Clipmarks | abailart's 'burma' clips

How Burma is Reported in Burma

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:19:46 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: See the impressive list of guests below. Report courtesy of 'New Light of Mynamar.

Clip Source: www.myanmar.com

Senior General Than Shwe, wife Daw Kyaing Kyaing host
dinner to mark 60th Anniversary Independence Day

At the reception and before and during the dinner, those present at the dinner were entertained with songs entertained by vocalists to the accompaniment of the Myanma Athan modern music band.

Tags: burma

Hypocritical Western Response to Burmese Tyranny

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:04:17 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Unusual?

Clip Source: www.zmag.org

While Burma’s worst human rights abuses — mass killings, rape, abduction for slave labour and destruction of villages — are those committed as part of the counter-insurgency wars, extreme repression has also been aimed at preventing any dissent in government-controlled areas. Burma holds more than 1300 political prisoners and torture is routine. The level of surveillance is extreme.

The current protests and crackdown has created more hypocritical condemnations and “targeted” sanctions (targeted so as not to harm Western corporations). Australian Prime Minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer have made global headlines with their colourful condemnations of the Burmese junta — described by Howard as “loathsome” — while at the same time the Burmese security forces receive training in “criminal intelligence” from the Australian Federal Police at the Australian-run Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation.

Tags: burma, australia, sanctions

Reign of Fear in Burma Goes On

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 08:11:09 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

Thousands of people are incarcerated in four detention centres around Mandalay controlled by the 33rd division of the Burmese army. Its commanders have broken the political power of the 200 monasteries here and shattered the Buddhist clergy as an organised force.

almost no details of what is happening in the city have yet become known to the international community.

nightly sweeps of raids and arrests are reinforced by daytime roadblocks and identity checks. Troops drag dozens of people, most of them young, off the streets at gunpoint.

“Our deepest worry is for the fate of people in detention who are definitely abused and get no treatment.”

“We are appealing to the international community to raise these cases to see if we can save them from this.”

Tags: burma, mandalay

Burma: Loving Kindness meets Brutal Reality

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:27:09 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

Last week Vida was a simple monk who marched through the streets of Rangoon because he believed it would persuade the regime to be more compassionate towards Burma’s hungry poor. Yesterday he was an angry, perhaps even traumatised, man - but a determined one;

“Politics is not the concern of the monks but this time we saw the people getting poorer and poorer and their trouble get bigger and bigger. We thought the monks could negotiate between the regime and the

He decided to try to reach Thailand to tell the world what he had seen,

The experience has also tried his Buddhist beliefs. “I hate the soldiers now,” he said through an interpreter. “I know I shouldn’t, but I do. Those who killed monks will go to the lowest depths of the Hells.

Other Burmese monks in Thailand have described angry arguments within monasteries in Burma over whether to join the protests, with radical young monks sometimes claiming that corrupt abbots, paid by the regime, tried to hold them back

Tags: burma, monks, protest, buddhism

Mass Suffering and Repression in Burma

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:09:49 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

With its rusty barbed wire fence, dense tropical foliage and acreage of decaying buildings, the former Government Technology Institute in Rangoon would be a spooky place at the best of times. In the past week, however, if reports circulating in Rangoon are correct, it has been transformed from an abandoned ruin to a place of mass suffering and repression.

One international organisation based in Rangoon has made a provisional reckoning of 40 dead, based on reports from hospitals, 1,000 monks arrested and 3,000 secular detainees

large numbers of people are being held in an invisible prison camp, without charge, without legal recourse and without the ability to communicat

Despite the international attention given to the quashing of the anti-Government marches, the crackdown remains undocumented.

Most people have vanished without trace, many of them the Buddhist monks who formed the backbone of the tens of thousands of people who turned out last week in Rangoon and Mandalay.

Tags: burma, protest

Heroic Monks, Chinese Shame

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 07:54:45 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Article on China's establishing Burma in its ;string of pearls. that is China's expansionist policy in Asia. Details China's military support for Burma and its large economic interests.

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

Burma’s monks are its people’s truest representatives, symbols of all they hold in reverence. By corralling them in their monasteries and brutally clearing their supporters off the streets, General Than Shwe’s junta has handed China a terrible foreign policy dilemma, even harder to handle than the nuclear roguery of North Korea.

Neighbouring Burma puts to the test, far more sharply than China’s cosseting of more distant Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Sudan and Iran, the pledge, implicit in Hu Jintao’s “peaceful rise”, that China will use its power responsibly. In Burma, China has influence that it is under intense international pressure to use. Yet Burma’s popular uprising is a strong reminder of its own “crowd control” problems; for Beijing is annually confronted by tens of thousands of local protests, some violent.

Burma is not just China’s neighbour; it is a heavily dependent client state that is close to becoming a virtual Chinese province,

Tags: burma, china, asia