New Mandala

Should war resume in parts of Burma’s borderlands, the country will simply return to its pre-1989 situation, and the challenges of national reconciliation and local sustainable development will begin again.
- Extracted from David Scott Mathieson, “Peace in name only”, The Irrawaddy, October 2009.

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As China continues to have problems with its own internal ethnic tensions, some of those it faces in Burma are richly ironic, but the entire situation is becoming more complex and fraught by the day.
- Michael Sainsbury, “For China, Burma is thorny territory”, The Australian, 8 September 2009.  This old New Mandala picture provides some [...]

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The northern three Wa divisions are currently on standby and say they expect an attack from the government army in the coming days…
- Wai Moe, “Clouds of war move over Shan State”, The Irrawaddy, 2 September 2009.
Of all of the hundreds of news reports about the recent battles in the Shan State this is one [...]

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But investigations by the media and concerned agencies in the next few weeks will find whether the ideal goal of forming a grand alliance against the hated military regime is too late or can still be a dream come true.
- Extracted from “The fall of Kokang raises questions”, Shan Herald Agency for News, 31 August [...]

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In the past week Burma’s State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) decided to stop pulling its punches with what we have come to know as the “ceasefire groups”.
In the northern Shan State there has been fighting on a scale that hasn’t been seen for decades.  According to Xinhua, tens of thousands refugees from the Kokang [...]

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Wei Yu Hua sits on the floor of his bamboo hut in the hilly Chiang Rai province of northern Thailand. The hut looks back over the steep fields he worked in after fleeing from nearby Myanmar, the culmination of a journey that began at the age of 13. At a time when awareness of the [...]

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Over at East Asia Forum I have a piece marking Aung San Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday and reflecting on some of the wider political context of June 2009.  It is available here.  I also noticed that The Irrawaddy has a selection of interesting Aung San Suu Kyi portraits to mark the occasion.
I’m sure I join [...]

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The Shan Herald Agency for News has a report on the International Conference on Shan Studies that will be held in Bangkok in October 2009.  More details about the conference are available here.

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I am delighted to announce the publication of Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Southeast Asia. It has been published by National University of Singapore Press,  NIAS Press, and University of Hawaii Press. The book is the result of research collaboration that has been going here at the Australian National University over the past six or so years. It features [...]

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Getting news out of Burma’s more remote corners — such as the Kachin Independence Army/Organisation headquarters at Laiza — can be a difficult job at the best of times.  When there is inherent, and perhaps even deliberate, ambiguity thrown into the mix it is almost impossible.
Nonetheless I was startled to see the contrasting headlines for [...]

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