Word: rangoons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dramatize their plight, four Burmese hijacked a Thai Airways jetliner on Saturday and demanded the release of imprisoned dissidents. After diverting the Bangkok-to-Rangoon flight to Calcutta, the hijackers said they wanted to make the world "hear our pleas for justice and human rights." They surrendered peaceably to Indian authorities...
After 26 years of decline, pressures for change finally pushed Ne Win into retirement in July 1988. Decades of anger erupted in bloody riots in the streets of Rangoon a month later and continued on and off for six weeks, leaving more than 3,000 dead. General Saw Maung, the armed forces chief of staff, seized power as chairman of the authoritarian State Law and Order Restoration Council, which was to govern until elections...
...political movement that began in 1988 is effectively over now," says an Asian diplomat. Says a Western official: "One by one they have knocked off the challenges to the regime, from the League to the monks." The consensus in Rangoon is that the junta can survive any sanctions its Western critics may impose for as long as the military leaders are determined...
Many Burmese who hate the regime also lament their inability to change it. "We are rubbish," says a student in Mandalay. "Our tradition and our religion prevent us from getting things done," says a Rangoon intellectual. The pacific teachings of Theravada Buddhism do not, for example, allow self- immolation of the sort practiced by protesting Vietnamese monks in the 1960s...
...sound trouncing in last May's elections, Burma's military junta has yet to move forward on its promise to cede control of the country, which it now calls Myanmar, to the "largest party." Last week it actually took a step backward. Citing "security reasons," government forces in Rangoon and Mandalay arrested six top leaders of the National League for Democracy, the opposition party that won 80% of the seats in the national legislature. The arrests came a week after the junta said it would release N.L.D. leader Aung San Suu Kyi if she agreed to leave the country. Aung...