New Mandala

David Mathieson - regular book reviewer over at The Irrawaddy, ANU doctoral candidate and newly appointed Burma consultant for Human Rights Watch – has read Myanmar’s Long Road to National Reconciliation edited by former Australian Ambassador to Burma, Trevor Wilson.  And he’s not impressed.  The book comes out of the papers presented at the 2004 Burma Update held [...]

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My memory isn’t perfect - and I must admit that the hazy days of September are lost in the glow of early Autumn Oxford - but I don’t recall Australia’s long-serving Foreign Minister making such stern noises after the Thai coup.  According to the report in today’s The Nation, Alexander Downer has “urged Fijians to passively resist the rule of [...]

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A military endorsed car rally through north-east India, across Burma…to Yangon has just been flagged off by the Indian Defence Minister.  The rally traverses a route that is maybe just starting to re-emerge as a viable conduit for everyday trade and transportation.  The rally is considered sufficiently interesting that media across India have picked up the story.  Hopefully, [...]

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[Oliver Tappe is a Phd student at the University of Muenster in Germany. He has contributed this piece for inclusion in New Mandala's Focus on Laos.]
During the work at my Phd thesis, dealing with questions of Lao national historiography and iconography, I wondered about recent tendencies of commemorative politics in the Lao PDR. Which [...]

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Some more nonsense today from the junta and The Nation’s rural-phobic columnists that seeks to deny independant political will in the Thai electorate. Pro-democracy rallies against the military regime are dismissed as a rent-a-mob (were Sondhi’s rallies ever described in these terms?) and pro-democracy commentators are branded as fundamentalists. This is contrasted with the “patriotic” [...]

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