Burma News (3.16.09)

by Danny Fisher

Only two items today:

  • The Associated Press reports that U.N. Human Rights investigator Tomas Ojea Quintana said today in a report that the junta must release all 2,100 political prisoners before the upcoming elections. “Release must be without imposing any particular condition which may result in new forms of diminishing enjoyment of human rights, such as written statements renouncing the right to political participation or campaign,” he said.
  • The International Herald Tribune reports on the U.S.’s “quandry” over Burma:

      It has been a policy of unintended consequences — two decades of isolation and sanctions by the United States that only made Myanmar’s ruling generals more stubborn — and now a new administration in Washington has declared it a failure.

      But U.S. officials also say they don’t know what else to do.