The first Chin Burmese student arrived at Wilma Sime Roundy Elementary School three years ago, a smiling preschooler whose father often checked on his progress. (more…)

When the European Union recently lifted economic sanctions on Myanmar, it closed a decades-long chapter designed to encourage democratic reform in the country.
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Kyisintaung Mountain, Myanmar — When the quarry guards show up, you run like hell.
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As elegant cemetery in strife-torn southeast Myanmar has long stood as a lonely testament to the fate of thousands of prisoners of war who died building Japan’s “Death Railway.”
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An important new report from Human Rights Watch on the violence last year in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state has particular resonance for this blog. Two days last October in Mrauk-u in Rakhine marked for me a low point in a long career in journalism. After some time reporting in Sittwe on the aftermath of the terrible violence in June between the Buddhist, ethnic-Rakhine majority and the Muslim Rohingya minority, we had taken the five-hour boat trip upriver to the ancient capital of what used to be known as Arakan. (more…)

It is New Year’s Day in Burma. For the annual thingyan festival the streets have been wild with water spraying and drenched revellers. Just weeks ago an anti-Muslim killing spree was ravaging the streets of Meikhtila, and had begun to spread around the country. Many are breathing a sigh of relief that the increasingly boozy annual street festivities did not result in a resurgence of violent behaviour. But U Win Tin, 84-year-old co-founder of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party back in 1988 reflects on the recent violence and on the country’s future prospects with foreboding.
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A winding, bumpy route through the misty mountains of eastern Myanmar is being paved into a smooth two-lane highway, the type of road commonly found in other scenic stretches from the Alps to the Rockies.
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On a recent evening at a popular beer hall in Rangoon, two dozen women wearing skimpy dresses and hair extensions swayed mechanically on a stage and took turns mumbling lines of high-energy pop songs into the microphone. The crowd — mostly Burmese men, but also a few groups of foreign tourists — drank mugs of Tiger beer and took videos with their phones. Every once in a while, a girl would receive a feather boa — a tip from an admirer in the audience, costing about $12. The show concluded with a performer bouncing a flaming ball on her foot while jumping through a flaming hula hoop — and the doors were closed by 10 p.m.
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After decades in the shadow of the military, Myanmar’s ragtag police force has found itself thrust onto the security frontline — and under fire for failing to stop a wave of religious unrest.
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With the gradual arrival of the hot season to Lower Burma, Rangoon has become a ghost town during the day. The city comes alive in the evening, when residents re-occupy public spaces, drinking tea at roadside stalls, and shopping at informal markets. In the city’s Muslim quarters, however, people have been staying out much later than usual lately – all night, in fact – to stave off potential attacks from Buddhist extremists bent on upsetting Burma’s fragile religious balance.
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Burma’s democratic reform has produced both winners and losers. The country’s transition to democracy has revitalized the government, opposition groups and civil society, and it has brought the people unprecedented development opportunities. On the other hand, some former military leaders and cronies have lost their previous political status and economic privileges.
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And the phrase seems a fitting way to describe how a wealthy, global elite manages to bypass the often harsh inequalities that exist at many of the most expensive, members-only golf clubs around the world. (more…)

It was a blisteringly hot day in Pyay, a midsized Burmese city that was the commercial center of the region and a tourist gateway for Burma’s undeveloped beaches.  I was walking up the town’s main drag, a two laned thoroughfare whose traffic signals were respected, and whose sidewalks were lined with street cart vendors and the city’s most prominent businesses. (more…)

Sectarian violence was not supposed to be part of Myanmar’s bright new direction

When Myanmar’s newly installed president and former soldier, Thein Sein, kick-started the country’s political transition two years ago, he hoped to usher in a clean and steady advance towards some sort of orderly democracy. Now, however, things are starting to turn out rather differently. (more…)

The day San Zaw Htwe was arrested he tried to chew through the leg of the wooden chair he was shackled to. He could hear a river outside. He figured he could swim away and escape the little room and the big men and the terrible certainty of years in prison. (more…)

Last month while in Burma I spent a few days in the town of Meikhtila, in the center of the country between Naypyidaw and Mandalay. The bus from Taungoo was packed with people and chickens and bales of bamboo, and stopped every couple minutes to pick up more passengers. The distance was 150 miles but the trip took eight hours. I had called the day before to reserve a room at the main hotel but was told it was fully booked. I didn’t want to return to Rangoon or go on to Mandalay, so I went to Meikhtila anyway. Sure enough, plenty of rooms were available.
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(Unofficial translation)

According to the report of People’s Daily, U Thein Sein government will have been in power for two years by March 30 and Myanmar’s opening up and reform have entered a sensitive stage. The rejuvenation and rise of the country’s largest opposition party, National League for Democracy (NLD), has become a major force in the future domestic politics. The sudden activeness of multiple political forces and interests groups, together with the “immigration” of media organizations established by Burmese outside the country, have added many complicated variables to the Myanmar politics.
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Ma Kyi, a 30-year old widow, wonders whether she will ever be able to return home. She is among 3,600 newly displaced people staying at Basic Education High School No. 1, in the central Myanmar town of Meiktila, following deadly sectarian violence between Buddhists and Muslims residents last week. (more…)

For the last 50 years, Myanmar’s journalists have fled to the Thai and Indian borders, where they provided some of the only insights available to anyone — Burmese inside the country and outside observers alike — into the brutal actions of their government. Some were driven outward in patterns flowing from their ethnic belongings: the Kachin, Shan, and Karen went east and southeast into Thailand. Supporters of the pro-democracy movement fled to Thailand or Europe, where they sent radio and TV signals and print media back home to Burma.
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Each year on February 12, Union Day is meant to celebrate cross-racial unity among Burma’s more than 100 minority groups, which comprise nearly one-third of the population. The day – marked by pageantry, traditional outfits, speeches and music – commemorates the 1947 Panglong agreement that joined the Burmese majority and three minority groups to unify the country in its final push to cast off British rule. That sense of unity proved fleeting, however, and reconciliation between the many ethnic groups and the ethnic Burman majority remains out of reach more than six decades later. (more…)