“If I could put all my money into Myanmar, I would,” Jim Rogers, the Singapore-based American investor, declared recently.Įven by the standards of authoritarian regimes, Burma lives in an epoch unto itself, a relic of the prosperous country that was once the world’s largest exporter of rice. The sudden access to a new market on China’s southern border has inspired flights of extraordinary optimism. The United States and other nations suspended many of the economic sanctions that, for years, had sought to cripple the regime. In June, Australia took the symbolic step of abandoning the name Burma, which has been the choice of exiles and of Washington, in favor of the name preferred by the government: Myanmar. They have relaxed media censorship, legalized the right to unionize, and allowed members of the main opposition party to compete for office they have also distanced themselves from Burma’s longtime patron, China. Since taking office in March, 2011, the former generals who make up Burma’s first civilian government in forty-nine years have released almost seven hundred activists and monks and artists, and taken more steps in the direction of democracy than Burma has seen in four decades. Wedged like an arrowhead between India and China, Burma has been ruled by dictators so ineptly and for so long that it can feel, these days, as if the country itself were stepping warily out of jail. “I’d only heard about it, how essential the Internet was, and I decided that I must learn about it as soon I’m out.” Once he had greeted his startled mother and begun to consider the tasks before him-“marriage, family, job”-he signed up for a Gmail account. We never used to see shiny cars.” He was eager to try the Internet. “And cell phones, those were a surprise,” he told me. On the road, Chitmin Lay noticed that the traditional thatch-roofed bamboo villages were now dotted with concrete-block houses with metal roofs. Finally, some local opposition activists gave him the equivalent of about twelve dollars for the bus. He had no money to get to his mother’s house in Rangoon, a daylong trip. Glimpses lost jewish communities myanmar full#He had full cheeks around a broad smile that gave him an oddly childlike aspect, as if his body had paused the year he went away. He was healthy, though his left eye was failing after so many years of reading in half-light. Chitmin Lay is not famous, and Burma had so many political prisoners that the inmate lists maintained by activists could not even agree on the English spelling of his name. Less than twenty-four hours later, Chitmin Lay walked out of prison amid a clamorous crowd of fellow-inmates, released as part of the government’s attempt to pull itself from the ranks of the world’s most reviled regimes. He had expected to resume his life in 2029. Put in front of a judge in a mass trial, he was convicted of making pamphlets without approval, breaking the Emergency Provisions Act and the Unlawful Associations Act, and sentenced to thirty-one years. Under interrogation, he was beaten and starved. He was thirty-eight, and had been arrested in 1998 for taking part in a campus demonstration at Rangoon University, where he was a literature major. Burmese prisons are exceptionally isolated, and Chitmin Lay had picked up only scattered news, from a hidden radio that he shared with other inmates, about a rush of political changes that were beginning to unwind the world’s longest-running military dictatorship. Glimpses lost jewish communities myanmar free#On the evening of January 12th, Chitmin Lay was in his cell, in Moulmein Prison, in the lush tropical hills of southern Burma, when guards informed him that he was a free man.
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