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Eight years after the first edition of this insightful and highly regarded book, Burma remains one of the most troubled nations in Southeast Asia. While other countries have democratized and prospered, Burma is governed by a repressive military dictatorship and is the second largest producer of heroin in the world. In this exceptionally readable yet scholarly account of Burma today, Christina Fink gives a moving and insightful picture of what life under military rule is like. Through the extensive interviews conducted inside and outside the country, we begin to understand Burma's political and domestic situation and a comprehensive understanding of why military rule has lasted so long. This significantly revised new edition includes material taking the reader up to present day action and accounts, including the impacts of the dramatic 2007 monks' demonstrations, which were coordinated with former student activists and members of Aung San Suu Kyi's party. The book explores the regime's continued attempts to weaken and divide the democratic movement and the ethnic nationalist organizations and explains how the democratic movement and ethnic groups have sought to achieve their goals; in part, by working more closely together.
Burma remains the odd man out in South East Asia. It is a military dictatorship, not part of the region's still-dynamic economy, and has a troubled relationship with the outside world, including that fact that it is the second largest supplier of heroin. This exceptionally readable account of Burma gives a graphic, often moving, and always insightful picture of what life under military rule is like for ordinary Burmese. This survey takes in a wide diversity of ordinary people and communities.
Situated in the triangle between South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China, Burma is a country of 50 million people struggling under the oppression of one of the world's most brutal military regimes. Yet, the voices of its people remain largely unheard in the international arena. Most of the limited media coverage deals with the non-violent struggle for democracy led by Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or the Army's repression of university students and urban dissidents, but these only form a small part of the story. This book presents the voices of ethnic Karen villagers to give an idea of what it is like to be a rural villager in Burma: the brutal and constant shifts of forced labor for the Army, the intimidation tactics, the systematic extortion and looting by Army and State authorities, the constant fear of arbitrary arrest, rape, torture, and summary execution, the forced relocation and burning of hundreds of civilian villages and the systematic uprooting of their crops. Three detailed reports produced by the Karen Human Rights Group in 1999 are used to give the reader a sampling of the life of Karen villagers, both in areas where there is armed resistance to the rule of the SPDC junta and in areas where the junta is fully in control. The Karen Human Rights Group is a small and independent local organization which has been using the firsthand testimony of villagers to document the human rights situation in rural Burma since 1992. Much of the group's work can be seen online at www.khrg.org. Kevin Heppner, who contributed the introductory sections of the book, is a Canadian volunteer who founded KHRG in 1992 and still serves as its coordinator. Claudio Delang, who edited this book, has a keen interest in Karen life and customs. He is currently completing a PhD dissertation on the Karen and Hmong in northern Thailand.
A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2019 A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2020 “An urgent book.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times During a century of colonialism, Burma was plundered for its natural resources and remade as a racial hierarchy. Over decades of dictatorship, it suffered civil war, repression, and deep poverty. Today, Burma faces a mountain of challenges: crony capitalism, exploding inequality, rising ethnonationalism, extreme racial violence, climate change, multibillion dollar criminal networks, and the power of China next door. Thant Myint-U shows how the country’s past shapes its recent and almost unbelievable attempt to create a new democracy in the heart of Asia, and helps to answer the big questions: Can this multicultural country of 55 million succeed? And what does Burma’s story really tell us about the most critical issues of our time?
Born in Ashton upon Mersey, Cheshire, UK in 1900, Marie Beuzeville Byles is best known to Vipassana meditators for her practice of meditation. In Journey Into Burmese Silence (George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1962), she traces her own story as she first travels to Burma and comes in contact with Vipassana Meditation and then how she returns several times more later in her life to strengthen her practice. At the Maha Bodhi Meditation Centre in Mandalay, she became the student of U Thein who taught as a lay teacher in the tradition of Saya Thet Gyi. U Thein forms the centre of a group of devoted friends that sustain Marie in her struggle and lead her on a pilgrimage of meditation centres across Burma. Byles' book is a detailed account of the many Burmese practices going by the name ‘Vipassana’. It is a valuable and inspiring book for any truth seeker.
How Burma’s pro-democracy movement transcends its borders.
Shwe Lu Maung, the author of the well-known book Burma Nationalism and Ideology (1989), describes a silent religious war of the Muslims and Buddhists in Bangladesh and Myanmar. He asserts that the religious war is a key factor which undermines advancement of democracy in these countries. More importantly, he gives a vivid illustration how the global warming would reinforce poverty and population explosion, leading to a full fledged Muslim-Buddhist war and destabilizing the entire region. He suggests that Rohingya-Rakhaing tension in the Rakhine State of Myanmar would ignite the war. He supports his reasoning with 31 tables, 21 figures, 15 maps, 8 charts, 112 illustrations, and 280 references. You can preview the book at http: //www.shwelumaung.org
This study analyses the various types and stages of conflict that have been experienced by diverse groups and generations of Karen over the six decades of armed conflict between the Karen National Union (KNU) and successive Burmese governments. Instead of focusing on those who are internally displaced, those in the refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border or living abroad, or those in the KNU, it places particular emphasis on the "other" Karen, or the majority segment of the Karen population living inside Burma, a population that has hitherto received little scholarly and journalistic attention. It also assesses the Karen people's varied attitudes toward a number of political organizations that claim to represent their interests, toward successive Burmese military regimes, and toward the political issues that led to the original divide between "accommodators" and "rebels." This study argues that the lifestyles and strategies that the Karens have pursued are diverse and not confined to armed resistance. Acknowledging these multiple voices will not only shed light upon the many positive features of ethnic interactions, including harmonious communal relationships and significant attempts to promote peace and stability by encouraging "normal" activities and routines in both peaceful and war-torn areas; it will also help to identify policy recommendations for future ceasefire negotiations and a possible long-term political settlement within the context of a militarized Burma.
“Craig wields powerful and vivid prose to illuminate a country and a family trapped not only by war and revolution, but also by desire and loss.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Miss Burma tells the story of modern-day Burma through the eyes of Benny and Khin, husband and wife, and their daughter Louisa. After attending school in Calcutta, Benny settles in Rangoon, then part of the British Empire, and falls in love with Khin, a woman who is part of a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, the Karen. World War II comes to Southeast Asia, and Benny and Khin must go into hiding in the eastern part of the country during the Japanese occupation, beginning a journey that will lead them to change the country’s history. Years later, Benny and Khin’s eldest child, Louisa, has a danger-filled, tempestuous childhood and reaches prominence as Burma’s first beauty queen soon before the country falls to dictatorship. As Louisa navigates her newfound fame, she is forced to reckon with her family’s past, the West’s ongoing covert dealings in her country, and her own loyalty to the cause of the Karen people. Based on the story of the author’s mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom. “At once beautiful and heartbreaking . . . An incredible family saga.” —Refinery29 “Miss Burma charts both a political history and a deeply personal one—and of those incendiary moments when private and public motivations overlap.” —Los Angeles Times