Word: teak
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...affairs, even of neocolonial badgering. Almost all Asian governments are more eager to do business with Burma than to put pressure on it. South Korea recently opened a household-appliance factory there. China has agreed to sell the junta almost $1 billion in armaments, partly in return for Burmese teak and minerals...
...glimmer of democracy is snuffed out, tentative moves toward a more open economy that Burma began in 1989 are likely to go with it. Sometimes called the world's richest basket case because of its wealth of such natural resources as teak and minerals, Burma needs foreign aid and investment to modernize. In the wake of the elections last May, international lending agencies were lining up to welcome Burma, and foreign businessmen were studying the country's new, liberal economic policies, but many investors are pulling back. "No one will lend money to Burma until it sorts out its political...
...Karens may be the most civilized guerrillas on earth. At army headquarters in Manerplaw, deep in the jungle of Burma, enlisted men maintain neat parade grounds, teak officers' quarters, even the occasional flower bed of marigolds and roses. Bugles sound morning reveille, and new recruits march to target practice under a gatepost that carries a black-lettered sign, GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH. Even in Komura, a muddy labyrinth of trenches and bunkers 100 miles south, where some 500 Karen soldiers have been trapped in battle for months with the Burmese army, the men are high-minded...
Spread throughout the jungles that straddle Burma and Thailand, the rebels have settled into a life of well-ordered predictability. They subsist on teak logging and farming, attend church, send their children to school and adhere to a strict penal code (adultery carries the death penalty). Though there is no electricity at Manerplaw headquarters, a generator supplies power for that most prized necessity, a VCR. The leaders tend to be melancholy idealists, sad-eyed dreamers who pass evenings drafting and redrafting a Karen constitution for use in the improbable event that independence will be achieved. Gentle in gesture and speech...