Burma News (3.23.09)

by Danny Fisher

“At the headquarters of Burma’s National League for Democracy, young supporters stand in front of a poster of the detained party leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.” Photo by Sandro Tucci for Time Life Pictures / Getty Images.
[This post has been updated as of 7:15 p.m. EST on 3.23.09.]

Here are today’s headlines about Burma:

  • Our friend, stringer, and past interviewee Erick D. White sends along a piece from openDemocracy in which Daniel Pye suggests that the junta may well eliminate all opposition ahead of the elections scheduled for 2010.
  • On the same subject, Time Magazine looks for a “silver lining.”
  • The Agence France-Presse reports that Thailand’s foreign minister will visit Burma to discuss the Rohingya refugee issue with the junta.
  • The Irrawaddy reports that “more than 20 homeless survivors of Cyclone Nargis demonstrated at the cyclone reconstruction committee headquarters in Twante Township in Rangoon.”
  • Médecins Sans Frontières details the challenges that come with trying to treat tuberculosis in Burma.
  • The San Francisco Chronicle reports on brave souls smuggling health care into Eastern Burma:

      The country’s military junta provides little health care, or access to international humanitarian groups for an estimated 500,000 displaced villagers, many of whom suffer from rampant malaria, malnutrition and one of the world’s highest rates of land-mine injuries.

      In response, Burmese refugees in Thailand developed a unique program, effectively sneaking health care into their own country: A network of tiny mobile clinics now dot eastern Burma, where medics…carry medical supplies in backpacks, walk for weeks through remote jungles and risk capture and injury to reach patients.