Word: junta
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...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...
...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 at all at the prospect of slow starvation...
...foreign supplies, swarmed the area within days. Perhaps Burma's generals could have been excused for the delay-after all, this is one of the world's poorest and most backward countries. Yet the efficiency with which the military has shepherded people to polling stations proves that the junta has plenty of organizational capacity. But for Burma's junta, saving the lives of cyclone Nargis' victims isn't as big a priority as conducting a sham vote. The heartlessness is staggering...
Even in the state-run newspapers, stories about the cyclone shared ample space with articles extolling the glories of conducting a referendum. The junta promises that the vote will usher in what it calls a "discipline-flourishing democracy." But the legitimacy of the plebiscite is further undercut by the fact that criticizing the constitutional draft is a crime. Nevertheless, some democracy activists have used the cyclone to register their opposition to the charter. Over the past several evenings, as large swaths of Rangoon remain dark because of downed electricity lines, a rash of spray-painted "x" marks have materialized, symbolizing...
...cyclone relief effort. Or if foreign NGOs were given permission to enter the country and coordinate aid work-something that is happening at a glacial pace. One of the few foreign shipments allowed in was quickly relabeled to say that the goods had been donated courtesy of the junta. "With each passing day, we come closer to a massive health disaster and a second wave of deaths that is potentially larger than the first," warns Gordon Bacon, the International Rescue Committee's emergency coordinator in Rangoon...