Word: rangoon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sanctions, Ko Myo does not believe they will topple the regime, and now?after years of staying to help his country?he is one of many Burmese leaving in desperation and disgust. It takes hundreds of dollars and months of waiting to get a passport, and the Rangoon office that issues them is now besieged by applicants. It helps to be male. Stung by foreign criticism that Burma is exporting sex workers, the regime now makes it nearly impossible for young women to go abroad. Ironically, this is fueling the local sex industry, which employs burgeoning numbers of painfully young...
...want to eat the best pickled-tea-leaf salad in Rangoon, possibly in all of Burma, go to Mrs. Greedy's tea shop, a collection of plastic furniture occupying the pavement opposite Sule Pagoda. And if you want to talk without fear of being overheard, do what my Burmese friend Ko Myo did when I met him there one evening: lift up one of Mrs. Greedy's tables and set it down several feet from the nearest customers. Even then you talk in an undertone. It's a reminder that despite Burma's tourist-friendly veneer?how many dictatorships have...
...over its own gloating commentary. The specter of military intervention has haunted the generals since the 1988 uprising, when the U.S. parked an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. The toppling of Saddam Hussein raises genuine hopes among Burmese that their despots will be next. The U.S. embassy in Rangoon even received messages reading "Please invade us." But the saturation media coverage of Iraq has served a domestic purpose. "This is our government's way of telling us, 'America has its hands full, so don't expect it to come to your help,'" says a Burmese journalist...
...headed north for Mandalay, Burma's second-largest city, which I had first visited via dilapidated train from Rangoon, a trip so punishingly long that giant spiders had spun terrifying webs from the luggage racks by the time we arrived. On this occasion, I went by air, which meant landing at one of the most eerie monuments to Burma's economic mismanagement: Mandalay International Airport. Topped with baroque spires to recall the palatial splendors of Burma's royal past, the airport was completed in 2000 at an estimated cost of $150 million. Today, ox carts ply its grand, four-lane...
...bloody hair littered the road where it took place. Suu Kyi was detained with about a hundred of her party members, including elderly deputy Tin Oo; both Suu Kyi and Tin Oo are still under house arrest. The authorities shut NLD offices nationwide, although last week the party's Rangoon headquarters was allowed to reopen. The party rank and file remains traumatized. Later, I would meet a stalwart too fearful to carry his NLD membership card but who instead defiantly scratched his membership number from memory on the corner of a newspaper...