Word: maung
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Burma's brief experiment with multiparty politics is over, and the country is reverting to the xenophobia and isolation of its past. In a nationwide crackdown on its opposition, the military junta led by Senior General Saw Maung has arrested at least 40 officials of the National League for Democracy, including 16 members of parliament, and some 200 rebel monks, many of them activists of the Young Monks Association. Hundreds more monks have slipped out of their monasteries and returned to their homes in the countryside. Six months after the League won a surprise electoral victory, the army has effectively...
After 26 years of decline, pressures for change finally pushed Ne Win into retirement in July 1988. Decades of anger erupted in bloody riots in the streets of Rangoon a month later and continued on and off for six weeks, leaving more than 3,000 dead. General Saw Maung, the armed forces chief of staff, seized power as chairman of the authoritarian State Law and Order Restoration Council, which was to govern until elections...
Meanwhile, Saw Maung was preparing his counterattack. After a pious prayer to the Buddha, he outlawed then abolished some Buddhist sects. Saw Maung then sent his troops into Mandalay's monasteries "to clean out unlawful organizations...
When Japanese professor Sadako Ogata arrived in Burma last week as a special envoy of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Saw Maung expressed his contempt for the very notion. "I will not give the kind of rights demanded by the Voice of America," he said in a speech. "I will not give the students the right to stage demonstrations. I won't let the people emulate the incidents in Eastern Europe...
Stress takes its toll on civility. A brutal assault by the Burmese troops that September left 40 Burmese and two Karens dead and made something in Major Than Maung snap. A few days later, a journalist visited Komura and found the major resting quietly in his bunker, surrounded by dozens of skulls mounted on stakes and planted in tidy rows. When a young Karen soldier playfully stuck a cheroot in the grinning teeth of one skull, the major chased him away. Then he grew quiet again and didn't want to be disturbed...