Word: rangoon
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...Riot police are marching north up Sule Pagoda Road, banging their truncheons against their shields. An even more menacing sight is behind: hundreds of troops, marching in formation, sealing off downtown Rangoon. Between the riot police and the troops are trucks with loudspeakers making announcements to clear the streets. For more than a week - for most of their lifetimes - Burmese have called peacefully for dialogue. This is the closest the junta gets to it: screaming at its people through loudspeakers from a truck surrounded by men with guns...
...safely left Burma but that it would be worth the wait. For few foreigners know Burma as intimately as he, and nobody has written about it with more power. His book The Trouser People (Penguin; 2003) is the definitive account of modern Burmese society. Andrew arrived in Rangoon just in time to catch the uprising at its most optimistic: the monks had been joined by thousands of ordinary Burmese, infused with hope that they would get the junta to bend and perhaps break. Andrew joined the crowds, marveling at the courage and candor of the protesters. "After years of sneaking...
...euphoria would not last, and Andrew was on hand to chronicle the junta's brutal crackdown. He was joined in Rangoon by our own James Nachtwey, the world's pre-eminent news photographer. If Andrew's story describes the ecstasy of the uprising and the agony of its failure, Nachtwey's haunting images capture Rangoon's somber mood as ordinary Burmese try to go back to their lives after the crackdown...
...should get closer," says the young woman in the crowd behind me. "If foreigners are here, they won't shoot." It's about 1 p.m. on Sept. 27, and I am wedged among thousands of pro-democracy protesters near the gold-domed Sule Pagoda in downtown Rangoon. Facing us are hundreds of soldiers and riot police, who look on edge as they finger their assault rifles. The woman behind me is hoping that they won't want to create an international incident by firing on a scruffy-looking Brit, and that my presence will protect the protesters. She will soon...
...promising nation into the ground. But there have been some positive changes too. A 2004 internal purge dealt a blow to a once fearsome spy network. A year later, the regime moved to a remote new capital it called Naypyidaw, or "the Abode of Kings." Suddenly people in Rangoon seemed to talk a little more freely. Mobile phones and the Internet arrived and, despite being costly and state-controlled, were embraced by thousands. Student activists jailed after the 1988 protests were released and quietly began regrouping. Then, two months ago, members of this self-styled '88 Generation hit the streets...