Myanmar

SECRETARY OF State Condoleezza Rice drew some criticism here and abroad for skipping a key meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Laos this week. Her excuse was business in Sudan, but her absence was viewed as showing ASEAN a sign of the consequences if it allows Myanmar to assume its rotating chairmanship next year. And lo and behold, before that meeting ended, the junta strangling the country once known as Burma blinked, signaling that it would postpone its leadership role.

A reporter inquires about the way we refer to U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, because his staff says that he prefers to be known as plain old Ben Cardin. (He's running for re-election.) Can we do that? Sure. We're easy. We accommodated Jimmy Carter and Bob Dole, so Ben Cardin should be no strain.  Our practice at The Baltimore Sun  is to refer to people by the names they choose to use for public purposes. So we indulge k.d. lang and bell hooks in their typographical eccentricities* as well as just-plain-folks seekers of public office. Sometimes people change their names formally for purposes of being listed on the ballot, as did American Joe Miedusiewski, a former Maryland state senator.

The decision by the United States last week to increase pressure on Myanmar by seeking a U.N. Security Council resolution against its continuing human rights abuses is necessary and laudable. But the negative reactions of key world powers to the U.S. diplomatic escalation are distressingly toothless. China, Russia and, shockingly, Japan reportedly argued in a closed Security Council meeting last Wednesday that the lack of political freedoms in the country formerly known as Burma doesn't pose a threat to world security - and therefore doesn't meet the test for such a resolution.

In keeping with his campaign promise to talk to America's enemies without precondition, President Barack Obama plans to turn his charms on Myanmar's military junta. Slowly, we're beginning to understand what hope and change were all about. Translation: Sure hope this change works. It may be too soon to pass judgment on Mr. Obama's new foreign policy strategy, but early returns on his gamble that talking is the best cure are less than reassuring. Each time Mr. Obama extends a hand to one of the world's anti-American despots, he is rewarded with an insult (Venezuela's Hugo Chavez)

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The long, tense border between Thailand and Myanmar has erupted in fighting in recent days, with repeated cross-border attacks in Thailand by former Burmese rebels now backed by the junta that runs Myanmar.The result has been the death of three Thai policemen and the uprooting of thousands of ethnic Burmese living in Thai refugee camps, with many of them forcibly marched back across the border to Myanmar.While Thailand has issued stern diplomatic protests and deployed reinforcements along the border, the Thai military is not threatening a counterattack against the army of Myanmar, despite allegations that Burmese soldiers have joined in the attacks on Thai soil.

With chaos on the ground in Myanmar and no reliable sources of information, Maryland disaster experts say it's no surprise that casualty counts from the cyclone that struck the country can range from 22,500 to 100,000. The remote nature of the devastated area and government restrictions on Western relief organizations mean that very little reliable news about deaths or the plight of survivors has appeared, said W. Courtland Robinson, deputy director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

SINGAPORE -- The military government of Myanmar appears finally to have turned the tide against a rebel movement fighting one of the longest-running insurgent wars of modern times.Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, appears to have adopted a divide-and-conquer strategy to get the upper hand over the Karen guerrillas, who are widely regarded as extremely tough adversaries.The Karen make up one of the largest ethnic groups scattered along Myanmar's eastern border. They have been fighting for independence from the rest of Myanmar since the early days of independence from Britain in 1948.

NEW DELHI -- A U.N. special envoy arrived in Myanmar yesterday for talks with the country's military rulers, whose ruthless crackdown on anti-government protesters has sparked international outrage. The streets of Myanmar's main city, Yangon, were virtually empty of demonstrators for the first time in nearly two weeks and devoid of the gunfire and chaos that marked three days of violent suppression by soldiers and police. Security forces continued to patrol and seal off parts of the city, including the monasteries whose monks spearheaded protests.

YANGON, Myanmar -- Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader of the Burmese democracy movement who has been under house arrest in Yangon for more than four years, was allowed to break her silence yesterday, telling visitors that, while she was ready to negotiate with her jailers, she would never leave her homeland."

Anne Frank had her diary, which did not come to light until years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp. Ko Htike has his blog, where he posted the following comment about his native Myanmar on Sept. 30, and it became available to the world moments later: "We just got phone call with our sister living in Yangon about a few hours ago. We saw on BBC world, saying that 200 monks were arrested. The true picture is far worse!!!!!!!!! For one instance, the monastery at an obscure neighborhood of Yangon, called Ngwe Kyar Yan (on Wei-za-yan-tar Road, Yangon)

The despots are having a bloody field day. In Zimbabwe, President Robert G. Mugabe's surrogates continue to terrorize his people for the sin of exercising their free will. Since the March election, when Mr. Mugabe failed to win a majority, Zimbabweans have been harassed, assaulted and attacked, and as many as 65 killed. The mayhem led opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to decamp abroad for seven weeks, and since his return May 24 to compete in the presidential runoff election, he has faced a series of indignities.

BANGKOK, Thailand - Foreign aid workers have begun reaching remote areas of Myanmar hardest hit by the May 2-3 cyclone, relief agencies said yesterday. These first admissions of foreign workers, issued over the past two days, breach the barrier erected by the government that had delayed delivery of supplies to more than a million people in the remote Irrawaddy River delta. The opening comes more than three weeks after the cyclone, which left 135,000 people dead or missing. The United Nations estimates that 1.5 million survivors deep in the Irrawaddy delta have not yet received any aid. The permissions follow an agreement announced Friday by Ban Ki Moon, the U.N. secretary-general, after a meeting in Myanmar with the leader of that nation's junta, Senior General Than Shwe.

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.

Myanmar's ruling junta has sacrificed the lives of its people to selfishly protect its secretive, repressive government. Human life means little to the generals in power, and their restrictions on food, shelter, water and other relief aid for cyclone victims is ample proof of that. Their indifference to the critical needs of survivors will consign so many more of them to death. Myanmar's rulers need only look to its neighbor to see that a military response to a natural disaster is foremost about saving lives, not safeguarding the regime.

KYAIKTAW, Myanmar -- U Maung Saw and his family are in a race against the rain. Cyclone Nargis pounded their house as flat as the mud where the broken pieces now lie. A 5-foot wave, driven by a storm surge that rolled 20 miles upriver from the Andaman Sea, crashed onto his doorstep. It washed away almost everything the family of seven owned - even the fish they were farming in a nearby pond. The flooding and torrential rain May 4 also ruined a fifth of the unmilled rice they had stockpiled since harvesting the paddy from the rich soil of the Irrawaddy River delta, Myanmar's rice bowl, in late March.

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.

Myanmar's ruling junta has sacrificed the lives of its people to selfishly protect its secretive, repressive government. Human life means little to the generals in power, and their restrictions on food, shelter, water and other relief aid for cyclone victims is ample proof of that. Their indifference to the critical needs of survivors will consign so many more of them to death. Myanmar's rulers need only look to its neighbor to see that a military response to a natural disaster is foremost about saving lives, not safeguarding the regime.

As Myanmar's military government has thwarted international efforts to deliver aid to thousands of people affected by last week's cyclone, Baltimore-based organizations are raising money to help victims and waiting to see if partner organizations will be able to gain entry into the devastated country. The political hindrance "adds a level of frustration" for aid workers, said Paul Rebman, director of disaster response for Baltimore-based World Relief. The aid group has partnered with five other organizations, two of which already had staff on the ground in Myanmar - a fact that helped to ease their assistance efforts, Rebman said.

With chaos on the ground in Myanmar and no reliable sources of information, Maryland disaster experts say it's no surprise that casualty counts from the cyclone that struck the country can range from 22,500 to 100,000. The remote nature of the devastated area and government restrictions on Western relief organizations mean that very little reliable news about deaths or the plight of survivors has appeared, said W. Courtland Robinson, deputy director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.