This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Myanmar/Burma

  • Myanmar; a bi-partisan issue in Washington

    As I wrote last Friday, the protests here in DC were generally bipartisan, with the exception of some extreme single-minded groups. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon, it’s shaking out that way on Pennsylvania Avenue, too;

    Myanmar’s democracy movement has emerged in a political environment polarized by the Iraq war as a rare unifying cause, bringing together Democrats and Republicans and groups as varied as Hollywood stars and evangelical Christians.

    But a number of foreign diplomats and lobbyists have voiced concerns that the White House, buoyed by nonpartisan support, could overreach in its drive to defend Myanmar’s democracy activists and hurt its cause.

    One issue being debated at the White House, apparently, is Chevron’s close ties to the military junta;

    One area critics point to is the White House’s talk in recent days that it may force U.S. energy company Chevron Corp. to divest itself of its stake in a Myanmar energy project. Chevron’s Yadana gas pipeline serves as a major source of hard currency for the Myanmar junta, and human-rights activists charge it has contributed to human-rights abuses inside the country, a claim Chevron denies.

    Forcing Chevron to sell might not necessarily work in the democracy activists’ favor, said one industry official working with Chevron. Any sale of the company’s stake likely will bring profits to Myanmar’s junta, the official said, while allowing a country like China to take it over.

    “You wonder if the White House is going to think any of this through,” the official said. “Or are they going to be cowboys” in an effort to support the Burmese?

    I guess some extreme elements on either side need to get their shots in occasionally. President Bush can be assured, though, that whatever he does will be the wrong decision in time for 2008 election. That’s not a partisan statement, just a simple truth. The same type of simple statement I made after the economy started tanking in the Clinton Administration and after 9-11. No matter what a Republican president does, it’s always the wrong thing. Bipartisanship only lasts as long as the Democrats look good at it.

    WSJ’s James Hookway writes about the events over the weekend in Myanmar;

    Much of the world has looked on with a mixture of revulsion and puzzlement as Myanmar’s military rulers cracked down hard on pro-democracy protesters, leaving at least 10 people dead and locking down the main city of Yangon under tight security.

    Over the weekend, troops used clubs, warning shots and tear gas to disperse the few hundred demonstrators who ventured into the streets.

    With the protests controlled, at least for the moment, Myanmar’s military bowed somewhat to international pressure by allowing a United Nations special envoy into the country on Saturday to meet several cabinet officials, though not senior generals that run the country. His mission: to persuade the rulers to negotiate with political opponents instead of crushing them.

    At least the UN is moving on this somewhat – a little faster than they moved on Darfur. CNN writes;

    The U.N. envoy plans to tell the junta leader Senior General Than Shwe “about the international outrage over what has happened and will urge him to talk with various people and try to resolve the problems peacefully,” Shari Villarosa, charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, told CNN Sunday.

    The United Nations was uncertain as to when any meeting with Shwe might take place.

    The Pope also sent a message of support to the Burmese;

    Pope Benedict XVI offered support to the citizens of Myanmar, The Associated Press reported. About 1 percent of the population are Catholics, according to AP, and 3 percent follow other Christian denominations.

    And the Japanese are considering sanctions;

    On Monday Japan’s chief Cabinet spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said Japan, Myanmar’s largest aid donor, is mulling sanctions or other actions to protest the junta’s crackdown, which left a Japanese journalist dead, chief Cabinet spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said.

    AP reports light action on today in Myanmar;

    A U.N. envoy made a last-ditch effort to meet Myanmar’s top military leader Monday, hoping to persuade him to accept the people’s demands for democracy. On the streets, troops removed road blocks and appeared to ease their stranglehold on Yangon following the largest protests in two decades.

    After days of intimidation that snuffed out the public demonstrations, soldiers and riot police redeployed from the city center to the outskirts Monday, but were still checking cars and buses, and monitoring the city by helicopter.

    Somehow, if the junta is still in power next November it’ll be this president’s fault – and somehow it’ll be because of the war in Iraq. I’m not being partisan, just an honest observer.

  • Free Burma Protest in DC

    Friday September 28th at about 4 PM there was a protest that began at the Myanmar Embassy and moved several blocks blocks through Northwest DC to the Chinese Embassy on Connecticut Avenue. Actually, I got at the Myanmar Embassy early and the Burmese has already begun, with very few Americans in attendance;

    Here’s a YouTube link to one of the speeches in their native language.

    [youtube JGm2b5cxydg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGm2b5cxydg]

    Then the monks showed up;

    And the crowd started growing;

    This is what endeared me to the movement. Whenever one of the Burmese would talk to a monk, they’d put their fingers together like this. I can appreciate a culture that reveres the piety of their old world while enjoying the benefits of our culture. To me that represents our melting pot – the western dress while observing their own culture’s traditions – without forcing the rest of us to bend to their particular whims. And so I, in turn, felt a measure of reverance for their culture.

    Although I commend the unions for showing up and lending their support, they brought very few rank-and-file members, but a lot of chiefs. Of course when you have topheavy leadership they took control away from the Burmese folks who were there and it began to look like a strike with chants like “What do we want?” “Democracy!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”

    Most of the Anglos that showed up were from Georgetown, GWU and American University. But the Code Pink gals showed up in their official protest clothes complete with Impeach Bush hats

    As well as some of the ANSWER creeps like this one in her Arafat scarf and ANSWER T-shirt who was chanting something while the monks were singing. I wonder if she knows her little Arab buddies bust up Buddist shrines every chance they get. I thought it was pretty offensive myself.

    Somehow the Impeach Bush stuff just didn’t fit in with the call for a free Burma – especially since President Bush made a point of telling the UN to get off their fat asses and do something about Burma just the other day. In fact the Burmese at the protest were thankful;

    This guy was live-blogging the event to Burma

    Finally, we were on our way to the Chinese Embassy

    With the Burmese Monks leading the way

    When we got to the Chinese Embassy, the monks stood between the protesters and the embassy much as I imagined they stood in front of protesters in Rangoon this week.

    Protesters shouted “Shame on you, China” (Video)

    [youtube KVV2dONkqvY nolink]

    And the monks led a traditional song (Video)

    [youtube zPAFP3yn4jo nolink]

    I’d say several hundred people showed up – and for an underpublicized event that’s a pretty good turn out for a Friday afternoon in DC during rush hour.

    I felt pretty good about myself afterwards – it was pretty black-and-white who was the good guys. And the good guys were well-behaved – well except for the US college students who couldn’t follow instructions from the police – like “stay on the sidewalk”.

    There shouldn’t have been any US partisanship – but there was. Some goofball fellow wearing a pink tie and pink socks and a pink “Peace” bumpersticker on his hat pulled up on his bicycle and yelled “Impeach Bush and save Burma” Of course, he got a giggle from the barren old hags from Code Pink – but pretty much was ignored by the others. Other than that, it would have been a nice non-partisan event supporting an oppressed people.

    Michele Malkin has the skinny on what’s happening in Burma. My protest buddy (three protests in two weeks), Kate from A Columbo-Americana’s Perspective was there and took some great pictures. She exchanged words with a Pinko, apparently.

    UPDATE: Spanish Pundit attended the protest in support of Burmese in Madrid today (Saturday) and writes a bit about Zapatero’s response to their plight.

  • Myanmar; when a blog is your only weapon

    US sanctions and ASEAN condemnations against the government of Myanmar are the only weak internatonal responses to a brutal regime that has victimized it’s population for half-a-century (Washington Times);

    The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, under increasing pressure from the West, ended its habitual silence on the situation in Burma yesterday, expressing “revulsion” at the ruling military junta”s killing of protesters and demanding an end to the violence.

    The United States, meanwhile, imposed financial sanctions on 14 senior officials from the Burmese regime, freezing any assets they might have in U.S. banks and barring Americans from business dealings with them.

    The Washington Post reports that the Burmese government is moving to shut down internet and cell phone trunklines out of the country;

    Violence subsided markedly in Rangoon on Friday as armed troops sealed off key downtown streets in an attempt to halt the bloody rioting that has shaken Burma and generated broad condemnation of the military dictatorship that has ruled the country for nearly half a century.

    Restrictions on Internet use imposed by the military’s State Peace and Development Council sharply reduced the flow of information. As a result, Thailand-based exile groups and outside observers had only a sketchy picture of what was going on in Rangoon, Burma’s main city, and the dozen other places where anti-government protesters led by Buddhist monks have mounted the strongest challenge to the junta since 1988.

    They’re shutting off the internet because apparently, that’s the only way news, photos and videos are getting out of the country according to the Wall Street Journal;

    In the age of YouTube, cellphone cameras and text messaging, technology is playing a critical role in helping news organizations and international groups follow Myanmar’s biggest protests in nearly two decades. Citizen witnesses are using cellphones and the Internet to beam out images of bloodied monks and street fires, subverting the Myanmar government’s effort to control media coverage and present a sanitized version of the uprising.

    The Washington Times explains why “citizen journalists” are so intregral in this latest protest against the government;

    Burma, formally known as Myanmar, is largely closed to Western journalists, who are predominantly covering the crisis from outside the isolated country. But bloggers living in the commercial port of Rangoon, where Buddhist monks, pro-democracy activists and residents have been defying security forces, are recording the events in Burmese and flawed English.

    The bloggers rely on word-of-mouth, cell phones, online chat groups, instant messaging and firsthand experience in barricaded streets amid tear gas and gunfire.

    The best blogs provide photos, video and text updates purportedly by eyewitnesses, which are later confirmed by news organizations or, in some cases, can’t be verified. 

    The Wall Street Journal story tells why these reports from citizens inside Burma are so important;

    Who produced these reports — or how the information got out of Myanmar — hasn’t been established. But that’s the point in a country where people caught protesting or writing against the government risk years in prison.

    The last time there was a protest of this scale in Myanmar was 1988, when a pro-democracy uprising was crushed by the military and more than 3,000 people died. First reports of that event came from diplomats and official media. “Technology has changed everything,” says Aung Zaw, a Myanmar exile whose Thailand publication Irrawaddy has been covering events in Burma hour-by-hour, with reports gathered online. “Now in a split second, you have the story,” says the editor.

    According to the AP, on Thursday Myanmar’s state-run newspaper blamed the protests in Yangon, formerly called Rangoon, on “saboteurs inside and outside the nation.” It also said that the demonstrations were much smaller than foreign media were reporting.

    The government can’t tell the world that there’s nothing to see here, because the photos and videos tell a different story. As illstrated in this portion of the Post story;

    Soldiers opened fire at several places around the city Thursday, killing nine people and injuring 31 according to an account read on official Burmese television. But exile groups said they had received information overnight that the toll was considerably higher, perhaps in the dozens. Bob Davis, the Australian ambassador, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio that he believed the number dead was several times the official count.

    The media has, in the past, been forced to report only what they were fed by the government, now they have other alternatives where nearly every person can send proof out of the country. The Associated Press reports that crackdowns continue today;

    Soldiers in Myanmar cracked down on dissenters Friday by swiftly breaking up street gatherings of die-hard activists, occupying key Buddhist monasteries and cutting public Internet access.

    By sealing Buddhist monasteries, the government seemed intent on clearing the streets of monks, who have spearheaded the demonstrations and are revered by most of their Myanmar countrymen. This could embolden troops to lash out harder on remaining protesters.

    Daily demonstrations drawing tens of thousands of people demanding an end to 45 years of military dictatorship have grown into the stiffest challenge to the ruling junta in decades. The crisis began Aug. 19 with rallies against a fuel price hike, then escalated dramatically when monks joined in.

    PDNPulse has the video that’s been running on the Japanese news of the shooting of Kenji Nagai, the Japanese journalist the Myanmar government claims was shot accidentally yeasterday. However from the video it appears he was shot intentionally and at point blank range. Bill Toddler at Pajamas Media tells the story of the world’s amazement at “Monks and Bloggers“

    From Burmanet News, the news for today;

    Rangoon; Afternoon—Trucks loaded with troops raided the offices of Burma’s main Internet service provider, Myanmar Info-Tech, located at Rangoon University (Hlaing campus) around noon on Friday in an effort to cut all public access to the internet. The move is in response to the flood of photographs, videos, news reports and e-mail sent out of the country to the international media and the rest of the world by average citizens.

    Downtown Rangoon; Afternoon—At least two people were hit by gunfire when military troops opened fire on demonstrators on Friday afternoon in Kyauktada Township in central Rangoon, according to a witness, who said she narrowly escaped by hiding under a vehicle. She said the demonstrators were boxed in between Anawrahta Road and Maha Bandoola Road. Dozens of protesters were arrested, bound and beaten. The troops pursued fleeing people into buildings, she said, singling out people with cameras. If they were arrested, the troops beat them while shouting, “Is it you who sends those pictures out?”

  • Myanmar government guns down nine more protesters

    According to the AP, nine more people were killed in Yangon, Myanmar today while 11 were wounded in anti-government protests, including an APF reporter;

    Among those killed was Kenji Nagai, 50, a journalist covering the protests in Yangon for Japanese video news agency APF News. He was confirmed dead after his father and a company representative identified him in a photo, a Japanese Embassy official in Myanmar told The Associated Press.

    Nagai had been covering the protests in Yangon since Tuesday, APF representative Toru Yamaji said.

    In Japan, Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said Tokyo will lodge a protest against Myanmar’s military junta.

    An American eye witness talked to CNN;

    An American witness told CNN soldiers waded into a crowd of protesters in Myanmar and beat several of them mercilessly, at least one of them to death

    “All of a sudden, the police and military guys started coming toward the crowd, and all of a sudden started beating them and running after them,” said the woman, who witnessed the incident from atop a nearby building.

    “And in one corner they got around, maybe, five or seven people, and they started beating them so bad for almost five minutes, and then they took them and put them in trucks.

    “And there was this one guy, laying down on the floor, and he was dead. And then these same police came a few minutes later and picked him up and took him to the police station.”

    This time the “Saffron Revolution” was missing their most ardent protesters;

    Red-robed Buddhist monks who had led several days of marches were largely absent from the streets Thursday after soldiers raided monasteries the night before. Monks reportedly were beaten and taken into custody or confined to the monasteries.

    “This morning, around noon, we went around the city and we saw that most of the monasteries were locked and we saw some of the monks inside,” the American witness said. “So the government is keeping them locked because they don’t want them to go out and protest anymore.”

    She said the soldiers used batons, rifle butts and riot shields to beat the protesters.

    “It was a crowd of, I would say, around 2,000 people, between 2,000 and 3,000 people today, and they … put 10 monks in front of them as a human shield. But the police didn’t care. They just came and started even beating the monks,” she said.

    Streets that had been jammed with as many as 100,000 protesters were deserted by 6 p.m. after the violent crackdown, the witness said.

    “Right now it’s a ghost town. I mean, nobody’s outside. Everybody is so afraid,” she said.

    “Please, these people need help,” the woman said. “It’s inhumane what’s happening here.”

    Not to worry, Anonomous Witness, the UN is on it’s way;

    After initial resistance from China, the U.N. Security Council issued a statement of concern about Myanmar’s violent crackdown on Buddhist monks and urged the military regime to let in a special envoy.

    Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, was expected to leave for the region Wednesday night after briefing the emergency council meeting in the afternoon on the fatal violence.

    Council diplomats said China, which has close economic ties to Myanmar, did not want any document issued after the closed-door session but relented and agreed to a brief statement, which was read to reporters by France’s U.N. Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert.

    And the UN is not just making strong statements, there’ll be emergency meetings, too;

    The U.N. Security Council was to hold an emergency meeting here Wednesday over deadly clashes between anti-government protesters and the military junta in Myanmar as the White House described the situation there as “troubling.”

    That should have that Myanmarian junta shaking in their collective boots.

    The State Department has background on the current turmoil and some historical perspective. Closet Republican gives us an historical overview.

    Kate from A Columbo-Americana’s Perspective emailed me about a protest outside of the Myanmar Embassy tomorrow afternoon at 4pm. I might head over and put up some pictures and videos on the Old Blog tomorrow night.

    Michael Goldfarb, Gateway Pundit, Michelle Malkin and Andrew Sullivan have all the links that matter. TimesOnline has links to Burmese Blogs.

  • How can we not act unilaterally?

    All I’ve heard the last six years is how “Bush The Cowboy” acted unilaterally against Afghanistan and Iraq and al Qaeda, in general. How could we not use the goodwill al Qaeda generated for us in taking potshots at us to gather a consensus worldwide to fight terrorism and evil…blah-blah-blah-blah! Well, let me ask these short-sighted imbeciles; what choice do we have besides acting unilaterally.

    Yesterday, President Bush told the UN they should do something about Myanmar or Burma or whatever it is today – a brutally repressive regime that the UN ignores (Bloodthirsty Liberal has a whole slew of posts on the situation there). There’s the Rawanda genocide, the Darfur genocide, Iranian and Syrian nuclear programs. Every single day I read from Little Green Footballs that “The Religion of Peace Strikes Again in Thailand“. Russia and China are ganging up, Venezuela’s Chavez is buying arms, suppressing opposition and forming military alliances at the cost of his own people’s living conditions.

    Anyone who reads Kamangir for a minute knows that Iran is a repressive government which squeezes the life out of it’s citizens daily.

    What has the community of nations done to ease suffering in North Korea? Besides pay-off the government to continue repressing their people.

    And who is stepping up? Where are all of the do-gooders who are sickened by these regimes and the absolute injustice? How can the US NOT be cowboys when the rest of the world is populated by pussies and pretentious pseudo-intellectuals who are willing to bide their time with useless sanctions and empty discussions while hundreds of thousands – no, millions – suffer daily.

    They suffer because they’re women, or because they’re the wrong color or the wrong religion, or because they want the right to speak freely, or because they’re gay – all of the reasons that these neo-liberals claim to be “their” issues, “their” reason to exist. And yet, they expect the Conservatives to do something about it, because they can’t summon the gumption to make the necessary decisions – it’s easier to let the suffering continue than to hitch-up their collective trousers and get off their dead collective ass.

    Who’s being the humanitarian here?