Word: burma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Clash of Titans It's perhaps no surprise that the junta is wary of Chinese influence, notwithstanding the two nations' growing economic ties. For decades, Beijing financially supported communist rebels in northern Burma, even at one point sending People's Liberation Army troops to reinforce their Burmese brothers in arms. For the fervently anticommunist junta, memories of this Chinese patronage are still fresh. It also doesn't help Burmese nationalism that large parts of Mandalay, the country's second largest city and historic royal capital, have turned into a giant Chinatown. "The SPDC wants to remake its image...
...complicated ethnic landscape puts Burma's giant neighbor, China, in a bind. Over the past few years, tens of thousands of Chinese businesspeople have fanned across Burma, setting up trading companies and filling downtowns with signs in Chinese characters. Much of the recent Chinese influx is in ethnic areas, where rebel groups have also come to rely on Chinese-made arms to continue their struggle against the junta. (The Chinese, however, are an equal-opportunity weapons dealer, supplying the junta with much of its military hardware...
...With the possibility of war breaking out along its long border with Burma, China is finding that its presumption of easy political influence down south may have been misplaced. High-level Chinese emissaries, say Burmese analysts, recently visited Burma to warn the junta to avoid any border instability in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China on Oct. 1. The Kokang attack, which reportedly came as a surprise to Beijing, was seen as a direct defiance of that admonition. Since the Kokang clash, Chinese troop levels have doubled along sections of the usually...
...proxy party was trounced by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. But what's often forgotten about those polls is that the parties that finished second and third in terms of parliamentary seats were ethnic ones from Shan and Arakan states, respectively. (The military party came in fourth.) Burma's generals surely want to avoid a repeat of that ethnic electoral success...
...years after it was formed. For the first time since the KIA signed its cease-fire with the junta 15 years ago, he canceled classes and sent his battalion commanders back to active duty. "When I joined the KIA, I was 17 years old and I thought that Burma would end in the flames of civil war," he told me. "Today, if you ask me the same question, I will give you the same answer: Burma will end up in civil war." If he's right, the hills of northern Burma will crackle with gunfire once again, and Felix will...