Myanmar’s new capital isolates junta

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The bamboo forests and sugar cane fields that once covered the gently sloping hills here have been replaced by hulking government buildings, roads so long and straight they resemble runways and a vast construction site marked by a sign: “Parliament zone.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.

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The power of the powerless

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.]

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At home with the General

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]

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Reaching out to two and a half million

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.

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

Cyclone Nargis hits Burma

[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.

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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.

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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.

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Trying to put a name to the face of evil

Can the right celebrities raise concern for Myanmar? Alex Williams in The New York Times:

“Hitler is alive in Burma” reads the words scrawled on a cardboard sign, held aloft by a sweet-faced Ellen Page, the “Juno” star, in a 90-second human-rights public awareness message that began showing on video-sharing Web sites last week.

The spot is one of 30 produced for U.S. Campaign for Burma, starring celebrities like Will Ferrell and Jennifer Aniston. They will be distributed on Fanista.com, a social-networking and entertainment retail site, then passed along to sites like YouTube and Google Video every day for the next month. The goal of the campaign is to thrust the cause of human rights in Burma - now known as Myanmar - into the orbit of A-list activist causes, along with Tibet and Darfur, and to encourage international pressure on a government that activists say is one of the world’s most oppressive.

[Picture: Ellen Page of “Juno” holds a picture of Myanmar’s dictator, Senior Gen. Than Shwe.]

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Forgotten Burma

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.

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She escaped strife, but embraced those scarred by it

Burmese-born Charm Tong Is among activists honoured for contributions to women’s causes. From The Washington Post:

Charm Tong was born in Burma’s conflict-lacerated countryside 26 years ago. She was 6 when her parents stuffed her into a straw basket strapped onto a donkey and sent her to join a caravan of villagers snaking its way through lush jungles to an orphanage inside the Thai border. Their desperate choice seemed a better option as the country’s repressive military regime moved through some 1,400 farming villages, taking ethnic Burmese from their lands and forcing them into labor, often after torturing them.

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Burma draft constitution bars Suu Kyi

Kenneth Denby from Rangoon in The Times, UK:

Burma’s generals intend to block the Burmese democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, from ever leading her country, according to leaked copies of a new constitution drafted by the country’s military junta.

The 194-page draft constitution, which was circulating yesterday among Burmese and foreign journalists in Rangoon, states that anyone with family connections to foreigners is not eligible to stand as president. But the document, which will be put to a constitutional referendum in May, does not impose the same restriction on ministers or those who run as members of parliament.

Ms Suu Kyi’s two sons by her late husband, the British academic Michael Aris, are British citizens, which would seem to rule her out unequivocally from the highest post.

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And at The Irrawaddy:

Who’s buying Burma’s gems?

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] 

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Subdued but unbowed

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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In Burma, assassination of a rebel leader

In the Wall Street Journal, Aung Zaw, editor of Irrawaddy magazine, a publication based in Thailand that covers Burma, on the murder of Karen National Union leader Mahn Sha.

On Valentine’s Day, two gunmen walked up to a wooden house in this border town and assassinated one of Burma’s most prominent ethnic minority leaders. The killing inflicts a serious blow to Burma’s flagging pro-democracy movement.

Mahn Sha was the leader of the Karen National Union, an armed rebel group fighting for autonomy from Burma’s ruling military junta. He joined the KNU in 1966 after finishing his studies in history at Rangoon University. Over the next few decades, he rose steadily through the ranks, finally serving as General Saw Bo Mya’s personal secretary. At the KNU’s 12th Party Congress in 2000, he was elected secretary-general, the third highest-ranking position in the KNU.

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Detours in Burma’s roadmap to democracy

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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A poem of hope from Burma’s missing blogger

Less than a month after he wrote of his hopes for the new year, Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt has mysteriously gone missing. His distraught mother, Daw Aye Aye Than said her son’s whereabout could not be confirmed as authorities have denied detaining him. But on January 29, 2008, Nay Phone Latt left his house at 12 noon, and hasn’t been seen since. A police party visited his house a few hours later, apparently searching for something though it did not say what. Meanwhile, Latt’s blog http://www.nayphonelatt.net has been blocked with practically nothing on it left readable, barring a first post titled, Happy Birthday… Mr Pooh.  And this poem:

Hopes accompanied us to the next year’s dates

All what we have done are also with us as a shade

Pure the heart for knowing the true rights

Pure the mind for making the best times

You are the one who can manage to earn both cold and warm

New Year is the one that remind u to value the length of time

Every change won’t be same what you want to gain

We have to try again to attain the various aims

Your view can be changed according to your brain

Every point of view can make you in sane

A man should be a man who can take responsibility of his stand

Remember that you can’t pass clearly to the new year if you have the unfinished affairs in the old year.

 

Burma: Are sanctions the answer?

Stanley A. Weiss, Founding Chairman of Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington, in International Herald Tribune.

In the often black and white, good-versus-evil debate over how to deal with the brutal military regime here, Ma Thanegi lives in a world of gray

To her admirers, the feisty 61-year-old Burmese painter and writer is a voice of reason - a former assistant to opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi who, after being jailed for three years herself, bravely opposed Suu Kyi’s misguided call for Western economic sanctions to pressure the junta into relinquishing power.

To her critics in the democracy movement, Thanegi is a sellout who parrots government propaganda to foreign tourists and journalists. Meeting openly with me at a major hotel suggests that - with her writings on Burmese culture and cuisine, not politics - she has little to fear in the continuing crackdown on dissidents after the fall’s protests led by Buddhist monks.

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Under the banyan tree

The dictators call it Myanmar. For the first time since they crushed the Saffron Revolution, Adam Karlin traveled to the country he calls Burma-and home. His dispatch on World Hum.

I was on my way home to visit my grandmother when she had a stroke.

Home. That’s a relative term when home refers to Burma. Because I’m half-Burmese, Burma-which I prefer to “Myanmar,” a name conjured up by the nation’s dictators-has always felt a little like home.

My relatives, even Burmese I’ve never met, treat me like a long lost son. I see elements of myself-my passivity, my faith, my taste for rich, oily hot food, and whatever capability I have for empathy-realized in this country and its culture. It’s a self-centered worldview, but travel can be narcissistic, especially in countries like Burma, which seems to naturally lend travelers a sense of self-discovery.

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Aung San Suu Kyi: Prepare for the worst

Aung Hla Tun has a report on the detained Myanmar opposition leader in Reuters

Detained Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is frustrated at a lack of talks on political reform with the ruling military junta since last year’s bloody crackdown on dissent, her party said on Wednesday.

After a rare meeting between the Nobel peace laureate and leaders of her National League for Democracy (NLD), spokesman Nyan Win said Suu Kyi held out little hope that unprecedented international pressure on the generals would bear fruit.

“Let’s hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” he quoted her as saying, adding she worried that Wednesday’s 90-minute meeting, and another immediately afterwards with junta liaison minister Aung Kyi, might give rise to “false hope”.

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Rambo goes to Burma

Joel Stein takes a look at the new Rambo film for Time magazine

Sylvester Stallone has memorized a lot of Procol Harum lyrics, and for the next two minutes I’m going to hear them. Because if you want to know what inspires a man to write a movie in which hundreds of people are blown up and which, by his own estimate, contains only three pages of dialogue between the two main characters, apparently you have to listen to the lyrics of a psychedelic 1968 song called In Held ‘Twas in I: Glimpses of Nirvana. This is the song that made Stallone want to be a writer, which is surprising because while it contains one Zen koan and mentions the Dalai Lama three times, it does not allude to firing a rocket launcher through a helicopter window.

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The waiting game in Myanmar

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?

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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