Word: maung
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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...
Major Than Maung, 54, the reserved and dignified officer in charge at Komura, could not be more insistent. Soldiers are not drafted until the age of 15, he says. When children show up in war zones, most are sent back. But why not send them all back? Pause. "It depends on the situation," he says...
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...
...government responded to the electoral rout with pledges to transfer power to a civilian government. But the timing remained vague, and the future role of the military was anything but clear. Although junta leader General Saw Maung announced that he would cede control "to the largest party," there were enough caveats to leave the opposition sleepless. First a constitution must be drafted, a process that diplomats warn could take as long as three years. And, Saw Maung cautioned, whoever threatens the protection of "national unity will not be tolerated...
...military leadership is almost universally despised since its ruthless suppression of what became known, in a variation on Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring, as the "Rangoon Fall." Western diplomats estimate that troops killed some 2,000 unarmed civilians in street clashes following the takeover by General Saw Maung, who took power in a coup last September. Since then, more students and other protesters have been arrested or shot. Government employees deemed sympathetic to the democracy movement are being purged from their jobs. Troops are everywhere, even in the compound of the Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma's holiest shrine. "They have stripped away...