Word: burma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...easy life. But the plight of the country's ethnic minorities, many of whom once waged long and bloody insurgencies against the military regime, is even worse. As a new human-rights report released on Jan. 28, as well as the recent stories of destitute refugees who fled Burma attest to, members of Burma's ethnic groups face persistent discrimination by the military regime. They are the targets of unpaid forced labor campaigns, scorched-earth policies that destroy farmland and relocation programs that require entire villages to move at a moment's notice. (See pictures of Burma's 19 years...
...smoldering remains of houses laid waste by Burmese troops; blood-drenched protesters on the streets back in 1988, when the last democracy uprising was snuffed out and thousands were killed. Twenty years of suffering is compressed into a few searing seconds. But it is still hard to simply recategorize Burma VJ as a well-made docudrama and leave it at that - not as long as its makers insist that it is a documentary, or that it is composed largely of the work of undercover reporters, when at least half of it seems re-enacted. The cause of Burma's democrats...
...Burma VJ won the top award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam in November and was screened at last month's Sundance Festival. It closes with a raid by secret police on DVB's Rangoon secret headquarters - also a reconstruction, although the events it depicts are real and tragic enough. Three reporters were arrested, others went into hiding. Joshua is now in exile, but the authorities know his name - they tortured it out of a friend - and keep his family under surveillance...
...imagine Joshua was comforted by the reaction of Rangoon's police chief. "DVB are the worst," growls Major General Khin Yi in the closing scenes of Burma VJ. "DVB are the ones who broadcast most of the false news about us." My brave Burmese colleagues couldn't ask for a bigger compliment, or for a better reason to continue their extraordinary work...
...Where does the responsibility to protect end? Does it mean fighting a national army? Does it mean supplanting a national government? Does it mean accepting the large losses that would inevitably accompany intervention in Somalia--the site of the world's worst humanitarian crisis--or in totalitarian states like Burma? Doss insists there are limits to what he proposes. "We assist the national process. We do not replace it," he says. "We're not an army of occupation." But introducing a foreign combat force into Congo would cast doubt on whether such declarations are sincere...