Word: juntas
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...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 the path we have taken in imposing sanctions hasn't influenced the Burmese junta ... [which is] impervious to influence from anyone." (See pictures of Burma's discontent...
...busy man. He manages a couple of companies in Burma's commercial capital, helps raise his children and regularly makes merit at a Buddhist temple. He also spends time tending to a plant that he knows is only grown to die. In Dec. 2005, Burma's economically inept junta - one of its leaders once decided to denominate the national currency by multiples of nine because he liked the number - decided that the country's future lay in a shrub called jatropha...
...Puzzlingly, however, the junta's planting directive has not been matched by adequate infrastructure to turn those acres into energy, like collection mechanisms, processing plants, distribution systems. My friend dutifully tends his jatropha trees and then watches the seeds fall on the ground and die. In his case, the spindly physic-nut shrubs in his garden are supplanting a fragrant frangipani tree or colorful hibiscus bush. But elsewhere in Burma - a nation where UNICEF estimates malnutrition afflicts one-third of children - farmers have had to put aside valuable crop land for a wasted plant...
...trends like jatropha. Ever looking for a hidden meaning to the seemingly incomprehensible actions of their leaders, some speculate that the Burmese word for "jatropha" sounds like an inversion of the name of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy may be the junta's most potent opposition. By inverting Suu Kyi's name, perhaps the superstitious junta believes that the kyet-suu plant will cause her democracy movement to wither away. (Read about Burma's ethnic minorities...
...must sign a document promising not to bear more than two children - a regulation that presumably ensures the number of Muslim inhabitants of Arakan doesn't mushroom faster than the Buddhist population. Burmese prejudice against the Rohingya is as casual as it is cruel. When international indignation over the junta's treatment of the Muslim minority erupted earlier this year, Burma's consul general to Hong Kong issued a letter saying that the Rohingya could not possibly be Burmese since they were "dark brown" and "ugly as ogres...