Word: burma
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From a secret border site somewhere north of the Thai village of Mae Sot, a clandestine radio transmitter last week beamed an urgent declaration into the purple mountains of Burma. "Ours is no hasty, ill-considered decision," said the tape-recorded voice. "For months after my release from jail I pondered the problem. Recourse to arms was personally distasteful to me. But in the end, we decided to fight...
...voice from Mae Sot had not been heard in Burma for eight long years. It was unmistakably that of U Nu, the ascetic, still popular ex-Premier who was ousted in 1962 by General Ne Win, the Burmese army strongman, and imprisoned in a military "rest camp" near Rangoon for the next four years. For the past 18 months, U Nu has been plotting his comeback. "I cannot tell you exactly at what time and in what month we will celebrate victory," he said in his broadcast. Less inclined to generalize, his lieutenants flatly predict "final victory" some time...
Pagodas of Sand. At 63, U Nu is opening yet another round in one of Asia's longest-running contests for power. The moonfaced, celibate Buddhist monk became the Union of Burma's first Premier when the country gained independence from Britain in 1948. He was gentle and compassionate, but he was also a sucker for a motley assortment of stargazers; one legendary day, presumably with appropriate astrological advice, he ordered 60,000 pagodas to be constructed-all of sand. The egregious corruption of his regime angered Burma's small middle class, and when he established Buddhism...
Eight years later, as Ne Win himself once admitted in a rare moment of candor, Burma is "in a mess." The economy, almost totally nationalized, has virtually ceased to function. Last spring the state-owned distribution system collapsed altogether, and Rangoon shoppers who queue up before dawn are lucky if the shelves are not totally bare a few minutes after the People's Stores open. Prices have risen fivefold since 1962, but rice exports, once the largest in the world, are down to less than a third of their precoup levels...
...Japan, long an importer of rice, now has such a huge surplus that one company has taken to spraying rice grains out of pressurized nozzles in order to clean the blades of air-cooling fans. Other countries feeling the impact of the Green Revolution are Turkey, Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, South Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Brazil and Paraguay...