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June 24th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Most notably, Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader, is on triumphant
17-day European tour. On her first trip back to Britain for 24 years, she
has made a historic address to both Houses of Parliament, received an
honorary doctorate at Oxford and caught up with family and friends whom she
has not seen for more than two decades.
The Lady – as she is respectfully and affectionately known in her homeland –
earlier visited Oslo, where she collected in person the Nobel peace prize
awarded 21 years earlier, and Dublin for a concert in her honour with Bono
and Bob Geldof. She began the trip in Switzerland and will finish it in
France.
Miss Suu Kyi, now 67, was ensconced in the genteel academic world of Oxford
with her British husband Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar, and their two sons
when she returned to Burma in 1988 to care for her dying mother. A popular
uprising was sweeping the country, and Miss Suu Kyi found herself caught up
in it.
As the daughter of assassinated Burmese independence hero Aung San, she
quickly emerged as the figurehead of the protests. She never left again,
spending the majority of the intervening period under house arrest, and only
saw her husband five more times before he died of cancer in 1999.
As Miss Suu Kyi prepared for her trip, I returned to Burma this month for my
first visit since 1995. Then, Miss Suu Kyi had just been released from house
arrest for the first time by the military junta that ruled the country with
an iron-grip.
But even when she was freed for a third time in late 2010, her most ardent of
supporters could have not imagined the momentous milestones that have come
with such surprising alacrity since then.
The very fact that a Burmese girl band even exists is one sign of that. But a
more striking indicator of the change is that my drivers were former
political prisoners who are only freed from jail in January.
The two were students jailed for 10 and 12 years in 2007 for handing out
leaflets during the brutally-suppressed protests known as the Saffron
Revolution, named after the robes of the monks who led the movement.
They had served more than four years of their sentences, including 12 months
in Rangoon’s notorious Insein jail, when they learned they were to be part
of the mass release of political prisoners earlier this year. Now they are
running a taxi business, carrying visitors around the country.
We met in Rangoon, a city where a dilapidated charm pervades and imposing
British colonial-era buildings are crumbling in the tropical heat alongside
garish new hotel and office blocks.
The signs and symbolism of change are difficult to avoid. For a start, the
down-at-heel headquarters of the National League for Democracy are now as
much a feature on the tour circuit as the golden splendour of the Shwedagon
Pagoda where Miss Suu Kyi cut her teeth as a political novice addressing a
crowd of hundreds of thousands.
Her party’s office was long shunned as drivers took circuitous routes to avoid
even passing the façade, while the defiant activists who stepped inside were
photographed by police stationed on the street.
Now NLD staff sell T-shirts, coffee cups, baseball caps and key fobs bearing
Miss Suu Kyi’s image from stands to tourists, while party members come and
go unimpeded and unnoted. Similar memorabilia is also piled high on vendors’
tables outside the main central market named after her father.
It is a far cry from my visit 17 years ago when stern-faced officers from
military intelligence monitored the movements of rare Western visitors from
behind their sunglasses and even whispering her name could seem like an act
of conspiracy.
On this trip, I found myself continually making double-takes at the sight of
her features beaming broadly down from a calendar in a local café serving
the speciality of tea-leaf salad; or on the front pages of newspapers and
magazines on the stands lining Rangoon’s bustling Merchant Street.
As much of a surprise was to witness the explosion of independent new titles
jostling for space with loyal pro-state publications such as The New Light
of Myanmar.
Among the notable arrivals on the media scene is MZine+, an
English-language business magazine aimed at the ranks of foreign
entrepreneurs hoping to capitalise on the suspension of economic sanctions
by the West. Indeed, Coca-Cola has just announced plans to set up operations
for the first time since 1960 in one of just three countries where it does
not currently do business (the other two are North Korea and Cuba).
MZine+ is edited by Soe Myint, a veteran Burmese opposition journalist
who had been based in India since hijacking a Thai Airways flight in protest
at the military dictatorship. Mr Myint is one of most prominent exiles to
return to Burma this year since the government’s change of direction.
The launch party at a cavernous new Singaporean-built hotel offered a graphic
illustration of the changing face of Burmese society.
Among the guests of honour at one table were senior figures from the Ministry
of Information, long responsible for implementing one of the most draconian
censorship regimes in the world. At another was Min Ko Naing, a former
student leader who spent nearly 20 years in prison, enduring brutal
interrogation and torture before he was released in January.
For senior former junta officials and the country’s second most influential
opposition figure to be guests at a reception celebrating the debut of a
magazine run by a long-time exile was another landmark in the Burmese Spring.
“I am very happy to be home – and home with dignity,” says Soe
Myint. “We are witnessing historic changes in this country, and it’s an
honour to be part of them.
“It is remarkable to see Aung San Suu Kyi travelling to Oslo to accept
her Nobel Prize and then re-visiting her old home in Oxford,” he
continued. “After all the long years of struggle, there were times when
it seemed unimaginable that this would happen. It is a historic moment.”
And Burma is on the verge of another once-unthinkable revolution in its media
landscape. At the end of this month, the head of the Orwellian-sounding
Press Scrutiny and Registration Department will be wound up after 40 years
of operation.
“Press censorship is non-existent in most other countries as well as
among our neighbours,” says Tint Swe, who as director was the chief
wielder of the censor’s pen. “As it is not in harmony with democratic
practices, press censorship should be abolished.”
But for all the dramatic changes, Miss Suu Kyi – who was elected an MP in a
by-election in April for a parliament that is dominated by the pro-military
ruling party – has cautioned against “reckless optimism”.
In a stark reminder of the country’s fragility, last week soldiers patrolled
towns in western Burma to enforce a state of emergency after several days of
Buddhist-Muslim violence left scores dead, thousands displaced and nearly
2,000 homes burned down.
The worst communal violence since reformist government took office last year
comes as the army also pursues a ruthless crackdown on the ethnic people of
the northern Kachin state.
Hundreds of political prisoners remain in jail, and the country is still
governed under a constitution drawn up by the old regime that grants the
military an effective veto of 25 per cent of seats in parliament. On our
drive through the country, we had just left behind the beguiling temples
near Moulmein, where George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling both once lived, when
we saw prison labourers toiling in a quarry in suffocating mid-day heat.
Economic reform lags far behind the political. The country lacks property
rights, an even half-way modern banking structure, and most basic tenets of
the rule of law. The infrastructure is abysmal and the whirr of generators
and darkness that covers even cities at night testify to chronic electricity
shortages.
And for all the reformist zeal of President Thein Sein, a moderate former
general appointed head of state last year, much of the bureaucracy lacks the
know-how or indeed enthusiasm to implement the changes he is ordering, while
old guard hardliners wait in the wings.
Htike Htike Aung and her friends in Me N Ma Girls may reflect the country’s
cultural thaw. But for the average Burmese – men in their wraparound
longyis; women daubed in the yellowish bark paste make-up of thanaka –
little has changed in material terms in the desperately poor economy.
Even they however are a celebrating the symbolism of The Lady’s lap of honour
through Europe. “Look, it’s Aung San Suu Kyi,” says one passer-by,
pointing happily at a magazine showing her on the front cover – six simple
words that underline the major changes under way in the former pariah state.
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