Articles by Zarni
We found 334 results.
Growing Up a Proud Racist in Burma
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Sep 2012
Like millions of my fellow Buddhist Burmese, I grew up as a proud racist. For much of my life growing up in the heartland of Burma, Mandalay, I mistook what I came to understand years later as racism to be the patriotism of Burmese Buddhists. Our leading and most powerful institutions, schools, media, Buddhist church and, most importantly, the military, have succeeded in turning the bulk of us into proud racists.
→ read full articlePopular ‘Buddhist’ Racism and the Generals’ Militarism
Maung Zarni – Democratic Voice of Burma,
10 Sep 2012
As a Mandalay-born dissident with deep roots in Buddhism, I find it revolting that thousands of Buddhist monks, human rights dissidents and the public in my hometown of Mandalay staged an anti-Rohingya rally this past weekend [2 Sep 2012]. Where has the vociferous human rights rhetoric gone when it comes to the persecuted Rohingyas?
→ read full articleBurma’s ‘Niggers’
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Sep 2012
President Thein Sein, what really is your analysis of the plight of Burma’s “Bengali Kulars” (or the Burmese equivalent of “niggers”)?
→ read full articleSanctions Have Nothing to Do With Human Rights in Burma
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Jun 2012
Sanctions have, in the final instance, little or nothing to do with the fact that the Burmese are oppressed and persecuted by the regime in Naypyidaw. There are western allies and/or business partners whose human rights records are equally appalling – Israel, Egypt under Mubarak, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc., as well as China and Vietnam – and these countries aren’t subject to any sanctions.
→ read full articleWhat Really Explains Thein Sein Regime’s Current Pursuit of ‘Ceasefire’ with the Karens while Killing the Kachins
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Apr 2012
Obviously, the Burmese generals and ex-generals have outsourced the business of “strategic peace” to its commercial elements – Burmese commercial interests. Investors from Norway, Germany, etc. are licking their lips while the locals do the foreplay with the ethnic virgin lands (and untapped resources).
→ read full articleHow Should the Elections in Burma Be Understood?
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Apr 2012
Do Sunday’s elections in Burma matter? Yes and No. In terms of who controls the real levers of power absolutely nothing will change. What may be significant is that the electorate is being excited about having a formal political process where there can openly debate the regime’s failed policies, talk about the dismal state of the affairs, openly express their support for Aung San Suu Kyi and what she and dissident colleagues stand for, and shed their fear of the regime.
→ read full articleCheerleading Is No Revolution: “Democracy in Burma”
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Mar 2012
Cheerleading is no revolution. That society is not going anywhere humanistic. The current discourse of revolutionary changes is nothing but a self-interested spin from vultures and vampires of all stripes and colours, native and foreign.
→ read full articleOn Burma’s ‘Changes’
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Jan 2012
Why the media coverage and expert yukings on Burma are so fundamentally non-sense. Firstly, the greatest misperception and flaw in the current media coverage about Burma’s changes is talking about these reforms as if it were the works of President Thein Sein. Like the Chinese Communist Party or the former USSR’s CCCP, the Burmese regime in power is a collective leadership with one big guy in the back.
→ read full articleNeutralising Burma’s Ethnic Rebellions
Dr. Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Dec 2011
In his Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Karl Marx wrote: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ Such an assessment is only half-right when it comes to Burma’s internal conflicts, of which ethnicity is of equal importance to class.
→ read full articleDark Economics Fuels Burma’s Perpetual War
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Nov 2011
For the past 200 years at least, Burma has been seen as a strategic venue by outside powers, be they European imperialists such as the French and the British in the 19th Century, or the 20th Century imperial and fascist powers of the US and Japan during the Second World War. These countries have always seen Burma as a commercial backdoor to China and India, a military launching pad, a half-way safe harbour, and a resource brothel.
→ read full articleChange the Burmese Public Can’t Believe In
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Oct 2011
Burma is undergoing top-down changes, we are being told. Norway’s Deputy Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, after his whirlwind trip to the country, told the Financial Times on Oct 11, “I almost left the country thinking they’re moving a little too fast. I never thought I would say that about Myanmar.”
→ read full articleUnderstanding the Changes in Burma
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Oct 2011
All the “dramatic” developments in Burma, including the release of 6,000-plus prisoners, are, as US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell put it, certainly welcome. And yet despite these loud applauses of “changes” in Burma, the Burmese public is finding it very, very difficult to feel hopeful. These changes do not include the change of heart among Burma’s rulers. They are in fact principally related to only two things.
→ read full articleCrisis Thinkers or Thinkers in Crisis?
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Oct 2011
Last Friday [23 Sep 2011], the International Crisis Group’s Myanmar: Major Reform Underway made me sit up and read. But once I got past the title I realized the report suffers from multiple shortcomings so fundamental to comprehending Burma’s/Myanmar’s crises – note the plural here – that it lacked a credible basis either for exile excitement or any serious international policy discussions. Here is a shortlist of ICG’s intellectual sins.
→ read full articleThey Talk the Talk, But Baulk at the Walk
Dr Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Aug 2011
Twenty three years since Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the then freshly minted popular dissident, began her impassioned calls for a resolution to the country’s long-standing problems through dialogue, we seem to have been conditioned like a Pavlovian four-limbed creature.
→ read full articleBurma: Ethnic Conflicts are the Generals’ Golden Goose
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND MEDIA SERVICE,
27 Jun 2011
Maintaining a contrived state of internal conflict with ethnic groups provides Burmese military with an excuse to hold onto power to prevent disintegration.
→ read full articleMeritocracy: A Myth?
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Apr 2011
If you are anti-imperialist, ‘Third Worldist’ type – like I unapologetically am – it may warm your heart to know that historically Oxford produced the highest number of folks who gave the rest of the world ‘the British Empire’, which among other things grew opium in India for export to China – as a brilliant economic policy to address the Raj’s trade deficit. (Cambridge was the runner up). Often our own Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is talked about as ‘Oxford-educated’ as if her Oxford education turned her into who she is and what she is made of. As a matter of fact, it was/is her (self-acknowledged) awareness of her parents’ exemplary lives as citizens that was/is her source of inspiration.
→ read full articleThe Intellectual Crisis of Reporting On Burma by the International Crisis Group
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Apr 2011
When European Union policymakers will meet to review the EU Common Policy on Burma, on 12 April, they will be wise to discard the International Crisis Group’s (ICG) recent call for the unconditional embrace of the country’s military dictatorship… The ICG analysts seem to have chosen only evidence that agrees with a pro-trade, pro-aid policy stance, while critically lacking both conceptual and historical understanding of how dictatorships change.
→ read full articleExperts Help to Rebrand Burma’s Failed Dictatorship
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Mar 2011
Every time Burma’s military dictatorship is framed as “new,” it is being rebranded, to use the lingo of corporate advertising. The spoils of the positive public relations are shared as it were between the experts and their organizations that prostitute themselves by spinning for their neo-liberal governmental patrons and corporate “donors” in the West and Burma’s despotic regime, the former’s actual and potential business partner.
→ read full articleAnti-Sanctions Chorus Out of Tune
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Jan 2011
The emerging anti-sanctions lobby should be understood for what it is – the bald promotion of Western strategic and corporate interests. Ending sanctions now will only further entrench military rule, giving it a veneer of normalcy and acceptability, at the expense of Myanmar’s long-suffering people and the country’s equitable economic development.
→ read full articleWhen Pixels, Bytes and VJs Unite
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Dec 2010
Everyone could hear the collective gasp that filled the auditorium – and no one would forget – the very moment when the first signal transporting Aung San Suu Kyi’s animated face to a large screen in London arrived last week.
→ read full articleBurma Needs Inter-Ethnic and Inter-Class Solidarity
Dr Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Dec 2010
The world knows plenty about Aung San Suu Kyi and what she represents. But it knows almost nothing about the generals beyond their international pariah status.
→ read full articleWhat Does Aung San Suu Kyi’s Release Mean for Burma?
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Nov 2010
Since the release of a single dissident Aung San Suu Kyi – while holding 2,100 of her fellow dissidents behind bars who are serving up to 90 years imprisonment – the loud calls for lifting sanctions are repeated by some well-known supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi such as East Timor’s Jose Ramos-Horta, as if pouring more foreign direct investment in Burma’s gas and oil sector and increasing trade with the country’s kleptocratic, dysfunctional State would automatically translate into public welfare.
→ read full articleMyanmar Election Was ‘Categorically Anti-Democratic’
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Nov 2010
The constitution also stipulates the commander-in-chief will be above the law, and that the president must have substantial “national security experience”, something which only military officers can claim. Twenty five per cent of parliamentary seats are reserved for the military and any constitutional amendment must have more than 75 per cent of votes, making reform virtually impossible unless, of course, the generals acquiesce. The parliament is required to meet only once a year.
→ read full articleCivil Society and Its Pragmatically Grateful Children (A POEM)
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Nov 2010
A gift to Burmese voters
→ read full articleWhy Soldiers Don’t Rebel in Than Shwe’s Burma
Dr Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Oct 2010
Besides seeing the generals’ Burma as a world-class disaster of rights abuses and poverty, one fruitful way to understand it would be to view it as a country that is subject to a military-led process of “re-feudalization” of the soldiering class, which is reshaping the country along precolonial feudal lines with adverse domestic and regional consequences.
→ read full articleThe Generals’ Election
Maung Zarni – Himal Southasian,
4 Oct 2010
In the run-up to Burma’s fraught polls, some of the junta’s leading cheerleaders are Western governments who are bending over backwards to justify their stance.
→ read full articleUnderstanding Burma’s Military Reshuffle
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Sep 2010
A lot seems to be happening lately in the world of senior and junior generals in Burma. The reports of the recent military reshuffle involving dozens of senior regime officials cannot be understood fully without taking into account a number of developments both at home and abroad.
→ read full articleBurma: Six Reasons to Welcome US Support for War Crimes Probe
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Aug 2010
On 24 Aug, the United States officially confirmed that it is “exploring how best to proceed” on the initiative to push for “a properly structured international commission of inquiry that would examine allegations of serious violations of international law in Burma”.
→ read full articleSome of the Last Words of Rachel Corrie to Her Mother
Submitted by Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Aug 2010
This was sent by a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer who was on one of the Turkish vessels boarded by Israeli commandos off Gaza.
→ read full articleThe Thinker: Neighbors Like These
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Aug 2010
Once again India has rolled out the red carpet for Burma’s aging despot Than Shwe, whose sleep has reportedly been disrupted by his deep-seated fears of being hauled to The Hague for his alleged crimes against humanity.
→ read full articleBye Bye Democracy! Hello Army-State!
Dr. Zarni – The Irrawaddi, Burma,
17 May 2010
Veiled and well-founded skepticism marked the US reaction to the Burmese military government’s announcement last week that “Prime Minister” Gen Thein Sein and 22 other military officers had resigned from their posts in order to contest the general “election”.
→ read full articleCHASING CHANGE IN BURMA
Dr Zarni,
9 Jan 2010
“Change” has been the most important buzzword in the world of Burma ever since the “8.8.88” events which brought down the flimsy bamboo fence of Gen Ne Win’s “Burmese Way to Socialism.” And yet, generally speaking, most activists and analysts who make Burma change Doe-A-Yay or “Our Business” have failed to either affect the process […]
→ read full articleSTIGLITZ AND THE MASTER OF PUPPETS
Dr Zarni – Democratic Voice of Burma,
10 Dec 2009
The long list of dignitaries with whom Burma’s junta chief has played ‘engagement’ attests to his masterfully strategic use of iconic figures for public relations purposes. Stiglitz may be next. How exciting that Joseph Stilglitz, the high priest of post-Washington Consensus globalization, will be traveling to Rangoon next week to give Senior General Than Shwe’s […]
→ read full articleCONFRONTING THE DEMONS
Dr. Zarni – The Irrawaddi, Burma,
6 Dec 2009
Since independence we Bama have been living a collective lie that is both hegemonic and myopically nationalistic. The supposedly linear progression of Burma or Myanmar, save the colonial interlude of 120 years, from a Buddhist kingdom originating in Pagan to today’s modern nation-state is a complete fallacy, devoid of any empirical evidence. The "we" here […]
→ read full article