tooth soup

Before we start

The paint fumes from the room next door being painted are giving me headaches and a raw throat.

Burma

I watched a program on SBS on the state of the Burmese people last night. Burma is the last true military dictatorship left on the planet. What does that mean? Well, it means that there’s one guy at the top who can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants to, because he’s got the guns to back it up. And the people have to comply, or be killed. Simple as that. The current guy in charge is Senior General Than Shwe, ‘Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council’, and ‘Commander in Chief of the Defense Services’. But he’s just the latest in a line of leaders that have oppressed the people living there.

In 1988, there were initially protests over the head of state at the time, Ne Win, cancelling the validity of most of the country’s currency notes. Why? He was an incredibly superstitious man, and he wanted only notes that were divisible by 9, which he considered a lucky number. This sparked a protest whereby an engineering student (Phone Maw) was killed outside his university. This in turn produced the biggest protest of hundreds of thousands of people in the a rally held on the 8th of August, ’88. What were they asking for? Democracy. The ability to influence their country’s development. What did they get? Shot. Well, some of them. On September 18th, the Burmese army shot and killed an estimate of over 3,000 people.

But it wasn’t all bad. The protests made it possible for the people to hold a vote in 1990 on which government they wanted. In fact, the ‘National League for Democracy’ led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won these elections in a 60/40 landslide, and the vast majority of the seats. So why isn’t she in power? They were annulled by the then-leader, Saw Maung. In fact, he’s also placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest on and off for years at a time since then.

The latest protests are over the rise of price in fuel. You and I may bitch about the price of fuel here, but at least our government doesn’t arbitrarily decide to double the cost of fuel (petrol and diesel, 4WD owners aren’t safe either) and quintuple the price of compressed gas. And incresaing the price of fuel increases everything else. Publict transport isn’t so cheap, so they guy that delivers rice from the fields has to pay extra to get into the markets, forcing him to charge more to make it worth his while. So the person looking to buy some rice (and this is rice we’re talking about, not steak, jut plain rice) can only afford one cup for his family, rather than the two or three he would need. So, in the biggest protest in years, 400 or so people marched on the 18th of August this year to protest against the economic mismanagement of the government. On the 5th of September, the government army injured three monks who were participating in protests. The next day, the monks took some government officials hostage and demanded an apology. Their deadline, the 17th of September, passed, and so they up and left their posts (including those stationed to help members of the military and their families) to join the protests. Since then, tens of thousands of protesters have joined the rank.

The government has reacted, imposing dusk-dawn curfews, and videos taken and posted on the internet show the police beating people and using tear gas to disperse protesters. On the 27th September the violence scalated and it was reported that 9 people had been killed.

So what are we doing about it? Bugger all, it seems. The US and the EU haven’t got a lot of clout with the Burmese government, but they are both tightening their sanctions on the Burmese government. China, probably the most influencial government with Burma, along with Russia, and India, have called for the government to stop the violence. A UN peace envoy has recently returned from Burma and is expected to discuss his findings with the UN.

And everyone knows how much that’s going to do.

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