Believe it or not, Aung San Suu Kyi has prolonged the lifespan of Burma’s repressive junta.

Provided that history repeats itself—and the present discussion fails—she would again have served her purpose. Her sincere statements and pictures of her with the generals are all the junta needs to keep itself in power.

Kyaw Zwa Moe (VS ‘06), comments in the Thailand-based English language news magazine The Irrawaddy.

Read the full commentary HERE.

What on earth did she see in him? For the duration of her short-lived marriage of convenience to President Pervez Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto’s friends and political rivals wondered how she, a populist democrat, could live with him, a military dictator. The mystery deepened when Musharraf declared a state of emergency and began a massive crackdown on democratic institutions–and Bhutto responded with only mild criticism, refusing to rule out a power-sharing arrangement with him. Some said her motivation was pure self-interest: she was that desperate to return to power. Others bought Bhutto’s explanation that a deal with Musharraf would allow Pakistan a smooth transition to democracy. And conspiracy theorists concluded that she had agreed to join him only at the insistence of their matchmaker, the Bush Administration. Aryn Baker (’01) reports for TIME.

Read the full story HERE.

Photograph by Sarah Caron / Polaris for TIME

In India, tens of thousands of Hindus go to the Ganges River to bathe, wash their clothes, and cremate their dead. The river is heavily polluted. More than 400 million people rely on the river and attempts to clean up the river have failed. Anna Sussman and Jonathan Jones (’05) made this video Safe Waters in Varanasi, India.
Find more from these two on their blog Backpack
Journalist

Over 5 million people in India have been infected with HIV since the country’s first case was discovered 20 years ago. The epidemic, which has tested the India’s health care and economy, was largely ignored in the nation’s mainstream media until the turn of the century.

“Even I turned away from the topic at first,” said Vanaja C, a visiting scholar at Berkeley who has recently produced a documentary on India’s AIDS crisis. “Society has been in a state of denial.”

As the epidemic has continued to grow, so has the media’s coverage of it. But stories typically hinge on the death aspect of the disease, Vanaja said. “I wanted to make a film about AIDS, but I didn’t want it to be about dying,” she said. “I wanted it to be about life.”

The following are still photos taken from Vanaja’s 2007 documentary, “+ve Living.”

For many Chinese, Tibet is not a controversial topic. It’s merely a region the average Chinese citizen knows nothing about.

That was the case for Jianqiang Liu, a senior investigative reporter at China’s Southern Weekend newspaper, before he traveled thousands of miles from Beijing into the Tibetan Plateau.

Throughout last year, Liu traveled across the autonomous region, in Lhasa and far into the countryside. The issues facing the Tibetans became apparent, Liu said.

“I didn’t know a thing about Tibet until I met a Tibetan,” Liu said.

Here are some of the photographs Jianqiang Liu took in Tibet. He presented a slideshow of photos on Oct. 31 in Asia Colloquium.

Visiting Scholar Dev Chatterjee (’09) interviews UC Berkeley professor Pranab Bardhan for India’s Business Standard.
Question: Are programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee a good idea?
Answer: First of all, there are interesting ways in which information technology has been used in Mexico and Brazil to identify the beneficiaries and monitor the implementation of massive welfare programmes that can reduce the extent of corruption. Secondly, we should not forget that Indians live in a welfare state for the rich.

Read the full article HERE.

The pastor of the Oakland Burmese Mission Baptist Church had his Sunday service completely planned. As the protests in his home country erupted into violence, and reports of attacks on monasteries, shots fired, and a rising death toll came in, Lone Wah Lazum wrote his sermon and picked out songs for his church to sing. He decided he would not discuss the events in Myanmar — he didn’t want to bring up bad memories for his congregation.

Early Sunday morning, Mr. Lazum changed his mind. Claire Trageser (’09) reports for Novometro.

Read the full story HERE.

Photo by Mary Lang.

It’s the week before finals at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), and, like at any college campus across America, the labs are chock-full of tousled students glued to computer screens and guzzling coffee as the night ticks on.
But these students are not just cramming for exams or writing term papers. They’re coordinating a city-wide campus movement against General Musharraf’s imposition of emergency, the dissolution of the judiciary, clampdown of the independent media and the detention of over 3,000 lawyers, human rights activists and other civilians on the pre-text of anti-terrorism. Manal Ahmad (’09) reports for North Gate News Online.

Read the full story HERE.

No UN envoys to Burma have turned into superman. Instead, all six previous diplomats buried their mission under a tomb stone marked “Democracy” and “Human Rights.” Burma is now a diplomatic graveyard.

The six UN special envoys—starting with Japanese diplomat Sadako Ogata who was appointed in 1990 as an independent expert of the UN Commission on Human Rights to the Malaysian businessman Razali Ismail, the UN secretary-general’s second special envoy to the country—quit their job in deep frustration.

Kyaw Zwa Moe (VS ‘06), comments in the Thailand-based English language news magazine The Irrawaddy.

Read the full commentary HERE. 

People in Pakistan awoke Sunday morning to find all private news channels blacked out from their TV sets.

They had paid their cable bills all right. It’s just that the President and Chief of Army Staff General Pervez Musharraf imposed emergency rule in the country the night before, suspending the constitution and with it the fundamental freedoms of speech and public congregation, giving authorities carte blanche to arrest people without informing them of charges.

For those who had witnessed General Musharraf’s first coup eight years ago, it was a familiar situation.

Manal Ahmad (’09) writes about the situation in Pakistan for North Gate News.

Read the full story HERE.