Word: junta
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...could there be cracks developing in the army's cohesion? During the lead-up to last week's brutal suppression of the Buddhist monk-led demonstrators, exile groups buzzed with speculation that the junta's No. 2, General Maung Aye, was opposing any violence. Then, army troops opened fire, killing at least 10 people in Rangoon. On Sunday, democracy advocates regained a modicum of hope when visiting United Nations Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari was allowed to meet with Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy won elections in 1990 that the junta ignored. Exile websites wondered whether this meeting meant...
...pariah states are usually recognizable personalities. Kim Jong Il with his electrified hairdo, Muammar Gaddafi with his aviator sunglasses, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with his penchant for windbreakers. But Burma? No one dictator comes to mind, only a coterie of faceless generals - 12, to be exact. Last week, in the junta's latest wave of repression, soldiers fired on thousands of peaceful protesters who had dared challenge its iron-fisted rule. But the question remains: Who exactly controls Burma, one of the world's most isolated regimes...
...army has repeatedly turned its guns against its own people, most tragically in 1988 when a student-led protest movement was crushed, leaving some 3,000 dead. Even as the masses have grown poorer, the military has enriched itself through timber and natural-gas deals. In 2005, the ruling junta mysteriously moved the nation's capital from Rangoon to a new city called Naypyidaw, carved out of the jungle at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Last year, a samizdat video of Than Shwe's daughter getting married made the rounds in Rangoon; Burmese were shocked...
That's a long way from the days when India backed the pro-democracy movement of Aung San Suu Kyi, the celebrated opposition leader who, in 1993, Delhi awarded the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Award. Within years, India had begun wooing Burma's junta, a relationship publicly cemented when strongman Than Shwe visited India...
What makes Fernàndez a potential intermediary between the U.S. and Latin America's neolefties is that she's fluent in both political tongues. She came on the scene in the 1980s, when democracy returned in the wake of Argentina's bloody, far-right military junta, and her speeches are peppered with terms dear to Chàvez & Co., like "social justice" and "popular sovereignty." But she also uses expressions from Washington's vocabulary, like "fiscal responsibility" and "capitalistic rationality." And unlike Latin American leaders who accuse the U.S. of evil imperialist designs, she welcomes Washington's leadership...