Word: burma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Whenever I visit Burma, I have a ritual: I look up a name in the Rangoon telephone book. Every year a new directory is published, but the listing remains "Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw," followed by Rangoon's most famous address "54 University Avenue" and a telephone number. The number never seems to work. When I tried it during my recent trip, the Nobel laureate and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) was enduring her third stint under house arrest since 1989. But seeing her celebrated name in the book always seems both extraordinary and reassuring...
...returned to Burma to see old friends. Last year was particularly terrible for the long-suffering nation. In February came the near collapse of the private banking system, then in May the savage "Black Friday" attack on Suu Kyi by state-sponsored thugs, who killed or injured scores of her supporters and so provoked tough new economic sanctions by the U.S. In the past, either event might have sparked a popular uprising on the scale witnessed in 1988, when the Burmese military shot and jailed thousands of demonstrators. The reaction this time?nothing, not a peep of protest?reflects...
...seem, on closer inspection, not much to shout about. For example, Rangoon now boasts a dozen or so cybercaf?s, but they charge a dollar an hour?more than the average daily wage?and deny access to hundreds of sites deemed "inappropriate." Who surfs what is easy to plot, because Burma has only two Internet-service providers: one state run, the other owned by the son of military-intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt. The universities, traditionally crucibles of antigovernment protest, are open again?but only for master's students; the rest must study by correspondence or at campuses far from...
...want to eat the best pickled-tea-leaf salad in Rangoon, possibly in all of Burma, go to Mrs. Greedy's tea shop, a collection of plastic furniture occupying the pavement opposite Sule Pagoda. And if you want to talk without fear of being overheard, do what my Burmese friend Ko Myo did when I met him there one evening: lift up one of Mrs. Greedy's tables and set it down several feet from the nearest customers. Even then you talk in an undertone. It's a reminder that despite Burma's tourist-friendly veneer?how many dictatorships have...
...Young, handsome and smarter than a truckful of generals, Ko Myo is a teacher by profession and my guide to the arcane politics of Burma. Thankfully, he's a patient one. On my first trip to Burma, he had bravely taken me to the house of a prominent democrat. Stupidly, I had no idea who she was or what risks Ko Myo had taken to bring me there. Today, he takes a spoonful of tea-leaf salad and shakes his head in mock disgust. "To think I risked a 10-year prison sentence for that," he says...