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Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. A birthday party for a dog while Thailand floods?

But will Thongdaeng get the same great treatment as FuFu the poodle?

Anyone got any idea what is “Suwannachart Company” ??

Re the article . . . Suu Kyi is half-Karen. Her mother Daw Khin Kyi was a Catholic from the Rangoon delta town of Myaungmya.

The elder sister of Gen Aung San’s widow, Daw Khin Gyi, was married to Thakin Than Tun, leader of the Burma Communist Party. (Both women carried Burman names).

The Karen people are widely dispersed across the land: many have settled in the plains and can be found ploughing rice fields in the Rangoon delta alongside Burman farmers.

Insein, on the outskirts of Rangoon, was the biggest Karen town outside their state. Majority of the nurses in Rangoon hospitals are Karen women, and not many are known to join the guerillas in the jungles.

It was a Karen general, Smith-Dun, who led Burma’s first rag-tag army against the well-trained deserter-turned-insurgent Karen soldiers from the gates of Rangoon, three months after independence from Britain in 1948. Loyal Kachin and Chin troops in the national army played a major role in saving the union.

An officer and a gentleman, Smith-Dun resigned over the rebellion and was succeeded by General Ne Win.

A loyal soldier of the (then democratic) Union of Burma, Gen Smith-Dun died in 1979. He was 73.

Meanwhile, counter-insurgency troops under Ne Win pushed back the rebels from the gates of Rangoon and the delta region to far-flung mountainous regions bordering Thailand.

Before retreating, the rebels mainly engaged in bombing passenger trains and bridges. The first airline hijack in Burma was carried out by Karen fighters.

To date more than 150,000 people have died in the fratricidal 63-year civil war — mainly civilians.

Over the years, peace talks with successive Burmese governments, both civilian and military, have failed as Karen rebel demands were unrealistic. Land-locked, the insurgents want Moulmein, a seaport in Lower (southern) Burma that is the capital of the Mon people, as part of the Karen state. Another recipe for carnage, no doubt.

The plains have always been a melting pot of the nation. Unlike some chauvinistic leaders, ordinary Burmans never hesitate to refer to other parts of the *nation of nations* as Kayin Pyi (Karen country) or Shan Pyi (Shan country) for that matter.

Burma is truly a land blessed by nature, but cursed by man. Enough for the enlightened Burmese to list the Ruler as one of the five enemies of the people since ancient times.

With the country on the road to democracy again, it’s time the guns fell silent . . .

I think Dr. Chou Norindr’s studies of Laos are quite significant as is the thesis on Lao politics done by Dr. Mongkhol Don Sasorith. Dr. Chou became a critic of the LPDR but his writings on pre-1975 Laos are useful for all scholars. Dr. Mongkhol’s thesis is hard to find. However, it provides a rare breakdown of the key factions dabbling in Lao politics. Recently a new set of texts on Lao-Viet relations has been put into print. It is not available to the public at this time but having gained access to a set I can say it has some new details which were previously excluded from earlier studies. The most striking to me is an actual listing of the number of Viet Minh volunteers fighting in Laos in the early 1950s. At this time the Neo Lao Issara (early name for the Pathet Lao) amounted for less than 15% of the revolutionary forces.

Rahmat #34

Just as you insist on calling the Arakanese/Rakhine Maghs, meaning bandit in Bengali/Rohingya, a term your colonial masters might have used (Arakanese is the only term I have come across in British Burma usage, never Magh, definitely no such thing as Rohingya), the Burmese/Rakhine will continue to call you Bengali which is the same as Bangladeshi in the UK, British born/naturalised British subject or no. And you know kala doesn’t mean bandit.

Shah Arkani #49

Putting words in people’s mouth seems to be your specialty. Nobody said Indo-Aryans cannot be Buddhists, or that all Mongoloids are Buddhists, or that the Bengali Borua and Chakma are Arakanese/Burmese, or that Hindus/Muslims in the Arakan cannot be Arakanese/Burmese nationals…phew!

Did Muhhamad say he converted or was going to convert? If Buddhism is alien religion what exactly are you in Burma? Unbelievable!

The writer of this article has such a suspicious mind that he has kept a dog’s birthday in his memory.

Michael John,

Please do not tempt fate over the Chinese question. It’s another tinder box likely to blow any time. Granted it’s easier for the Chinese to be integrated/assimilated. But remember 1967. The last serious anti-Indian riots was before WW2 and confined to Rangoon.

Kindness begets kindness and contempt begets contempt. How do you like being regarded with religious contempt by a certain group of immigrants and their descendants or converts for that matter of whatever creed in your own land? You insult Burmese hospitality and underestimate Burmese nationalism at your peril.

Whilst citizenship and nationality are synonymous, ethnicity can be Indian, Bengali or mixed with Rakhine or Burmese, not Rohingya which some Bengali once explained simply means homeless, applied to both those Rakhine in Bangladesh and the Bengalis in northern Arakan.

Makes one wonder why anonymous when people inside Burma are already dipping a toe in the water. Talk about water, if the Irrawaddy is a Kachin river then the Myitnge and the Salween must be Chinese rivers. It seems Thein Sein reckons it’s not his job to talk to the ethnic groups but his minions the state prime ministers’.

I do agree the real reasons behind the surprise decision on the dam have yet to emerge. My money is on managing a desperate split in their own ranks over the river that also handed them an opportunity to make precious political capital out of.

Now it’s ASSK’s turn to do the same. She has little choice but to go with the flow at this juncture. Will she exploit fully this precious window of opportunity (which may prove to be short lived) in strengthening her position and her organisation to raise the stakes, win over a significant faction of the govt and more importantly the Tatmadaw for the next phase of the struggle? Or will she lose faith in the masses, drop her guard and get ensnared into the generals’ game of top down ‘reforms’?

The door is certainly ajar. It will likely raise expectations to an unsustainable level for the generals when people start pushing, and push comes to shove. They say a reforming govt is at its most vulnerable. Where will they draw the line and say thus far and no farther? Or will it prove to be a very slippery slope for them?

Here is something to ponder from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard in relation to China that is also pertinent in the Burmese context:
“To accomplish such controlled democratization, the Chinese political elite will have to be led with extraordinary skill, guided by pragmatic common sense, and stay relatively united and willing to yield some of its monopoly on power (and personal privilege)–while the population at large will have to be both patient and un-demanding. That combination of felicitous circumstances may prove difficult to attain. Experience teaches that pressures for democratization from below, either from those who have felt themselves politically suppressed (intellectuals and students) or economically exploited (the new urban labor class and the rural poor), generally tend to outpace the willingness of rulers to yield (my emphasis). At some point, the politically and the socially disaffected in China are likely to join forces in demanding more democracy, freedom of expression, and respect for human rights. That did not happen in Tiananmen Square in 1989, but it might well happen the next time“.