Word: junta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years, the U.S. response to the junta's ironfisted rule has been an arsenal of economic sanctions. But Webb's confab with junta head General Than Shwe, though not an official visit, may signal a shift in U.S. policy. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that U.S. sanctions have done nothing to moderate the junta's behavior, in part because nations like China and India have poured investment into Burma. After his mission, Webb told reporters, "Isolation is only preventing [Burma] from developing economically and politically...
...democracy advocate, who has been locked up for 14 of the past 20 years, was punished in a bizarre case in which an American swam uninvited to her lakeside villa. The verdict virtually guarantees that Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy overwhelmingly won the 1990 elections that the junta ignored, will have to sit out the nationwide polls that the regime has promised for next year...
Some exiled Burmese dissidents have criticized Webb for lending legitimacy to the generals. But Webb did, at least, extract one concession from the junta. When the Senator's plane left Burma on Aug. 16, it carried an extra occupant: John Yettaw, the American sentenced to seven years' imprisonment with hard labor for his midnight swim to Suu Kyi's home. His saga--that of a middle-aged Mormon from Missouri who used homemade flippers to visit the world's most famous political prisoner--is stranger than any fiction, even that of Senator Jim Webb...
...refugee crisis comes as the Burmese military regime is tightening its grip on the country ahead of the nationwide election it has announced for next year. Since taking power in 1962, the exclusively ethnic Burman, or Burmese, junta has largely tamed an unruly patchwork of 100-plus ethnic groups, in part by signing cease-fire accords and granting certain minorities a modicum of regional autonomy. But with the upcoming election, ethnic groups with standing armies - such as the Kokang, the Kachin, the Karen and the Wa - have been given until October by the junta to refashion themselves as a centrally...
...return for participating in an election that few believe will be free or fair. Burma's last electoral exercise, in 1990, ended with the non-ethnic National League for Democracy winning the most seats in parliament, with ethnic-based political parties coming in second and third and the junta-backed party finishing fourth. However, the junta ignored the results and kept its grip on power. "Some analyses say that even a rigged election is O.K., if it leads to democracy," says Gun Maw, a high-ranking officer in the Kachin Independence Army, one of the armed ethnic groups operating...