Hope, Anxiety, and Life in a Changing Burma
Scenes from a country in a slow-motion and still uncertain revolution
Burma’s nuclear venture
The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) reports that the Burmese military government is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons technology as a deterrent against Western military actions. The allegations have been substantiated by Sai Thein Win, a former major in the Burmese army who served as a defence engineer and missile expert. According to DVB, he...
Armed Forces Day
Occasionally, a copy of the New Light of Myanmar — the Burmese government’s official mouthpiece — winds up in our office and gets passed around for laughs. The paper on March 25, commemorating Armed Forces Day, which marks the start of the Burmese army’s resistance to the Japanese occupation in 1945, was particularly amusing. In...
A city in the Burmese junta’s image
BURMA’S new capital city lies about 10 hours’ drive – or a short, white-knuckled flight on an ageing Fokker-27 – from Rangoon, the country’s largest city and former capital. A vast, empty plain of snaking arterial roads and low-density development, Naypyidaw is unlikely to experience anything approaching the so-called “Saffron Revolution” that brought central Rangoon...
