Tag: Myanmar

Just caught this over at Stars and Stripes and from AP:

Senator wins release of US prisoner in Myanmar

U.S. Sen. Jim Webb won the release Saturday of an American prisoner convicted in Myanmar and sentenced to seven years in prison for swimming secretly to the residence of detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the senator’s office said.

Yettaw, 53, is to be officially deported Sunday, when he will fly with Webb on a military aircraft to Bangkok, according to a statement from Webb’s office.

U.S. Sen. Jim Webb won the release Saturday of an American prisoner convicted in Myanmar and sentenced to seven years in prison for swimming secretly to the residence of detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the senator’s office said.

Yettaw, 53, is to be officially deported Sunday, when he will fly with Webb on a military aircraft to Bangkok, according to a statement from Webb’s office.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Aung San Suu Kyi

Evidently, the military junta running Myanmar (Burma) has decided to make life for Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, even worse.  Today was the second day of her trial.  The New York Times reports:

There is a tendency among those of us who value freedom of speech to believe that the virtuous thing to do is to speak out, access be damned. I don’t know that that is always the right impulse. I don’t know that I did the right thing in trading access to people trapped in Burma for a few opinion pieces critiquing vapid  Western media coverage of the country. The world does not need another American reporter declaring the junta barbaric and incompetent, a position for which there is almost no opposition in the United States. Indeed, those intent on raising awareness have done harm by encouraging both economic sanctions and hardliners within the junta.  I have never understood how American “awareness” of the Myanmar situation was supposed to help the Burmese trishaw driver surviving on two meals a day.

There is one young woman in Myanmar who continues to write me from time to time, thanking me for the time I spent coaching her toward competent journalism. I spent months teaching her how to structure a piece, a skill that does not come at all naturally to people raised in countries without an independent journalistic tradition. Surely helping her shape a single article was more important than any Burma-related op-ed I’ve written. And yet I’ve traded the right to go back-to have influence over individual lives-for the right to spill some ink. I am a journalist by nature, and it’s possible that I would do it all over again. But there is at least an argument to be made for playing by the rules of a paranoid military dictatorship to maintain access to the lives inside.

Kerry Howley, Sad Thoughts on Being Kicked Out of Military Dictatorships

From the AP:

Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was personally informed of her continued imprisonment by officials from the Home Ministry who entered her villa prior to the announcement, the official said.

snip

The extension was issued despite a Myanmar law that stipulates no one can be held longer than five years without being released or put on trial.

The junta faced a deadline to extend Suu Kyi’s house arrest for another year or release her. Members of her National League for Democracy were marching from the party’s headquarters to her home when riot police shoved the group into a truck.

It was not immediately clear where the truck was headed or exactly how many people were detained.

link: http://ap.google.com/article/A…

According to this YouTube, “Dust In The Wind” has been adapted as a song of protest by Burmese refugees living along the country’s border (it’s YouTube, so take it with the appropriate grain of salt):

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi

Enough is enough.  The NY Times reports that the Myanmar government has yet again extended Aung San Suu Kyi’s dentention:

Myanmar’s military government has renewed the detention of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

A government official said that Suu Kyi’s detention was officially extended Tuesday afternoon. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

It was not immediately clear if the extension was for six months or one year. The extension became official when an official drove to her house to inform her of it, he said.

Suu Kyi has been in detention continuously since May 2003, most of the time under house arrest.

She has been confined without trial for more than 12 of the past 18 years.

“I’m quite confident we will be able to overcome this tragedy. I’ve tried to bring a message of hope to your people,” Ban said earlier as he made an offering at the country’s holiest Buddhist shrine, the Shwedagon Pagoda.

“At the same time, I hope your people and government can coordinate the flow of aid, so the aid work can be done in a more systematic and organised way,” said Ban.

“The United Nations and the whole international community stand ready to help you overcome this tragedy.”

link: http://afp.google.com/article/…

Meanwhile pressure is building on the military regime to do far more to help the victims of the cyclone, and not all of the pressure is coming from outside the country:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is en route to Myanmar today, but already his presence in the region seems to have had an affect:

“We have received government permission to operate nine WFP (World Food Program) helicopters, which will allow us to reach areas that have so far been largely inaccessible,” Ban told reporters in New York on Tuesday before departing for Southeast Asia. His announcement was not immediately confirmed by officials in Myanmar.

“I believe further similar moves will follow, including expediting the visas of (foreign) relief workers seeking to enter the country,” Ban said, warning that relief efforts to save survivors of the May 2-3 Cyclone Nargis had reached a “critical moment.”

“We have a functioning relief program in place but so far have been able to reach only 25 percent of Myanmar’s people in need,” he said.

link: http://ap.google.com/article/A…

Progress can’t come too soon, as cyclone victims, desperate for food, beg by the side of the road:

“For the vast number of Americans, if they just gave to some disaster far away and then another disaster happens, in their mind that’s clumped as ‘faraway disaster,'” Strahilevitz says. “So they will feel, ‘I just gave to a faraway disaster.'”

link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24…

It’s no secret that Americans are feeling less fortunate than in previous years. Escalating gas and food prices, the mortgage crisis and a recent “economic recovery” that only positively affected the most wealthy among us have left families seeing their household budgets shrink.

But as tough as we have it, it is nothing compared with what millions of people are going through right now in Myanmar:

MSNBC reports that Americans have given $12.1 million to charities for Myanmar relief efforts, far short of the $1.92 billion the US gave to assist the victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami.

No one event triggered this devolution, but it undeniably was pushed along many times by the moral relativism of the last 50 years, when most of society’s widely accepted norms were undermined by the quicksand of nonjudgmentalism; when the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, were abolished in favor of differences that were to be respected if not celebrated, and codified when necessary to surmount widespread public opposition.

Paradoxically, people and institutions whose beliefs do not permit them to tolerate the most abhorrent differences were judged to be evil. Through rigid enforcement of increasingly fascist speech and thought codes, relativists turned America into a nation of lip-biters who with their silence condoned as normal behaviors and beliefs that are irrefutably unnatural and inherently immoral.

snip

No, the [recent California Supreme Court] ruling merely answered homosexuals’ purely emotional plea for cultural acceptance by giving civil unions their proper label – “marriage” – the will of Californians, as democratically expressed twice, and the dark societal consequences be damned.

–Editorial in the May 17, 2008 Waterbury Republican.

link: http://www.rep-am.com/articles…

Anyone who regularly reads my blogs probably thought to log in and find the latest news from Myanmar, or of the earthquake in China.

But today I want to write about something that underpins almost every headline here and abroad: human suffering. The answer on how to understand human suffering has been written about and expounded upon by far more eloquent and profound people than me. Everyone from Martin Luther King, to Gandhi, to the Dalai Lama agrees that compassion is the ultimate answer.

But what is the question?

On Monday, Fu Guanyu dropped off her young son, Wang Zhilu, at his grandparents’ house so she could go to work. Minutes later, the earthquake hit.

She rushed back home and saw their apartment building in ruins. She says soldiers came right away to help, but they had no equipment.

Two days later, the heavy machinery is on the way. As an excavator clears a path, Fu and her husband Wei Wang search the debris, calling for their son.

After a long while, the workers stop. They have found bodies.

link: http://www.npr.org/templates/s…

The NPR story concludes, tragically, with the rescue worker informing the parents that three bodies were found: the grandfather, holding his two year old grandson in his arms with his wife clutching his back.

Some of the worst of humanity, serial bomb blasts in the Indian city of Jaipur, killing 80, injuring 200:

Asia Times Online attempts to analyze the event, including the possibility that this is state-sponsored terrorism used as a type of cheap negotiation tactic.