Thoughts & Prayers for the people of Burma

[MarkW]

The unelected military regime changed the name to Myanmar (and the capital to Yangon) in the late 80s.  Most of the democratic activists continue to refer to Burma and Rangoon.

[dragonboy]

The local TV station called BBC 'a sky of liars' on air.

[red]

This and Jena 6 has me just appalled.

[bowl of soup]

As aniticipated, the world's response to the murder of monks, journalists, and innocent people begging for freedom has been swift, severe, and just.  President Bush has proposed calling our massive build-up of liberators and humanitarian aid workers "Operation Unbreakable Indifference" and most other countries have joined in this great global coalition of distraction.

China's role?  Wow, I don't think anyone has the time to listen to my take on that.  Let's just say that they are fast becoming the world's greatest enabler of brutal totalitarian regimes and they will use the coming Olympics to announce to the world that they have arrived ala Germany 1936.  Our time as the world's lone super-power has passed very quickly and our limited influence in Asia has virtually vanished.  I predict Japan will soon repeal Article 9 of it's Constitution and begin building an offensive military and the ball will roll downhill from there.  People don't realize just how big and capable the Japanese military allready is.

Enough from me.

[MarkW]

As aniticipated, the world's response to the murder of monks, journalists, and innocent people begging for freedom has been swift, severe, and just.  President Bush has proposed calling our massive build-up of liberators and humanitarian aid workers "Operation Unbreakable Indifference" and most other countries have joined in this great global coalition of distraction.

China's role?  Wow, I don't think anyone has the time to listen to my take on that.  Let's just say that they are fast becoming the world's greatest enabler of brutal totalitarian regimes and they will use the coming Olympics to announce to the world that they have arrived ala Germany 1936.  Our time as the world's lone super-power has passed very quickly and our limited influence in Asia has virtually vanished.  I predict Japan will soon repeal Article 9 of it's Constitution and begin building an offensive military and the ball will roll downhill from there.  People don't realize just how big and capable the Japanese military allready is.

Enough from me.

God, I really hope the first para was sarcastic, or else, erm, I don't know what to say.  Judging by the rest, I think it is...

With regard to China, I don't think anyone honestly believes that the West gives a toss what they do these days.  They've beaten most of the "capitalist" countries at their own game (anyone here checked the trade deficit recently - and I include Europe as well as North America in this?), while flouting human rights and other UN rulings at whim.  The Security Council seat pretty much makes them untouchable in this or any other regard.  It was only really Israel who used to get to ignore the rules in the past, but now China's doing it and the SC have no control at all, as they are a member rather than just being sponsored by one.

I disagree totally with your take on Japan.  There is no political stomach there for hardball foreign policy.

I find the whole Burma situation depressing.  I don't want to go over the whole Iraq thing ad nauseam, but the post-factum reasons for invading were put down to deposing a dictator in the interests of international security.  Putting aside the question as to why no-one seems interested in kicking Mugabe's arse (I mean, Africa's simply not important enough after managing to ignore Rwanda and Somalia), I find it hard to imagine a more sensitive part of the world in which to try and steer a path towards peace and stability.

SE Asia has historically been a Western foreign policy graveyard - surely we have an opportunity here to make a difference with little or no cost to ourselves?  China won't back the Myanmar Junta if it affects Beijing 2008, and they (Myanmar) remain isolated within ASEAN, and would receive little or no support from their neighbours.

Rant over.

[bowl of soup]

The first part was my poor attempt at satire - it's a fucking outrage.  I just saw something on CNN.com that read something like "Burma disconnects internet" - let the real genocide begin!

We can agree to disagree on Japan and you would know better than me about the public Japanese stomach.  When China begins to overtly act on its ambitions (Hello Taiwan, Ryukyu Islands, etc...), and that time is coming, Japan will injest a giant Tums as it comes to grips with the fact that the U.S. is no longer able or willing to tell China no.

[MarkW]

The first part was my poor attempt at satire - it's a fucking outrage.  I just saw something on CNN.com that read something like "Burma disconnects internet" - let the real genocide begin!

We can agree to disagree on Japan and you would know better than me about the public Japanese stomach.  When China begins to overtly act on its ambitions (Hello Taiwan, Ryukyu Islands, etc...), and that time is coming, Japan will injest a giant Tums as it comes to grips with the fact that the U.S. is no longer able or willing to tell China no.

Sorry - I misread your intentions in your original post.  Sarcasm just gets lost on the interweb.

Burma's fucked, and has been for nearly 50 years.  No-one comes out without a taint in this matter.  If anyone really cared, it could be sorted with a minimum of fuss.  Then again, the same is true about hunger, child mortality, AIDS...

I also agree with you on the Japan front when it comes to China.  If the PRC moves on Taiwan, there'll have to be a reckoning.  If the US don't, I imagine Japan will have to step in.  I'm no Japanese expert, but my limited knowledge of their politics leads me to believe they would only act in extremis.

I suppose what makes me really sad is that the people who could make a difference chose not to.  Fuckwits.

[the_wizzard]

I cannot even begin.....fucking makes my heart cry.  On my way home after a long day, I heard a report on all things considered about how scientist are watching Burma with satalites to document villages that have been destroyed.  Then they spoke with dignitary's from Australia in Burma.  It is very scary to know that the Junta is surrounding many temples to keep the monks segregated (and we all know much more is going on).....

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14810464&ft=1&f=2

I was so deflated after listening to it....made my long day seem like a freaking tropical breeze.  Then I rounded the corner to the most magnificent rainbow (full arch, with bright colors).  That gave me pause.......

Prayers indeed for the people of Burma.......

as the monks were chanting...."loving kindness will win everytime...."

Lets hope that love does prevail and the world responds.

[dragonboy]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7019359.stm

"A United Nations special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, is due to arrive in Burma within hours for urgent talks with the country's military leaders."

[vespachick]

This is Insane!!  
Monks Are Silenced, and for Now, Internet Is, Too
BANGKOK, Oct. 3 — It was about as simple and uncomplicated as shooting demonstrators in the streets. Embarrassed by smuggled video and photographs that showed their people rising up against them, the generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet.
Until Friday television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded with scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets and of chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest popular uprising there in two decades.
But then the images, text messages and postings stopped, shut down by generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to jeopardize their crackdown.
"Finally they realized that this was their biggest enemy, and they took it down," said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile magazine based in Thailand called The Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading source of information in recent weeks. The site has been attacked by a virus whose timing raises the possibility that the military government has a few skilled hackers in its ranks.
The efficiency of this latest, technological, crackdown raises the question whether the vaunted role of the Internet in undermining repression can stand up to a determined and ruthless government — or whether Myanmar, already isolated from the world, can ride out a prolonged shutdown more easily than most countries.
OpenNet Initiative, which tracks Internet censorship, has documented signs that in recent years several governments — including those of Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — have closed off Internet access, or at least opposition Web sites, during periods preceding elections or times of intense protests.
The brief disruptions are known as "just in time" filtering, said Ronald J. Deibert of OpenNet. They are designed to quiet opponents while maintaining an appearance of technical difficulties, thus avoiding criticism from abroad.
In 2005, King Gyanendra of Nepal ousted the government and imposed a weeklong communications blackout. Facing massive protests, he ceded control in 2006.
Myanmar has just two Internet service providers, and shutting them down was not complicated, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with Human Rights Watch. Along with the Internet, the junta cut off most telephone access to the outside world. Soldiers on the streets confiscated cameras and video-recording cellphones.
"The crackdown on the media and on information flow is parallel to the physical crackdown," he said. "It seems they've done it quite effectively. Since Friday we've seen no new images come out."
In keeping with the country's self-imposed isolation over the past half-century, Myanmar's military seemed prepared to cut the country off from the virtual world just as it had from the world at large. Web access has not been restored, and there is no way to know if or when it might be.
At the same time, the junta turned to the oldest tactic of all to silence opposition: fear. Local journalists and people caught transmitting information or using cameras are being threatened and arrested, according to Burmese exile groups.
In a final, hurried telephone call, Mr. Aung Zaw said, one of his longtime sources said goodbye.
"We have done enough," he said the source told him. "We can no longer move around. It is over to you — we cannot do anything anymore. We are down. We are hunted by soldiers — we are down."
There are still images to come, Mr. Aung Zaw said, and as soon as he receives them and his Web site is back up, the world will see them.
But Mr. Mathieson said the country's dissidents were reverting to tactics of the past, smuggling images out through cellphones, breaking the files down for reassembly later.
It is not clear how much longer the generals can hold back the future. Technology is making it harder for dictators and juntas to draw a curtain of secrecy.
"There are always ways people find of getting information out, and authorities always have to struggle with them," said Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of "A History of News."
"There are fewer and fewer events that we don't have film images of: the world is filled with Zapruders," he said, referring to Abraham Zapruder, the onlooker who recorded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Before Friday's blackout, Myanmar's hit-and-run journalists were staging a virtuoso demonstration of the power of the Internet to outmaneuver a repressive government. A guerrilla army of citizen reporters was smuggling out pictures even as events were unfolding, and the world was watching.
"For those of us who study the history of communication technology, this is of equal importance to the telegraph, which was the first medium that separated communications and transportation," said Frank A. Moretti, executive director of the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University.
Since the protests began in mid-August, people have sent images and words through SMS text messages and e-mail and on daily blogs, according to some exile groups that received the messages. They have posted notices on Facebook, the social networking Web site. They have sent tiny messages on e-cards. They have updated the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
They also used Internet versions of "pigeons" — the couriers that reporters used in the past to carry out film and reports — handing their material to embassies or nongovernment organizations with satellite connections.
Within hours, the images and reports were broadcast back into Myanmar by foreign radio and television stations, informing and connecting a public that hears only propaganda from its government.
These technological tricks may offer a model to people elsewhere who are trying to outwit repressive governments. But the generals' heavy-handed response is probably a less useful model.
Nations with larger economies and more ties to the outside world have more at stake. China, for one, could not consider cutting itself off as Myanmar has done, and so control of the Internet is an industry in itself.
"In China, it's massive," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
"There's surveillance and intimidation, there's legal regulation and there is commercial leverage to force private Internet companies to self-censor," he said. "And there is what we call the Great Firewall, which blocks hundreds of thousands of Web sites outside of China."
Yet for all its efforts, even China cannot entirely control the Internet, an easier task in a smaller country like Myanmar.
As technology makes everyone a potential reporter, the challenge in risky places like Myanmar will be accuracy, said Vincent Brossel, head of the Asian section of the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders.
"Rumors are the worst enemy of independent journalism," he said. "Already we are hearing so many strange things. So if you have no flow of information and the spread of rumors in a country that is using propaganda — that's it. You are destroying the story, and day by day it goes down."
The technological advances on the streets of Myanmar are the latest in a long history of revolutions in the transmission of news — from the sailing ship to the telegraph to international telephone lines and the telex machine to computers and satellite telephones.
"Today every citizen is a war correspondent," said Phillip Knightley, author of "The First Casualty," a classic history of war reporting that starts with letters home from soldiers in Crimea in the 1850s and ends with the "living room war" in Vietnam in the 1970s, the first war that people could watch on television.
"Mobile phones with video of broadcast quality have made it possible for anyone to report a war," he said in an e-mail interview. "You just have to be there. No trouble getting a start: the broadcasters have been begging viewers to send their stuff."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/world/asia/04info.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th

[dragonboy]

The whole thing is still so shocking.
They didn't open fire & kill 1000s (although insiders believe far more died than the reported 10) but 1000s were arrested & the Junta are still now 'rounding up' the Monks & people they believe were the 'trouble causers'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7022437.stm
What will happen to these people in prison?

Possible good news today?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7028360.stm

[bowl of soup]

I love that there's a law that bans gatherings of 5 or more people.  I'd also love to see that "get out of jail free" pledge that the people are signing to get out of jail; my best guess:  I (detainee name here) pledge that I am forever in debt to the great military leaders of Myanmar who, with great mercy in their hearts, decided not to kill me.  I agree that should I act sassy again, I should be killed.