BurmaNet News, April 14-16, 2007

[Editor]

April 14-16, 2007 Issue # 3184


INSIDE BURMA
AFP: Rare Myanmar parties for Buddhist New Year
AFP: Myanmar cashes up on energy, but locals in the dark
AP: Cricket bats clatter as dawn comes up like thunder in old Myanmar capital

ON THE BORDER
Bangkok Post: Burmese take Thai hostage

BUSINESS / TRADE
DVB: Anti-tax campaigns spread in Magwe, Arakan
Rapaport News: Myanmar announces first gem merchants association

REGIONAL
The Nation: Human-rights protection plea

INTERNATIONAL
Washington Post: South Africa's U.N. votes disappoint some

OPINION / OTHER
The Guardian: A woman of courage – Gordon Brown

ANNOUNCEMENT
Job Posting: Director, Burmese Service, Radio Free Asia

____________________________________
INSIDE BURMA

April 16, Agence France Presse
Rare Myanmar parties for Buddhist New Year - Hla Hla Htay

Yangon: Punks, rockers and scantily-dressed youths thronged the streets of
Yangon at the weekend for a raucous Buddhist New Year party, despite
warnings from Myanmar's junta against any subversive behaviour.
Celebrated across Buddhist Southeast Asia, the Thingyan festival, as it is
known here, offers the people of this isolated military-ruled state the
rare chance to gather in public en masse and truly let their hair down.

"This period is the free time for all. Friends can gather happily, and
lovers can meet freely with the excuse that they are celebrating
Thingyan," said 38-year-old Tin Tin.

Revellers sporting flamboyant punk hairdos in red, blue and yellow
gathered under tight security at small stages across Yangon where bands
played and water flew as partygoers engaged in traditional water fights.
Some dressed as rappers or rockers, while others wore as little as
possible, with mini-skirts, bikinis and skimpy tops on rare display
throughout the country's commercial capital.

The culture ministry warned the population ahead of the festival not to
wear indecent clothes that were "contrary to Myanmar's traditions".

Myanmar is one of the few countries in Southeast Asia where the majority
of people still wear traditional clothing every day, with most men donning
a traditional sarong called the longyi and women wearing demure long
skirts.

But 24-year-old Mu Mu said no one had been punished for wearing revealing
outfits, saying the surprising sartorial statement was not about
provocation, but just good, clean fun.

"Many youths want to out-do each other -- that's why they wear these
clothes," Mu Mu said.

The four-day celebration, which ends on Monday, seemed to pass without
incident.

However, the nose and lip rings and gravity-defying spiked hairstyles will
likely be removed Tuesday as life returns to normal in the country
previously known as Burma, which has been ruled by military dictatorships
since 1962.

In a country where you can be jailed for holding a public gathering or
criticising the junta, people are usually at pains to conform or risk
trouble from the authorities.

A small protest in Yangon in February against economic hardship and rising
commodity prices prompted the junta to arrest 20 people, including the
protest leader and journalists covering the event. All have since been
released.

For Thingyan, the authorities warned partygoers not to shout any political
slogans or create unrest during the water festival -- one of the rare
moments in Myanmar when citizens are authorised to march in the streets.

Nevertheless, Myanmar's pro-democracy activists are planning to use the
holiday to cast the spotlight on their cause.

On Tuesday, one group will hold a ceremony for the family members of
political prisoners, symbolically releasing fish into Inya lake near the
home of detained democracy leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

"We will release the fish on New Year's Day, wishing to release all
political prisoners," said activist Min Ko Naing.

Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won elections
in 1990 but was never allowed to take power.

"We wish for her good health in the new year," said NLD spokesman Myint
Thein. "We also hope for cooperation from the authorities for the benefit
of the country in the new year."

The raucous water-soaked street parties end Monday, and on Tuesday people
will head to pagodas and monasteries to offer food to monks and release
birds and fish into the wild to bring good fortune for the coming year.

____________________________________

April 15, Agence France Presse
Myanmar cashes up on energy, but locals in the dark - Hla Hla Htay

Yangon: Military-ruled Myanmar has recently signed off on a raft of energy
deals with its power-hungry neighbours, winning the junta a desperately
needed income stream.

But Chinese and Thai dams to be built on Myanmar's rivers to power their
own economies and Asian companies drilling for natural gas off the coast
to boost fuel exports are cold comfort for impoverished locals.

Most have been left in the dark as blackouts stretch through most of the
day, even as reclusive officials in the new administrative capital
Naypyidaw in central Myanmar enjoy an abundance of energy.

The sprawling capital, once a mountainous backwater and home to government
and military offices since last year, boasts 24-hour electricity, amply
lit streets with few cars and fairy lights that twinkle around ministry
buildings.

That contrasts starkly with Yangon, Myanmar's biggest city, where people
and businesses do without electricity for most of the day, and they are
hurting.

"Now we average about four hours per day with power in our industrial
zone, about a 50 percent decline from eight hours per day in March," a
businessman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

"Many factory owners have to rely on generators mostly. The price of
diesel is also going up now. But we have no choice," he added.

"We were informed that the electricity distribution department has some
technical problems. But we don't know when it will be in a normal
condition."

As of September last year, Myanmar had an installed capacity of 1,775
megawatts. Just one of the dams Thailand is building on the Salween River
has a capacity to produce three times that amount.

"We had good sales in previous months... but they have declined over the
last three weeks because of the daily blackouts," said one electronics
shop owner.

Myanmar's official energy statistics provide some insight though many
questions are left unanswered by bureaucrats responsible for administering
one of the world's most isolated states.

According to the Myanmar Electric Power Enterprise, 40 percent of the
electricity generated in 2005 was never sold to consumers or businesses.

While some electricity is normally lost during transmission and
distribution, the enormous shortfall has never been explained and
electricity officials could not be reached for comment.

In Yangon, the nation's former capital and commercial hub, the power
shortage is hammering a moribund economy and for many, the lack of power
also means a lack of water as most pumps are electric.

"We normally get about six hours per day, but we can't do anything since
it usually comes on at night," said Htwe Htwe, a 50-year-old Yangon
housewife, who complained that the outages prevent her from cooking or
cleaning.

"My family has to eat the leftover rice and curry. Our priority is to get
water first whenever the power comes back," she said.

"For the last two weeks, we only get three hours a day."

The Southeast Asian nation is under a series of US and European economic
sanctions imposed over the junta's rights abuses and the house arrest of
61-year-old democracy icon and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

But the impact of the sanctions has been weakened as Myanmar's neighbours
such as China, India and Thailand are spending billions of dollars for a
share of its vast energy resources.

According to 2006 official figures, 13 foreign oil companies are working
on 33 energy projects in Myanmar but none of the benefits appear to have
filtered through to the general population.

Residents are especially chafed over the outages because the government
hiked electricity charges 10-fold last year, earning authorities an extra
eight million dollars in the first half of the 2006 fiscal year.

For those who can afford it, generators have become a necessity. But
soaring demand for fuel has sent prices surging and created further
shortages in an already unstable market, petrol dealers said.

This has forced frustrated consumers onto the black market where prices
are up about seven percent for petrol and diesel -- when it is available
at all. Otherwise, people go without.

"Many residents come to buy for their generators. But sometimes we have no
petrol to sell," one black market dealer said.

____________________________________

April 16, Associated Press
Cricket bats clatter as dawn comes up like thunder in old Myanmar capital
- Jerry Harmer

Yangon: As people in Myanmar's ramshackle but bustling former capital made
their way to work one recent weekday, they heard a sound many may have
struggled to place. Through the tinkle of temple bells and the rumble of
traffic was the distinctive crack of a leather ball on a willow bat.

Decades after the country's British colonial masters departed, taking
their game with them, cricket is making a comeback.

The current standing of the game in Myanmar is reflected in the zero
amount of local coverage of the cricket World Cup now being played in the
West Indies.

But on a tree-fringed field, within sight of the magnificent Shwedagon
Pagoda, hordes of youngsters brought out bats, leg pads, gloves and
stumps. For an hour and a half, boys and girls threw themselves into a
knockabout version of the game, while slightly older youths practiced
their batting and bowling skills.

For 9-year-old William Phyowai, his first taste of cricket was a
revelation. "It's great!" he enthused, "It's fun!"
For Aye Min Than, who has been playing for two years, the appeal was more
cerebral.

"Cricket's different from other sports," the lanky 21-year-old bowler
said, smiling. "It boosts your mental sharpness. It's a game for the
mind."

Such a scene would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when
cricket was all but dead here. But in 2005, the Myanmar Cricket Federation
formed and began a vigorous program of promotion, including this annual
three-week Summer School.

The federation's president better known locally as a movie star than as a
sporting evangelist watched and nodded with satisfaction.

"The schoolboys in Yangon are interested; that's the initial stage," said
Nyunt Win. "Now it's growing. We're going to promote cricket in other
states this year, so I hope there'll be more players coming."

Besides school teams, Yangon now has eight clubs, the central town of
Taunggyi has two, and a new one is setting up this month in Mandalay.

There are national teams at Under-15 and senior levels, and work will
start shortly on a new showpiece ground on the outskirts of Yangon. The
Asian Cricket Council, the sports regional development body, has donated
gear worth thousands of dollars (euros).

It is not about to challenge the dominance of soccer in Myanmar, but
cricket is unquestionably on the rise.

"Cricket is developing as well in Myanmar as it is in any other new
country," the council's development manager, Sultan Rana, said in an
e-mail. "The most encouraging sign is to see that children have taken a
liking to the game."

In some ways it is puzzling that cricket should need a revival. After all,
Myanmar then called Burma was a province of the British Raj, along with
what are now the cricket-crazy nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Nyunt Win, who became a cricket convert after he was sent to school in
India, wonders whether bitterness over the colonial experience played a
part in cricket's post-independence nose-dive.

"When Myanmar people get hurt, it stays. Cricket was thought of as an
English game; maybe that was one of the causes that Myanmar people weren't
interested. They didn't feel comfortable."

Myanmar's return to cricket's international stage has not been easy.

In its debut tournament, the ACC Trophy 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, the national
team suffered a calamitous defeat. Though it was not a fatal blow for the
game.

With dignity, Nyunt Win sent a message to the Asian Cricket Council.

"Thank you for giving us a chance to find ourselves," his message said.
"Thank you for your patience and understanding. This failure has to be the
beginning of our success."

____________________________________
ON THE BORDER

April 16, Bangkok Post
Burmese take Thai hostage

A Thai citizen captured by the pro-junta Democratic Karen Buddhist Army of
Burma has been held since last Thursday, the foreign ministry said.

Tarit Charungwat, director general of the department of information and
ministry spokesman, said the Buddhist Karens originally captured two Thai
civilians, but have released one.

Authorities were working to try to secure the release of the second man,
known only as Chortho.

Mr Thongsuk and a companion were seized on the northern Thai-Burmese
border, said the spokesman.

Mr Tarit said that Thai and Burmese authorities were both working on the
problem. The Democratic Karen Buddhist Army is a pro-Rangoon group
responsible for violence along the border.

_____________________________________
BUSINESS / TRADE

April 16, Democratic Voice of Burma
Anti-tax campaigns spread in Magwe, Arakan

The signature campaign against increased tax rates in Magwe Division’s
Chauk township has reportedly spread to several other areas in Magwe and
Arakan State.

Early this month, traders from Chauk township launched a petition against
recent income and sales tax increases of between 100 and 500 percent
across Burma. The petition has reportedly already been filed with the
Chauk township municipal office.

Similar signature-based petitions have now also been launched in the Magwe
townships of Yenangyaung, Pakokku and Yesagyo and in the Arakan township
of Taungup.

It is unclear whether the new tax charges have resulted from new,
unpublicised legislation or the enforcement of 1990 tax laws that had
previously been unimplemented.

Residents in Yenangyaunng told DVB late last week that traders were
outraged by the tax rises.

“The latest situation is that even the sidewalk vendors, who are used to
paying 50 kyats in tax, are now being asked to pay 100 kyats. Do they want
to pay 100 kyats willingly?” one resident said on condition of anonymity.

“Trishaw drivers and horse-cart operators are angry and definitely joining
the campaign.”

In Pakokku, a signature campaign was launched after the local authorities
announced that the tax on retailers would triple and that businesses would
be charged 500 kyat a day for late payment, according to residents.
Between 70 and 80 store owners are reported to have signed the petition.

Burmese government statistics say that tax revenue has risen sharply in
the past five years as tax collection systems have been strengthened and
more heavily enforced.

But reports from across Burma this month suggest that the tax laws
continue to be implemented arbitrarily with residents and business owners
in some states asked to pay more than others.

Small business owners and retailers in Taungup said last week that local
officials had demanded 600 percent sales tax increases from March 15 and
that many people in the area were unable to pay.

“Our trouble is, we are faced with high commodity prices . . . Our monthly
income is not enough to cover the increases. Besides, people can barely
spend these days and business is bad. Some vendors are so discouraged that
they said they will give up their business,” one Taungup salesman said.

Every store owner in Taungup’s eight-building Myoma market has reportedly
signed a petition protesting the tax increases.

Business owners in Pegu Divison’s Daik-u and Pyuntaza townships told DVB
last week that despite being officially asked to pay tax increases of 500
percent, they were able to negotiate individual tax agreements with
township officials.

“. . . when the tax was actually paid, the township revenue authorities
negotiated individual compromises. So the amount did not increase as
expected and people ended up paying a maximum of about two or three times
the amount only,” a Daik-u resident said.

There has been no organised opposition to the tax increases in the area.

____________________________________

April 16, Rapaport News
Myanmar announces first gem merchants association -  Zach Helke

Myanmar is taking steps to create the first gem merchants' association to
develop the county’s rough gem industry.

The nation’s largest business organization, the Union of Myanmar
Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, as well as the Ministry
of Mines are behind the efforts to create the new organization. The new
Myanmar Gem Merchants' Association (MGMA) will be responsible for
promoting the nation’s gem industry and serving as a direct contact for
foreign traders who wish to purchase domestic gems.

Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has conducted annual gem shows since
1964, and is best known as a destination for quality jade, rubies, and
blue sapphires. The most recent show, the 44th, lasted 13 days and yielded
3,652 lots of jade, gems and pearls. The show attracted 3,421 merchants.

Since year 2000, joint ventures with ten private companies have been
operating mines in the nation’s rich Mogok, Mongshu and Phakant
minefields. These agreements have given the country greater access to
international buyers.

Most foreign partners, traders and buyers are from China or Thailand.
Trade with the west remains controversial due to the anti-democratic
military government that governs the nation and profits from the gems.
Both the United States and Europe have imposed economic sanctions on the
nation in the years following the arrest of democratic leader Aung San Suu
Kyi. Other nations have followed suit.

The United States has banned the import of gems from Myanmar, with
exception for those polished by third countries. Many western companies
support a voluntary boycott of goods from Myanmar, the most vocal of which
is Tiffany & Co., who stopped accepting goods from the nation in 2003.

____________________________________
REGIONAL

April 15, The Nation
Human-rights protection plea

Human Rights Watch yesterday urged Thailand to protect ethnic minorities
fleeing fighting from neighbouring Burma and condemned the military
government in Rangoon for the fresh round of violence.

About 400 villagers, mostly ethnic Karen, have crossed into Thailand over
the last week to escape fighting between Burmese government soldiers and
rebel troops.

"Burma's military government should end joint military attacks, carried
out with ethnic Karen militias, on civilians" in the eastern Karen State,
the US-based group said in a statement. It called on Thailand to shelter
all the newly displaced families.

"The international community needs to keep a close watch on the situation,
encourage Thailand to protect the refugees, and find ways of providing
assistance themselves," it said.

____________________________________
INTERNATIONAL

April 16, Washington Post
South Africa's U.N. votes disappoint some - Colum Lynch

United Nations: Nelson Mandela's South Africa projected an image of a
virtuous nation, reconciling with a brutal white minority government,
scrapping the country's nuclear weapons program and serving as an enduring
symbol of resistance to political oppression.

But South Africa's brief debut this year on the U.N. Security Council has
tattered its reputation. It has prompted human rights activists to condemn
South African President Thabo Mbeki for abandoning the human rights
principles that defined the anti-apartheid movement and for routinely
siding with some of the world's worst human rights abusers.

In just over three months, South Africa has used its position on the
15-nation council to try to block discussion of human rights abuses in
Burma and Zimbabwe. It initially backed Iran's efforts to evade sanctions
for defying U.N. demands to subject its nuclear program to greater
scrutiny. And it reacted coolly to Kosovo's bid for independence, lending
its backing to a Russian effort to deny Kosovo's president the right to
address the U.N. Security Council in its formal chambers.

"It's a sad perversion of the anti-apartheid struggle," said Kenneth Roth,
the executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "Mandela
understood that the anti-apartheid struggle was a human rights movement
and clearly stood with the human rights victims of the world."

South Africa's U.N. ambassador, Dumisani Kumalo, said his government
remains faithful to the values of the anti-apartheid movement, which
offered amnesty to the country's former white rulers in exchange for
publicly describing their roles in perpetuating a system of racial
discrimination. He said South Africa has now embraced a pragmatic foreign
policy that urges such countries as Burma, Sudan and Zimbabwe to resolve
their disputes through negotiations.

"We're not into 'who is to blame,' " Kumalo said. "We believe in resolving
problems. . . . We resolved our differences between black and white people
in South Africa." South Africa, he added, stands ready to help others do
the same.

Kumalo said his government is seeking to counter "an imbalance of global
power" in the U.N. Security Council, where he said the United States,
Britain, France, Russia and China use their authority to attack enemies
and to shield friends. The council should stick to resolving international
conflicts and not abuse its role by bullying small countries or expanding
its authority into areas beyond its jurisdiction, including human rights,
he said. Kumalo said that his government's hesitation to embrace Kosovo's
independence bid reflects South Africa's concern that the 15-nation
council is straying from its mission.

South Africa's approach has bolstered its standing among Third World blocs
-- including the influential Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement --
that have long bridled over the power of the council's five powers. It has
strengthened its case within Africa for a permanent Security Council seat
if the 15-nation council is ever expanded.

But it has also set Pretoria on a collision course with the United States
and its closest European allies, undercutting their efforts to use the
United Nations to constrain Iran's nuclear program and highlight human
rights abuses.

South Africa posed a rare challenge to the council's five powers by
pressing them to abandon an agreement to impose a ban on Iranian arms
sales and an asset freeze on Iran's top military commanders. The South
African initiative failed, and Pretoria ultimately voted in favor of the
sanctions.

Still, South Africa's stance struck a chord among Third World countries
and succeeded in "making the point they are a force to be reckoned with
and have to be dealt into negotiations," said Colin Keating, a former New
Zealand ambassador who oversees the publication of a newsletter called the
Security Council Report.

South Africa's more assertive approach has alienated some of its
traditional allies in the human rights community by aligning it with
brutal regimes, earning praise from countries accused of committing
large-scale atrocities. South Africa "is a great nation; it's a role model
for us" said Sudan's U.N. Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad.

He said that South Africa's efforts to settle a dispute between Khartoum
and numerous Darfurian rebel factions are likely to do more to achieve
peace than threats of Western sanctions or scolding from human rights
advocates.

South Africa is unapologetic about its willingness to stand up for friends
such as Zimbabwe, which has launched a bloody crackdown on opposition
leaders. "We do not apologize for having very strong, long relationship
with Zimbabwe," Kumalo said. "There are a lot of people in Zimbabwe who
died for me to stand up here as ambassador."

Kumalo said his government is sympathetic to the plight of victims of
human rights abuses in such countries as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Burma. But he
said the appropriate forum for those concerns is the Geneva-based Human
Rights Council, not the U.N. Security Council. Last week, South Africa
also voted on a measure to end scrutiny of human rights abuses inside Iran
and Uzbekistan. The only country it has cited as deserving of
international scrutiny is Israel.

Burmese human rights advocates say that while South Africa has provided
political cover for Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, it has betrayed its
former supporters in Burma's pro-democracy movement.

In 1960, Burma's then-elected government joined other U.N. members from
the Third World in calling for a Security Council debate over the
apartheid government's role in the April 1960 Sharpeville massacre, which
led to the killing of 69 anti-apartheid protesters in the South African
township. South Africa's then-U.N. ambassador, Brand Fourie, argued that
the council had no right to debate such "purely local disturbances."

But in its first Security Council vote this year, South Africa joined
Russia and China in voting against a U.S.-backed initiative to discuss the
Burmese regime's oppression of pro-democracy followers of Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for most
of the past 17 years.

"It's ironic," said Jared Genser, a Washington lawyer and Burma activist,
that the argument marshaled now by South Africa to block debate on Burma
was "virtually identical" to that used by the apartheid regime to
challenge the Security Council's criticism of the treatment of
anti-apartheid protesters.

"I am deeply disappointed by our vote. It is a betrayal of our own noble
past," South African Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu
said after the vote. "Many in the international community can hardly
believe it," he said. "The tyrannical military regime is gloating, and we
sided with them."

____________________________________
OPINION / OTHER

April 16, The Guardian
A woman of courage – Gordon Brown

Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who has been detained by Burma's
military regime for nearly 20 years, is a true hero for our times, writes
the chancellor, Gordon Brown, in this extract from his new book

In the early 1990s, I wished to invite Aung San Suu Kyi to address the
Labour party conference. Of course, I knew that she would be unable to
attend so I approached her husband, Michael Aris, and arranged to meet
him, wondering if he might take her place. It was only as I prepared to
meet him and began reading about the couple in more detail that I
discovered the story of their lives together and the sheer scale of their
struggle.

Indeed, the more I read, the more I wondered at Suu Kyi's great courage;
lonely and sustained, it had shaped her life and resulted in her becoming
the world's most renowned female prisoner of conscience. Facing one of the
most tyrannous regimes in the world, she had demonstrated that courage by
living under house arrest for most of the past two decades, far apart from
the husband she loved, and from her beloved children, missing all their
years of growing up.

To understand Suu Kyi's courage we need to understand firstly her devotion
to duty - and in particular, the influence of her father, Aung San, who
secured Burmese independence from the British in 1948 but who did not live
to see that independence come into force - and secondly, and most
important of all, the strength of Suu Kyi's underlying belief in democracy
and human rights. Her courage has shown itself not in the fearlessness of
impetuous confrontation, but in a strength of character rooted in
passionately held beliefs - beliefs that have sustained her through years
of oppression and deprivation and cruel separation from her loved ones.

For Suu Kyi, the turning point in this process occurred in the spring of
1988. "It was a quiet evening in Oxford like many others - the last day of
March 1988," her husband recalled. "Our sons were already in bed and we
were reading when the telephone rang. Suu picked up the phone to learn
that her mother had suffered a severe stroke. She put the phone down and
at once started to pack. I had a premonition that our lives would change
for ever."

Until that day, Suu Kyi had been an academic and housewife, married to a
professor, and bringing up two young sons in the tranquillity of
Oxfordshire. The next day, she left England for a Rangoon in the grip of
demonstrations and protests. As she tended her critically ill mother, she
bore silent witness to the growing restlessness of the country's youth.
Within a few weeks of her arriving in the city, General Ne Win's
26-year-long dictatorial rule came to an end as he announced plans to
allow the country to decide its fate in a referendum.

Pro-democracy fervour was sweeping from Rangoon across the country and
with mass demonstrations drawing millions on to the streets, Ne Win
orchestrated not the democratic transition people hoped for, but a
military takeover and a human-rights crackdown which culminated on August
8 in what Desmo nd Tutu and Vaclav Havel have subsequently exposed in a
report to the UN Security Council as a massacre of the innocents:
thousands of unarmed demonstrators - mostly students - were gunned down in
the streets.

Suu Kyi had been in Rangoon only for a few weeks. She had no weapons,
troops or band of followers, but she had seen at first hand the brutality
of the military and she knew the fate awaiting the countless demonstrators
rounded up on the streets. It was because she wanted for others in her own
country the freedoms she enjoyed in the United Kingdom that at this point,
the point of greatest danger, she stepped forward. Within weeks, Suu Kyi
and colleagues had established the National League for Democracy (NLD) and
she became its general secretary.

For me, Suu Kyi defines the meaning of courage. Once courage was seen
chiefly as a battlefield virtue. In most accounts the emphasis is on the
physical - physical risk, physical vulnerability or physical triumph. It
has been seen as an almost exclusively male, physical attribute: courage
as daring and bravado, even recklessness; indeed, in many languages, the
word for courage is derived from the word for "man". But Suu Kyi
represents the power not of the powerful but of the powerless: a woman, a
prisoner of conscience up against a state with one of the worst
human-rights violation records in the world; a country of only 20 million
people with 1,000 political prisoners, 500,000 political refugees,
children as young as four in prison, and poets and journalists tortured
just for speaking out.

In the collection of her writings, Freedom from Fear, Suu Kyi describes
the courage that she admires the most. It is not fearlessness but
conviction, a courage of the mind; not so much a momentous act of daring
as a constant condition of the mind defined by strength of belief and
strength of will.

Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage
acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit
of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be
described as "grace under pressure", grace that is renewed repeatedly in
the face of harsh, unremitting pressure


For the complete text of this extract from “Courage: Eight Portraits by
Gordon Brown,” please follow this link:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,2058069,00.html

____________________________________
ANNOUNCEMENT

Job Posting
Director, Burmese Service, Radio Free Asia

Radio Free Asia – a non-profit corporation that broadcasts news and
information to Asian countries where listeners lack access to full and
free news media – is seeking a Director for its Burmese language service,
located in Washington, DC. Reporting to the Deputy Director for Southeast
Asia, the Director supervises the production of top quality, unbiased, and
balanced news and information programs relevant to life in Burma.

Responsibilities Include

• Planning, directing, and supervising the development of Burmese
broadcast programs and daily operations of the Burmese language service

• Providing strong editorial leadership and managing a staff of broadcast
journalists

• Monitoring and maintaining quality control of Burmese service broadcasts

• Directing the preparation of original scripts on news, current events,
features, and other topics of particular interest to the target audience

• Establishing and maintaining contact with Burma specialists and sources
to enhance program content and stay abreast of political, cultural, and
economic developments

• Handling Burmese staff administrative, personnel, and staffing matters

Minimum Qualifications

• A Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university (degree in
journalism or related field preferred)

•   Ten years’ working experience in journalism or related field (graduate
studies in journalism or related field may substitute for up to four years
of this experience), with four years’ experience in a supervisory capacity
preferred

• Fluency in spoken and written Burmese and English languages

• Demonstrated knowledge and understanding of current political, economic,
and social conditions in Burma

• Strong editing skills and demonstrated ability to exercise unbiased,
timely, and principled news analysis and judgment

All candidates must be eligible to work in the U.S. and provide proof of
eligibility.

How to apply

Send resume with cover letter (making reference to Director, Burmese
Service position) via:

Fax to 202-530-7797; or

E-mail to: jobs at rfa.org

RFA is an equal employment opportunity employer.