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August 4 - August 4, 2020
It is prone to devastating natural disasters (over 120,000 people died in a single day due to a cyclone in 2008) and is predicted to be one of the five nations most negatively impacted by climate change.
George Orwell, who was a policeman in Burma in the mid-1920s, put it more simply: “If we are honest, it is true that the British are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamelessly.”
themselves were now poorer, as wages were not keeping up with the cost of living and the weight of colonial taxation was ever harder to bear.
the most sacred site in Burmese Buddhism, dominating the skyline, described by Kipling as a “beautiful winking wonder” and by Somerset Maugham as a “sudden hope in the dark night.”
In 1937, the British separated Burma from India, in response to a decades-old Burmese demand. This was India’s first and largely forgotten partition. And whereas the second partition, in 1947, created the nation of Pakistan on the basis of religious identity, this first partition created Burma within its modern borders on a basis of racial identity.
More than 30 percent of children under five were malnourished. Burma was the only country in the world where the main cause of infant death was beriberi, a vitamin B deficiency.
HIV/AIDS was rampant. By 2003, Burma had the third highest rate of infection in all of Asia, after Thailand and Cambodia.
Coming on top of existing Clinton-era sanctions, the new act virtually cut Burma off from the global economy.
The new American law charged the ruling junta with failing to transfer power to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy and for “egregious human rights violations” against its own people.
a Dutch physician who had worked in Burma since 1994 and headed the medical charity Doctors Without Borders. “People are going from three meals to two meals to one meal. One meal a day just isn’t enough.”
On August 15, without warning, the government hiked fuel prices by 500 percent, leading to an immediate spike in bus fares. Buses were the only transportation available to most workers to get to work.
They also refused to perform rituals for government officials, army officers, and their families, an exceptionally serious step in a fervently religious society. By September 22, thousands of shaven-headed monks, a sea of reddish hues, walked along Rangoon’s glistening, rain-swept avenues, chanting the Metta Sutta, an ancient discourse on compassion, which includes the lines: sabbe satta bhavantu skitatta [May all beings enjoy happiness and comfort] sukino va khemino hontu [May they feel safe and secure]
Within a week, the crackdown began, with the army opening fire on protesters, raiding monasteries, defrocking and arresting monks. Dozens of people are believed to have died, but as with almost every event like this in Burma’s recent history, there are no confirmed figures.
The protests were rooted in the economic desperation of the poor, but the West chose to see these events as a pro-democracy uprising that was crushed. The protests were retroactively termed the Saffron Revolution, to draw parallels with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the other “color revolutions” in the former Soviet bloc. The economic dimensions of what was happening in Burma were almost entirely lost.
argued that sanctions and aid restrictions were simply not working and were only hurting the poorest.
“Look, if there are no seeds in two weeks you guys can just forget it, the assessments, everything, it’s as simple as that.” The US Agency for International Development (USAID) stepped in to help, but in a low-key way, without any US flags; working through Proximity, they quickly got seeds to 55,000 homes in 1,200 villages. It was an important success. A month later, Debbie Aung Din was invited to meet George Bush.
By 2009, Burma was an impoverished country, with a sinister economic system and a mosaic of generals, warlords, and ethnic rebels, with millions more now traumatized by a natural disaster of unimaginable proportions.
