Word: ethnicity
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...impose international sanctions. The debate is polarizing. The pro-sanctions crowd claims the moral high ground, deploring the enrichment of a clutch of ethnocentric Burmese generals whose impulses are most brutal against the roughly 40% of the population that, like the villages of Arakan state, is composed of ethnic minorities. The engagement side preaches practicality, arguing that some investment will trickle down to the populace and that cultural exchange is better than imposed isolationism. When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Asia on her inaugural foreign trip last month, she weighed in on the Burma question, acknowledging: "Clearly...
...resource-hungry countries cozy up to the junta, they are discovering that Burma's natural wealth is most bountiful in areas where ethnic minorities simmer under the rule of the ethnic Burmese generals. Officially, the Burmese junta recognizes that the country is a union of at least 135 distinct groups. Yet the top ranks of the military are practically devoid of any non-Burmese presence. Army persecution of Burma's diverse tribes has festered for decades, and the proliferation of junta-controlled mines and concessions in the minority regions only exacerbates the tensions. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic villagers have...
...British, trying to hold together an ethnic patchwork of a colony, knew too well the perils of Burma's tribal politics. They resorted to divide-and-conquer schemes, much as the current military regime has done. Intense negotiations by the junta led to many ethnic insurgencies laying down their guns in the 1980s and '90s - and opened up a vast territory for resource exploitation. But as the inequities between the Burmese majority and the tribal groups - the Arakanese, the Shan, the Kachin, the Karen, the Mon, the Wa and the Chin, to name a few - yawns ever wider, the chance...
...Read "A Closer Look at Burma's Ethnic Minorities...
...World, whose managing director was the target of U.S. sanctions last year. China will receive most - if not all - the generated power, leaving the Kachin people literally in the dark. The largest dam will be at Myitsone, where two rivers meet to become the mighty Irrawaddy. Chinese engineers and ethnic Burmese workers are already on-site. "All we can do is pray that the dam doesn't get built," says Nlam Brang Nu, the Baptist pastor of Tang Hpre village, which will be inundated when Myitsone is completed. "It is in God's hands...