Word: burma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...story, of course, is a metaphor, and a potent one in times of natural disasters, food riots and the criminal responses of governments like Burma's. But Blindness is rarely plausible, never compelling; its characters are locked in a mindset that accepts the status quo, no matter how awful it gets. They never think of forming a community to rebel against the government guards, and only belatedly find a way to escape. Meirelles' camera style is plenty jazzy, with an agitated rhythm and the desaturated color scheme from Children of God (another dystopian English-language social parable from a Latin...
...loss. Twice, her eyes welled up, but she blinked back her tears. Her children were gone. She had no money or food. But instead of grief she seemed terrified at both her urgent need to tell her story and her decision to tell it to a foreign journalist. Burma's ruling military junta could do terrible things to her for such disregard...
...Disaster scenes, no matter where they are, tend to take on a terrible similarity. There is the keening for lost family members, the frantic jostling for relief supplies and mounting anger as diseases stalk refugee camps and medicine is in short supply. But Burma has been different. There are third-hand stories of food riots, but in four days of visiting villages in the affected Irrawaddy Delta, the dominant emotional themes are fear and resignation. It is a remarkable accomplishment by the junta to have set the bar so low for competence that weariness reigns; few people express any frustration...
...casting a vote. Cyclone Nargis had just razed his house and ravaged the rice paddies that were to provide half of his yearly income. Nearly all the other wooden shacks in his village of Too Chaung had also been annihilated by the storm. Then, on May 10, representatives from Burma's repressive military junta descended on the village. Were they coming to bring badly needed food, water and building materials to the people of Too Chaung? Hardly. Instead, the government men forced villagers to participate in a constitutional referendum that critics have labeled a sham dedicated to legitimizing the military...
...Forcing victims of Burma's worst natural disaster in modern history to participate in a referendum of questionable validity underscores the callousness of the Burmese regime. But the determination to hold the plebiscite also points to an even darker irony. A week after the cyclone devastated the Irrawaddy Delta, precious little aid is reaching the storm's victims. On Friday, in village after village, residents told me no aid at all had arrived. Blackened, bloated corpses still bobbed in rivers. Many storm survivors had no idea when they would be eating their next meal. NGOs began reporting outbreaks of diarrheal...