Word: junta
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...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...
...Report Arakan's capital, Sittwe, is a sleepy port near the Bay of Bengal where the pace of life inches along at the speed of a pedicab. But nearby, the rush for oil and gas is intense; last year, Russian, Thai and Vietnamese companies signed exploration deals with the junta. In late December, a consortium of four foreign companies, led by South Korea's Daewoo, inked an agreement with the junta and China National Petroleum Corp. to extract natural gas from Arakan's offshore Shwe fields and pipe it northeast through Burma to China's Yunnan province. The pipeline, along...
...inequity is straining the network of fragile cease-fires in tribal areas. "We have sent many letters registering our complaints to the government, but we haven't heard back," says Colonel Gun Maw. Not hearing back from the Burmese junta is something to which the spokesman for the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) is accustomed. An ethnically based movement in northern Burma's Kachin state, the KIO waged a long insurgency against the Burmese regime before signing a peace treaty in 1994. Most Kachin are Christian, and they believe their faith makes them particularly vulnerable to persecution by the exclusively Buddhist...
...without their input. (Eventually, the Chinese paid up.) More foreigners could get caught in the cross fire. Next year, Burma's generals will oversee nationwide elections, two decades after they ignored the results of the last polls. But for the cease-fire groups to participate in the balloting, the junta requires them to give up their guns. For many ethnic organizations, the KIO included, that's not acceptable. Between sips of whiskey chased by Red Bull, a gun runner in the Kachin capital Myitkyina tells me that he's fielding more orders for Chinese-made arms from various ethnic insurgent...