage boy in an oversize shirt donated by a Buddhist monastery picked through piles of smashed wood.

More:

Myanmar’s new capital isolates junta

Published
by
asianwindow
on June 24, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

The transfer of Myanmar’s junta to Naypyidaw, a relatively remote location, has drained the country’s finances and widened the gulf between the rulers and the ruled. From The New York Times:

The bamboo forests and sugar cane fields that once covered the gently sloping hills here have been replaced by hulking government buildings, roads so long and straight they resemble runways and a vast construction site marked by a sign: “Parliament zone. Do not enter.”

Naypyidaw is Myanmar’s new capital, built in secret by the ruling generals and announced to the public two and a half years ago, when it was a fait accompli.

A nine-hour drive north from the former capital, Yangon, it looks like nothing else in this impoverished country, where one out of three children is malnourished and many roads are nothing more than dirt tracks.

More:

The power of the powerless

Published
by
asianwindow
on June 16, 2008
in Books and Burma
. 0 Comments

In The new York Times, a review of Justin Wintle’s “A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s Prisoner of Conscience”

There are not many countries whose stories are so intensely bound to the character of a single person, much less a person with no tangible power, not even the power to leave her house or receive a visitor or make a telephone call. Yet for nearly two decades, events in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have revolved around the condition, the policies and most of all the victimization of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, now 62, who has been held under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years. Hers is a symbiotic power, as Justin Wintle describes it in his aptly titled “Perfect Hostage,” bestowed by the almost cartoonish thugs who have made her “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless,” in the words of the former Czech president Vaclav Havel.

[Photo: Protestors in London with masks of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, 2007.]

More:

At home with the General

Published
by
asianwindow
on May 24, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

There have been street protests, a cyclone and appalling loss of life, yet Burma’s junta remains untouched, winning a 92% ‘vote of confidence’ amid the devastation. The Guardian’s Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report from the leader’s hideaway:

Two matching pairs of soft cotton slippers are laid outside the sliding glass doors. Lilies in the adjoining palm grove fill the air with a heavy perfume. This seaside villa on Burma’s west coast – made from polished hardwood, marble and mother-of-pearl – is the holiday hideaway of Senior General Than Shwe, head of the latest incarnation of a junta that has clung to Burma like bindweed for five decades.

It is hard to reconcile the quiet luxury of this villa, its infinity pool overlooking five miles of Ngwe Saung (Silver Beach), with the devastation in the Irrawaddy delta region just a few miles to the south, where cyclone Nargis struck on May 3, killing thousands and destroying a million-plus bamboo-and-wood homes. The Ngwe Saung villa is a haven for the Senior General and his family, and for his fellow generals who share a holiday camp just along the beach. Here, Than Shwe could relax after brutally crushing the uprising by the nation’s monks in Rangoon last September. His villa survived the cyclone.

Cushioned by luxury, serviced by junior officers terrified of imparting bad news, the junta rarely gets to learn of the hardships facing their battered people, Lord Malloch-Brown, foreign office minister, argued this month. He was one of many diplomats and international leaders who criticised the regime for delaying or blocking relief to victims of the cyclone.

[Photo: Myanmar ruler Senior General Than Shwe attends Armed Forces Day ceremonies on Sunday March 27, 2005, in Yangon. AP]

More:

Reaching out to two and a half million

Published
by
asianwindow
on May 23, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

Twenty-one days after Cyclone Nargis, Burma finally seems to have agreed to allow all aid workers in. Red Cross volunteers are there already, but there’s still miles to go, writes Markku Niskala in The Guardian’s Comment is Free

Now that the Burmese government has finally indicated it may allow all aid workers into the country, the task of reaching Burma’s remoter regions becomes even more pressing. Every night, the dire situation facing hundreds of thousands of cyclone survivors grows more and more desperate. Solutions tailored to Burma just have to be found.

At least one and a half million cyclone survivors remain homeless, many of them hungry, many of them weak, ailing or exhausted. As the rain pours down there is some relief: people can harvest drinking water. But the misery grows, along with the burgeoning health threats. The homeless – a portion of the 2.4 million people the UN estimates have been affected – are facing their 21st night since Cyclone Nargis swept in from the Bay of Bengal and crossed the Irrawaddy delta. Each night is more wretched than the last. Conditions are worsening all the time, and the need for basic lifesaving aid becomes more urgent.

more

[Pic: Portraits of cyclone victims hang on what is left of their home in the Irrawaddy delta, Burma. Getty]

Cyclone Nargis hits Burma

Published
by
asianwindow
on May 7, 2008
in Burma
. 0 Comments

[Updated on May 8]

Satellite images from US space agency NASA showed virtually the entire coastal plain of the country, one of the poorest nations on the planet, under water. The death toll could reach 63,000.

Most killed by a 12ft tidal wave

From The Times, UK: Most of the victims of the Burma cyclone were overwhelmed by a 12ft moving wall of water that bore down on their lowlying villages at the mouth of the Irrawaddy river delta.

In a rare press conference, members of the Burmese junta today gave the most detailed description to date of the disaster that killed at least 22,000 people at the weekend, and left a further 41,000 missing, according to Burmese state radio.

More:

Out of tragedy, light may shine on Burma

From The Telegraph, UK: They are cruel, power hungry and dangerously irrational – beyond that, little can be said for certain about Burma’s ruling generals. Reading them is less like Kremlinology, more like Byzantine studies.

They may regard the cyclone which devastated their country on Friday night as an ill omen from the spirit world. Certainly, the timing – a week before the first national vote in 18 years – looks inauspicious, and they are known to consult astrologers and mystics on all aspects of political life.

More:

United Nations envoy Paul Risley says the death toll in Burma could cross 100,000. But the Junta is still not welcoming of aid. The Associated Press has that story (carried in the Houston Chronicle)

Myanmar’s isolationist regime blocked United Nations efforts today to airlift urgently needed high-energy biscuits to survivors of a cyclone that may have killed more than 100,000 people, U.N. officials said.

Paul Risley, a spokesman of the U.N’s World Food Program in Bangkok, said three flights were waiting to take off from Dubai, Dhaka and Thailand with 50 tons of biscuits. A fourth shipment aboard a scheduled Thai Airways cargo flight was likely to bring some biscuits later today.

He told The Associated Press that the WFP was in “constant touch” with the military junta to obtain the flight clearance for the first major airlift of international aid, but there has been no word from officials.

more