Category: Features

News Features on Burma & Burmese issues

D Aung Khin – Refugees Made in Burma

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Refugees Made in Burma
D Aung Khin
February 6, 2009
 
“All the villagers are deserting their villages!!!” According to the news headline, the readers might be puzzled, “It can’t be true. How can it be?”
 
Yes, it was true. There were several numbers of villages being deserted and increasing.
 
While city dwellers from Rangoon or Mandalay were busy attending certificate courses, catching buses and train, consulting with the astrologers and psychics for their better future, the villagers from remote areas were also struggling and hard-working on their own.

Yawning Bread – Singapore shows Burmese dissidents the door

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Led by Singapore’s George Yeo, Asean foreign ministers last September “expressed their revulsion to Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win over reports that the demonstrations in Myanmar [were] being suppressed by violent force”, and called on the military junta there to “work towards a peaceful transition to democracy.”

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had spoken “to his ASEAN counterparts… and [would] be writing to Senior General Than Shwe,” the joint Asean statement said [1]. During that period, Singapore was the rotating chair of Asean, and people thought this unusually strong statement was a hopeful sign of where Singapore stood. But was this government, always so boastful of its “integrity”, being sincere?

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