Word: burma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Htein Lin's prison experience is omnipresent in his paintings, which have been featured in recent exhibitions in both Hong Kong and London, where he now lives with his wife, a former British ambassador to Burma. His work - and unique modus operandi - is attracting the attention of international collectors, according to Karin Weber, owner of a Hong Kong gallery specializing in contemporary Burmese art that has shown Htein Lin's paintings. "They're dense with visual information," Weber says, referring to a corpus that both chronicles the artist's bodily and sensory impoverishment, and offers a timely glimpse into...
...natural to hope that the destruction wrought by Cyclone Nargis in Burma will have a similar impact - that it will force the military junta that, in one guise or another, has ruled Burma for decades to change its ways: win the trust of its citizens, and devote its resources not to sustaining a bloated, corrupt military but to helping people live better lives. But assessing how governments will conduct themselves is not like the common law, where precedents accrete until they solidify into doctrine that shapes future conduct. The dreadful famine in North Korea in the 1990s, for instance...
...Optimists will hope that the junta in Burma will learn the lessons of Chernobyl and Mexico City, and realize that they cannot continue as they have before. Realists, sadly, will note how long Burma's rulers have defied the manifest will of their own people, and guess that they will hunker down again. It would be nice if the realists were to be proved wrong. Until then, those within Burma as well as those from afar who genuinely care about its prospects can do little but hope for better, cloudless, days to come...
...people of Burma take omens seriously. For centuries, the paths of planets and vagaries of weather have been scrutinized by astrologers, who divine a relationship between celestial irregularities and earthly mayhem. So when Cyclone Nargis tore across the country on May 2 and 3 - killing tens of thousands of people and leaving hundreds of thousands more homeless - Burmese couldn't help but note the curious timing: exactly a week later, on May 10, the country's thuggish ruling junta was set to hold a constitutional referendum, a step toward what the military has called a "discipline-flourishing democracy." Critics dismissed...
...that fear of infiltration is key to understanding the normalcy pursued by Burma's generals. Even as the Burmese people struggle to survive in the wake of the storm, the government is insisting on going ahead with a referendum on a draft constitution the leaders claim would open the door for democratic elections in 2010, but which most view as a rigged effort to prop up support for their rule. The deaths of tens of thousands of people, in other words, should not impede efforts to codify the primacy of the generals. At a time when Burma's rice growing...