Remember Burma? Or Myanmar? You know, the country that some people wanted us to invade after that big storm, Cyclone Nargis, in May 2008 because the junta wasn’t admitting international aid the way they thought it should be done? And China Matters attracted vituperative comments and cancelled subscriptions because I stated that: the Burmese freedom... Read More

One doesn’t have to be a paranoid Tatmadaw (Burmese army) jefe to believe that the United States, France, and the UK and the international NGOs would be perfectly happy to see the Myanmar government’s prestige and authority swept away as collateral damage as foreign personnel, money, and attitudes flood into the Irrawaddy delta after Cyclone... Read More

To understand what’s going on now, and what the Myanmar government is doing, one needs only to understand three numbers: 5% 15% 30 The five percent of Myanmar’s population affected by cyclone Nargis accounts for roughly 15% of the rice produced in the country. For that 15% to get harvested, all the seed has to... Read More

There has been a lot of “Myanmar is refusing aid” reporting which, I think, has been a distraction that has obscured the heroic efforts and contributions on the ground from local disaster relief personnel and in-country NGOs. Now that Myanmar has agreed to permit entry to “all aid workers”, hopefully the full story of disaster... Read More

In the matter of Myanmar, you can have humanitarian aid or you can have politics...but you can’t have both. I’ve taken a certain amount of heat for questioning the blanket condemnation of the Myanmar regime’s disaster relief measures in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. Some of the dissatisfaction has to do with my unwillingness to... Read More