Junta

NEW DELHI -- The street protests roiling military-ruled Myanmar turned deadly yesterday when at least one anti-government demonstrator was killed after security forces cracked down on the growing unrest, according to news and witness accounts trickling out of the closed-off country. Dozens of protesters, many of them Buddhist monks clad in burgundy robes, were said to have been beaten and dragged off by authorities as they rallied in the capital, Yangon, for the ninth straight day. Protests were also reported in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

I WAS THREE YEARS OLD when Eva Peron died, and I can't say I remember too much of the event. I have a vague memory of rain and long lines of people around the Plaza del Congreso waiting to go in and catch a glimpse of her casket. Ah, and my father muttering under his breath something like: ''. . . about time!''What I do remember is three years later, in 1955, when Juan (''El Pocho'') Peron, his regime under attack on several fronts for corruption and scandal (he was accused, among other things, of being a pedophile)

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize winner and opposition leader in Myanmar, formerly Burma, was released yesterday from house arrest after nearly six years of confinement by the nation's military junta.The release of Mrs. Suu Kyi, who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her campaign to bring democracy to her homeland, came the day before her detention order expired.Foreign diplomats in Yangon, the capital of Myanmar, said they had been assured by junta officials that the release of the 50-year-old opposition leader was unconditional, and that she was free to come and go as she pleased.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Haiti's dictatorship went into its death throes yesterday as the first member of the three-man military junta fled into voluntary exile, and the leader of the country's most brutal terror organization publicly renounced violence.Police chief Lt. Col. Michel Francois, who initiated the coup against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide three years ago, crossed the border into the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

One day after U.S. forces in Haiti cleared the way for a mob to ransack the headquarters of the dreaded FRAPH para-military organization, they guarded its leader from an angry populace yesterday as he promised an end to violent tactics. If this sounds like American soldiers are operating under schizophrenic rules of engagement, one answer is that they are. The other is that they have to be.For better or worse, U.S. forces at this moment have taken over Haiti and are running it in classic imperial fashion.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Political parties aligned with Thailand's junta won more than half the parliamentary seats at stake yesterday in general elections, the first since the military toppled a democratically elected government in a bloodless coup 13 months ago.While the results should allow the pro-military parties to dominate the new government, their victory was slim enough that it could -- hopes within the junta that one of the leaders of the coup will...

Haiti is being destroyed. Washington's Haitian policy, well-intentioned but fatally flawed, is adrift. So is the approach to Haiti of the Organization of American States (OAS).Eight months after a narrowly focused military oligarchy ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti has decayed economically and politically. Meanwhile, an American-OAS boycott has further depressed Haiti, compelling more than 30,000 Haitians to put to sea in flimsy boats.Washington's use of economic sanctions to compel the Haitian military junta to restore democracy and President Aristide has backfired badly.

EVER SINCE the Duvalier dictatorship was overthrown in 1986, the island nation of Haiti has been plagued by turmoil. Even by such a standard, the coup that overthrew President Jean Bertrand Aristide Monday was anything but routine: It ousted Haiti's first democratically elected president.The Bush administration's firm stand against the junta -- including the cutoff of desperately needed humanitarian assistance -- was a tough but necessary first step. It is terrible that humanitarian aid is to be denied the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

WASHINGTON -- The Organization of American States, heeding a dramatic request by Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was poised last night to dispatch a mission to his impoverished nation to demand an immediate end to the coup that toppled him and to warn of further action if necessary.Father Aristide told OAS foreign ministers his people were determined to resist a new dictatorship and said such a mission would help prevent a blood bath at the hands of a junta led by Brig. Gen. Raoul Cedras, who seized power Monday.

Guillermo Ungo, 59, who headed the political wing of El Salvador's guerrilla movement, died of a heart attack today in Mexico City. He returned from exile in Panama in 1989 to head his own party, the National Revolutionary Movement. Mr. Ungo was a candidate for the Salvadoran National Assembly in elections set for March 10 and had been a presidential candidate in 1989. He served on El Salvador's governing junta from 1979 to 1980 and in 1972 ran for vice president on the ticket headed by the late former President Jose Napoleon Duarte.

For nearly two weeks, we have witnessed the callous indifference of Myanmar's ruling junta to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The regime's grotesque failure to permit more than a trickle of aid has stimulated calls for the United Nations to compel Myanmar to provide access for international relief efforts. Whether such calls are answered could determine the survival of hundreds of thousands in Myanmar spared from the initial inundation but clinging to life without food, clean water, shelter and access to lifesaving medicines.

YANGON, Myanmar -- In this cyclone-ravaged country where most people have more important things on their minds, such as the daily struggle for fresh water, food and shelter, Myanmar's ruling generals sent their people to the polls yesterday to vote on a constitution that opponents call a cynical attempt to maintain the junta's grip on power. The regime insists that the vote to approve the new constitution, held in parts of the country that weren't affected by last weekend's devastating storm, is part of its road map to "discipline-flourishing genuine multiparty democracy."

This week, on the other side of the world, a 62-year-old woman marks 12 years of sitting alone in her home. The telephone is silent because the line is disconnected. The doorbell never rings because visitors are forbidden. There is no mail or news. For our client, Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader of Myanmar and Nobel Peace laureate, little has changed for years - there is almost complete isolation. It has been more than a month since the world witnessed tens of thousands of Buddhist monks in saffron robes marching in solidarity with the Burmese people, protesting the military junta in that country.

Washington -- President Bush reached further into his administration's limited arsenal of sanctions to apply against Myanmar yesterday by targeting additional senior officials and supporters. He also called on China and India to join international efforts to promote human rights and democracy in the military-run Southeast Asian nation formerly called Burma. With his wife, Laura, who has taken a very public interest in the nation's political conditions, at his side, Bush said, "The people of Burma are showing great courage in the face of immense repression.

NEW DELHI -- The street protests roiling military-ruled Myanmar turned deadly yesterday when at least one anti-government demonstrator was killed after security forces cracked down on the growing unrest, according to news and witness accounts trickling out of the closed-off country. Dozens of protesters, many of them Buddhist monks clad in burgundy robes, were said to have been beaten and dragged off by authorities as they rallied in the capital, Yangon, for the ninth straight day. Protests were also reported in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

THE MILITARY JUNTA strangling Myanmar has survived with a lot of help from its Southeast Asian neighbors. After all, Myanmar's generals offer natural resources, slave labor and a profitable drug trade. And anyway, a key principle of the region's top political organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, has long been noninterference in its members' internal affairs. But Myanmar is to take over leadership of ASEAN next year. And given the regime's brutality, that honor finally is proving embarrassing enough that officials from some of the group's 10 members - Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines - have been calling for preventing Myanmar from assuming this chairmanship.

IN RELATIVE terms, Gen. Khin Nyunt was the moderate face of the illegitimate military junta suppressing democracy in long-suffering Myanmar, as Burma's generals renamed their country. But his so-called road map to democracy -- and his talk of reaching an accommodation with arrested pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi -- proved not much more than an illusion to deflect international pressure on the repressive regime. Nonetheless, Gen. Khin Nyunt's recent sacking as prime minister by the junta's strongman, Gen. Than Shwe, is yet more bad news from Yangon.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Four angry generals, five miffed governors and a pair of missing oil paintings were not enough to prevent President Nestor Kirchner from commemorating the dead of Argentina's "dirty war" with two powerfully symbolic acts yesterday that hit hard at the legacy of the country's former military dictators. Kirchner dedicated the Museum of Memory at the Navy Mechanics School, former site of a clandestine concentration camp where thousands of prisoners were tortured and murdered between 1976 and 1983 under military rule.

TWO WORDS in the Massachusetts manslaughter trial of Thomas Junta burned my ears: "That's hockey." Heard that one before, many times. It's macho shorthand, used by hockey fans to defend fights in the National Hockey League, and by hockey dads and hockey moms to dismiss peers who express some squeamishness about rough play on the ice. Think NHL stars set a bad example by dropping the gloves and going at it? My son elbowed your son "behind the play" and got away with it? "That's hockey." In other words: "The coolest, fastest game on Earth is a contact sport and sometimes there's more contact than the rule book allows, so get used to it or have little Josh take up tennis."

BOSTON - He will go to jail wearing his own moniker: "Hockey Dad." Not "gentle giant," the label his defense lawyer tried to attach to his frame. Not "burly truck driver," the phrase the media used to hint of dangerous bulk. Thomas Junta, who was found guilty recently of involuntary manslaughter, will be forever known as "Hockey Dad," as if the paternity and the sport had teamed up to commit the crime. "Soccer Mom" may be the handle for the minivan-driving suburban mother involved in her kids' lives, but "Hockey Dad" is now the official nickname for any over-involved, driven father who lunges over the line that separates competition from violence.