Word: rangoon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...analyst's nightmare. Remnants of a Kuomintang army that fled China at the time of the Communist takeover vie with independent warlords for control of the region's rich opium crop, while armed independence movements representing a bewildering host of ethnic and tribal groups periodically challenge the Rangoon government of General...
...behind him, he was suddenly everywhere, talking officially and informally on a variety of subjects. With his family, he strolled and quipped his way through Lafayette Square Park ("Perfectly safe. No problem when you've got about ten Secret Service agents with you"), dined out on Crab Rangoon at Trader Vic's, invited newsmen into the Oval Office to overhear decisions of state, and advised Richard Helms, his new ambassador to Iran, that Iranian caviar was "the best in the world." Between the pleasantries and the public appearances, he also made and talked policy on a broad range...
...priority list for supplies and troop replacements, Slim's 800,000-man force often went to battle as lightly armed as guerrillas. The struggle went on for more than three years until May 1945, when the polyglot army of Indians, Nepalese, Africans and Britons captured the port of Rangoon, virtually ending the Burma campaign...
Eight years later, as Ne Win himself once admitted in a rare moment of candor, Burma is "in a mess." The economy, almost totally nationalized, has virtually ceased to function. Last spring the state-owned distribution system collapsed altogether, and Rangoon shoppers who queue up before dawn are lucky if the shelves are not totally bare a few minutes after the People's Stores open. Prices have risen fivefold since 1962, but rice exports, once the largest in the world, are down to less than a third of their precoup levels...
...countryside, Burma has a whole series of wars in progress. Private armies led by hill-tribe warlords wage a running battle for autonomy with the despised lowlanders from Rangoon. Rangoon and Peking recently agreed to exchange ambassadors once again (they were recalled during the Cultural Revolution in 1967); yet the Chinese have been quietly supporting a new group of Communist insurgents who have frequently bloodied Ne Win's 150,000-man army in clashes in Burma's sparsely populated northeast. Something less than half of the country (pop. 27 million) is really under Rangoon's control...