Tag Archive for ‘junta’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'junta'

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

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on March 7, 2010

in Burma

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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:

Rapping at the Burmese Junta

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on January 7, 2010

in Burma, People and human rights

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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

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on November 12, 2009

in Burma and Entertainment

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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:

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

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on July 5, 2009

in Burma and human rights

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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:

In Burma, two hidden worlds

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on June 20, 2009

in Burma

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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’

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on May 21, 2009

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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:

Burma’s orphans of the storm

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on May 11, 2009

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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:

Burma eats its young

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on November 24, 2008

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George Packer in the New Yorker:

In 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.

Not such a hero after all

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on November 11, 2008

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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:

Aung 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.

Burma’s bloody trade

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on October 29, 2008

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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.

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.

Visit Myanmar — That’s an order

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on September 30, 2008

in Travel

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Travel to Myanmar has slowed to a trickle. But a decade ago, with great fanfare, the government launched a new tourism campaign. Stephen Brookes, then Rangoon bureau chief for Asia Times, remembers its bizarre launch ceremony. From World Hum:

The 7-foot dolls had taken their papier-mâché heads off and were milling around behind the stadium, smoking cigarettes and chatting up the dancing girls from the Ministry of Culture.

You could hardly blame them-the enormous heads were hot and airless, and the guys inside had to peer out from two little eyeholes cut into the mouth. Besides, the dancing girls were cute and had jasmine flowers in their hair, and they weren’t due in the stadium for another 15 minutes, to do their part-along with more than 5,000 other costumed performers-for a massive ceremony to usher in “Visit Myanmar Year.”

It was November 18, 1996, and at 5:30 that morning, Myanmar’s military junta had rounded up the few foreign journalists in town and bussed us to a stadium just outside Rangoon, for what they promised would be the media event of the year. Now, two hours later, most of us had managed to sneak out of our assigned seats and were wandering around on the field, trying to figure out what was going on. I stumbled into a makeshift staging area, where I found the gigantic papier-mâché dolls. One of them offered me a Marlboro.

After Saffron Revolution, all is black in Myanmar

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on September 25, 2008

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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.

Locked in Burma

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on September 4, 2008

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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”.

A new generation of activists arises in Burma

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on July 21, 2008

in Books and Burma

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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.

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.

‘To be busy helps them forget’

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on July 7, 2008

in Burma

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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.

The power of the powerless

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on June 16, 2008

in Books and Burma

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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.]

At home with the General

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on May 24, 2008

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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]

Cyclone Nargis hits Burma

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on May 7, 2008

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[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.

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.

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.

Forgotten Burma

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on May 2, 2008

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As the country prepares to vote in a discredited referendum, Rachel Aspden visits the forgotten Burmese resistance – the eastern ethnic groups promised independence 60 years ago. From New Statesman:

As the sun sinks over the steep jungle hills of the Thailand-Burma border, a saffron-robed monk walks towards his temple’s golden shrine. Across a shallow gully, four grey- uniformed Burmese soldiers watch him through binoculars, their rifles poised. Below them is a huddle of abandoned, burnt-out houses.

“Six years ago, they destroyed the temple and ran the new border straight through the middle,” says the monk. “On the Thai side we are safe for the moment. On the other . . .”

Pra Preecha is a refugee from Shan State in eastern Burma. Last September, when his fellow monks led 50,000 street protesters against the military government in Rangoon, the international media heralded a “saffron revolution”. It seemed that one of the world’s most brutal and insular regimes was about to crumble. But the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) clamped down hard on protesters and sympathisers – “scores, perhaps hundreds, of monks were abducted, tortured and killed”, says Pra Preecha – and the moment for change passed.

Who’s buying Burma’s gems?

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on March 12, 2008

in Burma

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In The Christian Science Monitor, Danna Harman reports from Rangoon:

It’s the last hour of the last day of the gems auction in Rangoon, and tired buyers are fanning themselves with worn auction catalogs, and making their final bids.

Over the past five days, jade, rubies, sapphires, and close to $150 million have passed hands here, according to the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd., the consortium that dominates Burma’s gemstone trade and is owned by the defense ministry and a clutch of military officers.

Who’s buying? China, India, Singapore, and Thailand are scooping up Burma’s stones. US first lady Laura Bush’s efforts at a global boycott of Burma’s gems seem to have done little to reduce China’s appetite for Burmese jade to make trinkets and souvenirs to sell at the Summer Olympics.

[ Photo: A Burmese worker washes jade prior to an auction]

Subdued but unbowed

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on February 27, 2008

in Burma

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Monks who were at the forefront of September’s demonstrations against the Junta in Burma have been under constant surveillance by authorities, writes Kyi Wai in The Irrawaddy

A 35-year-old, slender, dark man with a long face wearing a white shirt and longyi is sitting in a teashop opposite a A-Nauk Taik, a famous monastery in western Pakokku.

Many people, including the teashop owner, notice him. They know he is an undercover police officer assigned to watch the monks’ activities in A-Nauk Taik, also known as Mandalay Monastery.

Pakokku residents said that since the September monk-led protests, the authorities have assigned various officers in plain clothes to areas surrounding Buddhist monasteries, many of which are also monastic schools that train monks in the higher Buddhist scriptures.

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Detours in Burma’s roadmap to democracy

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on February 16, 2008

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The planned constitution, referendum and 2010 elections look to be a grand — if empty — show, writes Daniel Ten Kate in Asia Sentinel

Constitutions, elections and a multi-party democracy are often welcome news among the international community, but the terms mean little coming from Burma’s generals, especially in a new “democratic” process that will likely turn the current junta leader into an all-powerful president.

While the constitution has yet to be completed or made public, exile groups say the “basic principles” that guide it specifically preclude anyone from serving as president who has a spouse, children or spouses of children that are citizens of a foreign country—a rule designed to exclude Aung San Suu Kyi, who was married to a British academic and has two children who live in the United Kingdom.

In a sign of how secretive the constitution-drafting process has been so far, many people both inside and outside Burma were surprised when the junta announced over the weekend its plan to quickly draft a constitution, put it up for a referendum in May and then hold elections in 2010.

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The waiting game in Myanmar

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on January 25, 2008

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Myanmar’s junta plays to win, says The Economist

In a comic novel by Evelyn Waugh, an exasperated teacher tames his unruly class by setting an essay competition with a cash prize. Entries, he tells his rowdy students, will be judged on one criterion alone: length.

Myanmar has long been run on much the same lines. A convention set up to draft a constitution for a move to democratic rule eventually pronounced last September, 14 years after it first met. Its conclusion surprised no one: an arrangement ensuring the perpetuation of military dominance.

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Who’s bombing Burma?

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on January 22, 2008

in Burma

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The junta blames insurgents and shadowy foreigners for several blasts, but analysts suspect the military itself, writes Brian McCartan in the Asia Sentinel

Burma’s ruling State Peace and Development Council has accused Karen ethnic minority insurgents and a “major group from abroad” for a series of bombings over the past 10 days, raising suspicions that the junta itself is behind the violence in an effort shore up unity in the armed forces or as an excuse for crackdowns against the pro-democracy movement and ethnic resistance groups.

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