Burma Past and Present: Same and Different
It has been 20 years since Myanmar’s intelligence agents detained the writer, who was a university student at the time. Yet far too little has really changed in Burma since then.
It has been 20 years since Myanmar’s intelligence agents detained the writer, who was a university student at the time. Yet far too little has really changed in Burma since then.
“I didn’t want to be a journalist, but of course I didn’t want to be a political prisoner either,” editor and author Kyaw Zwa Moe said. “But I just did what I believed I should do.” He talked to Reporting ASEAN’s Johanna Son at the July launch of his book ‘The Cell, Exile and New Burma’ in Bangkok.
From Burma’s prisons to the 1988 uprising and to the border towns and communities of displaced ethnic groups, ‘The Cell, Exile and the New Burma’ revisits many of the stops in this Southeast Asian country’s more recent history. What does Burma’s past tell us about the future?
ASEAN integration comes in many forms – in this case, it’s with puppets. Puppet artists and musicians from around the region met with their counterparts in Myanmar to learn from each other and exchange ideas. Kyaw Hsu Mon of ‘The Irrawaddy’ looks at the outcome of the workshop in this ‘Reporting ASEAN: 2015 and Beyond’ story.
Recent years have seen dramatic changes to Burma’s media environment, with the previous quasi-civilian government taking steps to unshackle a press corps long muzzled by successive military regimes dating back to 1962. In the wake of World Press Freedom Day, The Irrawaddy revisits a media history stretching back to the 1800s in this article.
Khin Ohmar, Coordinator of Burma Partnership, explains to Johanna Son of IPS Asia-Pacific her worries about foreign donors rushing into Myanmar in the wake of its reforms.
BANGKOK, Aug 27 (IPS Asia-Pacific) – Busy shedding off its reputation as a recluse after decades of self-imposed isolation, Myanmar is playing catch-up with it neighbours and may well become a middle-income nation by 2030, the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) says in a report released this month.
BURMA, Apr 3 (Irrawaddy Magazine) – The Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (Asean) agreed on Monday to back Burma’s call for the European
Union to lift sanctions on the country, a day after a by-election in
which Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won a
landslide victory.