Word: juntas
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...teenage grandson, and like many of their soccer-mad compatriots they stay up late into Burma's tropical nights to watch live broadcasts from faraway England. So far, so normal. But knowing the grandfather in this touching scene is Senior General Than Shwe, the xenophobic chief of Burma's junta, makes it seem all wrong. Rabidly anti-Western, yet pro-Wayne Rooney, is this the tyrant we know and hate...
...surprise passions might seem trivial, but it raises a serious question. With U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying on Sept. 24 that Washington would begin "engaging directly" with Burma's military leaders after 20 years of American censure and sanctions, how well do we really know the junta? "We don't understand it very well at all, although it's not very easy to understand," says Donald M. Seekins, a Burma scholar at Meio University in Okinawa, Japan. Trying to fathom the regime's worldview doesn't mean we condone its human-rights abuses; many believe that ongoing atrocities...
...Loyalty - and Dishonor Than Shwe, the junta's chief since 1992, is Burma's enigmatic but undisputed leader. "He exercises almost absolute power," says Seekins. "Nobody wants to challenge him, at least openly." His origins were humble. Born in a village not far from Mandalay, Burma's last royal capital, he dropped out of high school and worked in a post office before joining officer-training school and rising up through the military ranks, specializing in psychological warfare. Unquestioning loyalty was "the secret of his success," says Benedict Rogers, co-author of a forthcoming book called Than Shwe: Unmasking Burma...
...natural gas over the next 20 years from Australia. Last month, China's state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) entered talks with Nigeria to buy as much as one-sixth of the West African nation's proven petroleum reserves, the Financial Times reported. This week, Guinea's junta announced a $7 billion mining deal with an unnamed Chinese company, which human-rights activists say could prop up a government implicated in a mass killing of demonstrators in September...
...After longtime Guinean President Lansana Conte died before grooming a successor, members of Guinea's military junta reportedly drew lots to decide who would become the nation's next leader. On Dec. 23, Camara's soldiers broke down the doors of the state TV station and broadcast that he was dissolving the constitution. (Read "A Big Double Murder Jolts Africa's Cocaine...