Word: junta
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...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...
...military and elements of Peng's Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, as the Kokang militia is known. Throughout August, the Burmese army made incursions into the Kokang enclave, a region it had largely kept out of since the 1989 cease-fire was signed. The initial reason given by the junta for its forays into Kokang territory was that a weapons factory there was being used to churn out illegal narcotics. Several of the ethnic militias in that part of northeastern Burma have financed themselves through the drug trade...
...Burmese state-controlled media finally acknowledged the bloodshed in Shan state, reporting that 36 junta forces had been killed in the fighting. Estimates for Kokang casualties vary widely. But even the Kokang admit that their outnumbered forces have been no match for the invading Burmese army, which now appears to be occupying large parts of Kokang turf...
...from the colonial British, Kokang territory was under the control of Burmese communists, who for decades waged an insurgency against the central government and were among the military regime's most persistent foes. "The [Burmese army] hates many ethnic minorities very much," says Aung Kyaw Zaw, a former anti-junta rebel who now lives in exile in Yunnan province. "But they especially hate the Kokang because they are ethnically Chinese and they used to be communist...