Word: rangoon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Despite the cruelty and tedium Htein Lin recorded, he doesn't consider himself a political artist. He was, in fact, disillusioned with politics after years of futile activism. As a law student in Rangoon, he became involved with a troupe practicing a-nyient, a traditional Burmese form of comedy that often pokes fun at the country's military leaders. When those leaders reasserted their authority in a 1988 putsch, Htein Lin, along with many other student activists, fled into the jungle. While living in a rebel camp, he happened to meet an older artist, who offered him drawing lessons using...
...show much of the region still inundated by a vast surge of muddy water. The few residents who have been able to communicate with the outside world describe rice fields littered with bodies and villages where not a single bamboo shack was left standing. Even in the commercial capital Rangoon, where structures are more sturdily constructed, roofs were sheared off buildings and nearly all the city's main streets were uprooted of their columns of stately trees. "We have a major humanitarian catastrophe on our hands," says Chris Kaye, Burma country director for the U.N.'s World Food Program...
...French arm of Doctors Without Borders to abandon the country. When the 2004 tsunami swept over Burma, the generals refused any outside help. This time, though, the military announced it would welcome foreign aid. Three days after the storm, a trickle of donated food started reaching victims near Rangoon, although scores of other aid workers were still grounded in neighboring Thailand as the Burmese embassy considered processing their visas. Meanwhile, U.S. navy ships were idling in nearby Thai waters, seeking permission to enter Burmese waters and help with the relief effort. On May 6, U.S. President George W. Bush pledged...
...Left to fend for themselves, residents of Rangoon rushed to the markets to stock up on plastic sheeting, food and water. In just two days, prices of some basic commodities had already quadrupled. Even before the cyclone hit, Rangoon was reeling from the price hikes that had sparked last year's civil protests; additional increases could push tens of thousands of shantytown dwellers from chronic malnutrition to starvation. Outside Rangoon, the fate of millions remains largely unknown, since roads are blocked and telephone lines are down in a region that serves as Burma's rice bowl. In a frightening glimpse...
...that the cyclone spared was Burma's new administrative capital, Naypyidaw, which was carved out of the jungle by the ruling junta in 2005. Even Burmese civil servants who had to move north to the new capital were given no explanation for the shift. But some local journalists in Rangoon speculated that junta leader Than Shwe had been swayed by soothsayers who predicted that civil unrest and a natural disaster would soon strike the city of 5 million. In September, the monk-led protests made the first part of the prophecy come true; the cyclone fulfilled the second half. Holed...