Word: thant
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...stressed that he would remain focused on the situation, and said he expected the government "to demonstrate real progress in the near future." Real progress, however, hasn't been seen in Burma since 1962. And contempt for the U.N. is nothing new among Burma's generals. A Burmese, U Thant, served as U.N. Secretary-General for 10 years, from 1961 to 1971. When he died in 1974 and his body was flown back to Burma, leader General Ne Win, the mentor of current ruler Than Shwe, refused U Thant a state funeral or any honors whatsoever...
...rather less magnetic successor Than Shwe. The generals took control not only of the armed forces but all aspects of politics and the economy as well. In the decades since the takeover, Burma has evolved into a nation where "the military is the state," according to Burmese historian Thant Myint-U. "Army officers do everything. Normal government had withered away...
...Thant is not by profession a writer and sometimes his pages are so clotted with detail that they read like a dusted-off doctoral thesis. But as a storehouse of facts about a history too little known, his book is fascinating. In the 17th century, he tells us, the Burmese capital of Mrauk-U was seen as a "second Venice" for its rivers as well as its mix of Japanese samurai, Islamic customs and Portuguese priests. To this day the highlands around the Irrawaddy Valley, crowded with minority groups, are "one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world...
...Thant's belief that centuries of such foreign intrusions have left his country without a sense of pride or self-direction. The British stripped the land of its ruling class when they attacked King Thibaw in 1885 and packed him off to an Indian exile, and then the Indians who came in took over many of the country's middle-class positions. Nowadays, Rangoon is full of Chinese mobsters and Russian prostitutes, while the foreign media traffics in exotic tales about 12-year-old twins running an eccentric force known as God's Army and Wa former headhunters now thriving...
...Karen Christian village (and the ongoing Karen insurrection), and of his own unlikely passage from guerrilla and waiter to Cambridge student. Even Amy Tan's last novel, Saving Fish From Drowning, is set in Burma, among American tourists who bat back and forth the arguments for and against boycotts. Thant Myint-U does not command the page as these others do, but he gives us both the savory details and the cruelties of colonialism, as well as a rare feel for palace intrigue. In the process, he suggests that isolation is in fact just what the military regime feeds...