Armed Forces Day
Occasionally, a copy of the New Light of Myanmar — the Burmese government’s official mouthpiece — winds up in our office and gets passed around for laughs. The paper on March 25, commemorating Armed Forces Day, which marks the start of the Burmese army’s resistance to the Japanese occupation in 1945, was particularly amusing. In...
A city in the Burmese junta’s image
BURMA’S new capital city lies about 10 hours’ drive – or a short, white-knuckled flight on an ageing Fokker-27 – from Rangoon, the country’s largest city and former capital.
REVIEW: ‘The Golden Triangle’, by Ko-Lin Chin
BURMA’S United Wa State Army is seen by many Western law enforcement agencies as one of the most powerful drug-trafficking organizations in the world. Since signing a cease-fire agreement with the Burmese government in 1989, the 20,000-strong UWSA has been granted control of Wa Special State—an isolated and mountainous region of Shan State in Burma’s...