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“In just about every village I’ve been to, of the Kale Pyaw Neya only the buildings are left. I didn’t see any kids still attending. I was told the reason is that people in the villages can’t pay the salaries of the staff for the Kale Pyaw Neya.”

The author also quotes a farmer from Methila Village in Taungkale Tract, Ngaputaw as commenting that:

“To give a monthly salary of about 25,000 to 30,000 Kyat (USD 25-30) for a youngster to take care of the children, each household in the village had to put in about 500 Kyat. Now that the village economy isn’t good, people can’t put in money so the Kale Pyaw Neya kindergarten had to be shut.”

The article continues that these and other kindergartens were constructed after Cyclone Nargis with funds from UNICEF as well as donations from local groups and businesses, and with help from parents. The project included not only the buildings but also provision of toys, books and food, but after completion, responsibilities fell entirely to the local authorities, women’s groups, health and education officers, and parents.

Are the Kale Pyaw Neya another example of an internationally-funded project without legs? Are they failing everywhere, or does this article give the wrong impression? Do any New Mandala readers working in the delta, or who have been to these areas recently and perhaps seen the kindergartens (there’s a photo of one in the original article) care to comment?

The protagonists in the ongoing political war may have their own reasons for destroying each other. But when they manage to kill people’s faith in the very foundation of a genuine democratic system, that is inexcusable.

- Extracted from Suthichai Yoon, “From delusion to loss of faith in ‘democracy‘”, The Nation, 17 September 2009.

Dr Tira Foran
Research Fellow, Unit for Social and Environmental Research (USER), Chiang Mai University

12.30-1.30pm Tuesday 18 August
Seminar Room B, (Arndt Room)
Coombs Building, The Australian National University

Dr Tira Foran is an editor of the recently published Contested Waterscapes in the Mekong Region: Hydropower, Livelihoods and Governance, which examines some of the most controversial hydropower projects in the Mekong Region: Pak Mun; Nam Theun 2; Hutgyi, Tasang and other dams on the Nu-Salween River. His seminar will highlight issues of irrigation development and wetland conversion from case studies of Pak Mun, Nam Theun 2, Hutgyi, Tasang and other dams on the Nu-Salween River, giving an account of how modern Mekong societies have responded to the challenges of inland fisheries management, drought and flood, and regional cooperation.

Phom mai dai khai chat (I did not sell my country) (2008) by Nophadon Pathama (ISBN: 9789743681141 ). Nophadon, former foreign minister in Samak’s government was hounded out of office for his role in Preah Vihear temple dispute. This book is his story and his account of Preah Vihear. Part one is autobiographical and part two provides detailed documentation of the Preah Vihear issue. Here is the table of contents for interested readers.

[This post is provided by the National Library of Australia as part of our Book Zone feature. For further information on the featured publications contact Saowapha Viravong at sviravong@nla.gov.au]

A “flash mob” for Burma will hit London tonight as campaigners urge commuters to remember victims of the cyclone and decades of human rights abuses in the country.

- Extracted from Joanna Sugden, “Flash mob for Burma hits London”, The Times, 25 June 2008.  If any New Mandala readers were there, or have thoughts on this kind of activism, please don’t hesitate to have your say.

I was due to go to Yangon on the Sunday but was told by the Burmese friend I was going to meet there that they were expecting bad weather, but that it was all expected to be over by Saturday. With this warning in hand, I went to Bangkok on Wednesday evening to stand in the visa queue at the Burmese Embassy the next day but decided to keep a close eye on the weather forecasts, and, amazingly enough, on CNN they were already including warnings of an impending cyclone with increasing wind speeds (and a satellite image of it) with a landfall close to Yangon on their hourly weather forecasts. It was sufficiently bad-sounding to deter me from going to the Embassy but I watched regularly all the next day to see how things progressed in case there was still time to change my mind – and CNN continued their hourly reports. The reports continued to come through all day Thursday on CNN news/weather bulletins.

I asked <name deleted> to check repeatedly on the BBC Burmese website for their weather report and other Burmese sites during this time. Confusingly, there was nothing on them – the BBC five day forecast said ‘Fair’ (and remember, this was when CNN was giving hourly warnings). By Friday morning CNN was reporting wind speeds of up to 200km and they were trying to predict the landfall and it had become a main weather bulletin item. I decided to leave Bangkok and abandon the visit – but <name deleted> was actually telling me I was stupid not to go because there was nothing reported anywhere on the BBC Burmese site. I got back on Friday evening and the BBC Burmese weather site still had a 5 day forecast of FAIR and there was not a single reference to the weather which was being tracked as a storm on CNN’s satellite images on the BBC’s main pages.

By Friday night, as I continued to scour the web for some clarification of these really oddly contradictory messages, a couple of bloggers had started to pick up about the cyclone – but they were weather freaks rather than Burma watchers. Result for me – total confusion, which was sadly resolved by the events that subsequently did get reported by the BBC with, shockingly to me, shock.

My conclusion? Everyone was so obsessed with the referendum that they took their eye off every other ball bouncing around on the tennis court – and there are surely some serious lessons to be learned from this about the way that news is collated within the Burma-related media. If as big a news channel as CNN was reporting this hourly for two-three days beforehand, why did BBC weather and BBC Burmese at the very least not pick this up? As I said, I’m not mentioning this now to ‘blame’ people, and didn’t raise it at the time for fear that it might be seen in that way, but rather that it is something that the Burmese media needs to think through, I would have thought.

On the topic of journalistic access to Burma, I noticed in this Saturday’s The Guardian that Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy have an excellent article on Than Shwe.  They appear to have been in the country in the period immediately before the cyclone.  And this after their comments about Burma, and its rulers, in 2001’s The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade.

Some others also seem to be getting visas for Burma, even after the long-term (pre-cyclone) clampdown discussed here.  Where there is a will there is often (it seems) a way…unless you are Bertil Lintner.

Lintner was, of course, the target of much government attention back in the 1980s when the world looked to people like him for expert analysis of the prospects for democratic change in Burma. 

There is a book produced back in 1989 by the News and Periodicals Enterprise, Ministry of Information, Government of the Union of Myanmar, called The conspiracy of treasonous minions within the Myanmar Naing-Ngan and traitorous cohorts abroad that we have here in the library in Oxford.  On page 283 there is a picture of Lintner copied (no doubt without permission) from his Land of Jade. The caption is: “Correspondent Bertil Lintner who has been procuring misinformation about the Myanmar Naing-Ngan from insurgent sources to write all kinds of false news seen on the left with BCP [Burma Communist Party] chairman Ba Thein Tin in the centre”.

Ahhh, misinformation: pot…kettle…black.