Word: burma
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...Rogues Gallery Than Shwe is burma's paramount ruler, but he is not alone at the top. Hard-line loyalists within the military include General Thura Shwe Mann, his likely successor, and U Thaung, a former ambassador to the U.S., now the Science and Technology Minister who is believed to be driving the junta's long-held ambitions to acquire nuclear technology. Also influential are a handful of Burmese business tycoons, many of whom - like the generals themselves - are the subject of U.S. and E.U. sanctions that severely restrict overseas travel and investments. Lobbying of Than Shwe by these business...
...protect his legacy - and his skin. In 2002, suspecting a plot against him, Than Shwe put Ne Win, the man who had first elevated him to power, and his daughter under house arrest and jailed his grandsons. "Ne Win died in ignominy," says Christina Fink, author of Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule, a landmark book about life under the junta. "Than Shwe must be painfully aware that the same could happen to him." The junta chief has another weakness: his family. He allows them "to run wild," says Rogers. In July 2006, his jewel-bedecked daughter Thandar Shwe...
...Standing Alone Many in Burma's pro-democracy movement - and in the U.S. Congress - view any overtures to the generals as appeasement and say Than Shwe personally has blood on his hands. Aung Lynn Htut, a former Burmese diplomat and army major who defected to the U.S. in 2005, claims Grandfather personally ordered the massacre of 81 men, women and children on a remote Burmese island in 1998. Five years later, Than Shwe's thugs attacked the convoy of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi at Depayin, west of Mandalay, killing or injuring dozens of her supporters...
...violating the terms of her house arrest after an American man swam uninvited to her lakeside home. Her initial three-year prison sentence was commuted to 18 months of house arrest because, said the order read aloud in court, Than Shwe "desires ... to exercise leniency upon her." (Read "Burma Court Finds Aung San Suu Kyi Guilty...
...sounded cautious, and who can blame her? Than Shwe "remains impervious to the appeal of reform or compromise with the opposition because he wishes at all costs to maintain a personal monopoly on power," says Seekins. So will a fresh diplomatic onslaught work? The new U.S. approach on Burma is the product of a White House that stresses diplomacy over confrontation. "It's more a change in tactics than overall strategy," says Fink. Also driving the policy review are Washington's concerns over China's influence over Burma and Than Shwe's apparent nuclear ambitions. Seekins believes Washington risks overestimating...