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The Global Mail is the new kid on the Australian media block. Funded by Internet entrepeneur Graeme Wood it aims to showcase the best in current affairs reporting. It has only been going a very short time but is already making an impact, and getting chins wagging.
This will only be helped by the fact that the Mail‘s Asia correspondent, Aubrey Belford, has recently returned from the eastern Kachin State where he lived among the Kachin Independence Army. For anyone hoping to understand that part of the world, and its ongoing conflict, his piece is essential reading.
You can start with this extract:
Amid the trenches, the landmines and the tense hum of latent violence at Ning Moi Bum, it’s hard to feel optimistic about Myanmar’s political future. On this hill within sight of China, ethnic Kachin rebels are taking part in a dirty, bloody war against Myanmar’s military, largely out of sight of the rest of the world. Sitting in foxholes by a jungle road, soldiers from the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA – a guerilla army of as many as 20,000 men – warily eye a government camp on a nearby rise as men and teenage boys haul bamboo and dig fortifications. Far from Yangon and Myanmar’s Potemkin capital at Naypyidaw, there is no glint of democratic awakening here, no talk of reform, and no adulation of the opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi.
The full piece is available here in a funky, tablet-friendly format. Previous New Mandala coverage of the Kachin war (2011 – present) is available here.
Great article, and it definitely shows the disconnect between the minority areas and the majority areas. One wonders how long that disconnect can continue without it affecting the majority areas.
Somewhat off topic, what birds are those on the Manau tusks? They aren’t hornbills, are they?
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“Great article, and it definitely shows the disconnect between the minority areas and the majority areas. One wonders how long that disconnect can continue without it affecting the majority areas.”
The conflicts b/t various ethnic groups and Bamar could have been long settled if:
As example:
A) Grand Daddy of all conflicts, Karen/Myanmar.
2┬║ to British Colonial Policy, neglected by the West, under Ne Win, and used to vilify SPDC now again being neglected.
B) Kachin/Myamar, 2┬║ to useless careless policy of Sanctions and overt threat of regime change that has now evolved to present well armed KIA and the following reality on the ground
http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/myanmars-bloody-war-in-the-shadows/50/
1) Where is the west and UN effort now, prioritizing the fate of minorities as everywhere else by solving the real causes of conflicts, that were so loudly touted through HRI and such during SPDC era?
2)Has the Useless careless policy that has no historical base within Myanmar or anywhere else in the world being reversed?
Not by the continuing support of DASSK, whom herself is being deluded.
This 3rd generation problems should never have been if not for the west policy.
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