Over 70 percent of Burma’s FDI has come from China, largely for development projects in ethnic-minority regions. These projects, along with smaller initiatives worth millions if not billions of dollars more in undocumented investment, have now brought tensions in ethnic regions to a boiling point. In turn, such tensions have led to the breakdown of a handful of ceasefire agreements between ethnic armed groups and the government army, which, incidentally, receives the majority of its weaponry from China.
Showing Juntas Some Love
North Korea and Burma have been the beneficiary of foreign policy initiatives by China and the United States respectively.
An Arab Spring in Burma Requires Alliance Between Armed and Nonviolent Resistance
To approximate the results in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the non-violent resistance of Burma must let itself be complemented by the armed resistance of the ethnic groups.
When a Clandestine Nuclear Program Is Good News
The United States is selective about which states engaging in nuclear proliferation that it condemns.
Gaddafi Just Another Tyrant Who Painted Himself Into a Corner
By burning their bridges, dictators condemn themselves to fight until the bitter end.
Burma’s Junta: Can a Tiger Change Its Stripes?
Burma’s leadership announced it would free 6,359 prisoners, but only 207 political prisoners have been released thus far.
Poets Stand Up
In Paris, poets staged a flash mob outside the Louvre Museum. In North Carolina, they sent poems to their state legislators, calling on them to restore arts education funding to the decimated state budget. In Vancouver, BC, poets cleaned up a beach before their reading. There was a reading in solidarity with the people of Tibet in Pasadena, California, events throughout Mexico City demanding an end to violence, and “an exorcism of fear and helplessness” in Norman, Oklahoma. Poets gathered in Fez, Morocco, and Jalalabad, Afghanistan and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
War on Roaches
Set up the four cuts
cut support cut food cut water cut communications
still see stray guerilla roaches, though all food including edible trash
carefully removed or wrapped
in plastic.
Graphic Foreign Policy
Living in Japan in the late 1990s, I was struck by the sheer number and variety of manga or comic books. You could go to a manga store and find an entire aisle devoted to your particular genre: golfmanga, comics about the Japanese yakuza (mafia), mecha that focus exclusively on giant robots. Name your interest – or your fetish – and there was a manga series for you. Unlike the United States, where young people were the primary audience for comic books, a huge number of Japanese manga appealed to adults, who read the thick books on the subway or in coffee shops. During the prolonged economic crisis in Japan, it was not uncommon for downsized salarymen to pretend to their families to go to work and instead spend the entire day at the manga cafes,mangakissa, reading comics about, among other things, salarymen.
How Can a Junta Survive With a Weak Army?
Burma’s military continues to increase in size, but most of the soldiers are forced to join and paid poorly.