Parajutes in Burma, 1944

From Burma '44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 329-330:

Watching the ground operations at the airfields, [Gen. William] Slim was surprised by the range and flexibility of Snelling’s air supply. Rations, fuel and ammunition were, for obvious reasons, the priority, as well as mail, grain for animals and a host of other supplies. ‘The emergency and fancy demands made,’ he noted, ‘were also met with the promptitude and exactness of the postal order department of a first-class departmental store.’ These included blood plasma, instruments, drugs, spare parts for guns and other weapons, boots, clothing, the daily issue of SEAC (the new troops’ newspaper), typewriter ribbons, cooking pots and even replacement spectacles. The sheer range and logistical effort was mind-boggling.

From 2.30pm that afternoon, the first of a number of Dakotas and Commandos dropped supplies over the Admin Box. The multicoloured parachutes had been another bit of clever forward-thinking. Snelling had been unable to get enough parachutes supplied from India and there was no hope of acquiring the number needed from back home in Britain; SEAC was still bottom of the priority list for parachutes, as for everything. The answer was to make them of paper or jute instead – there were a great many paper mills in Calcutta and Bengal was the jute capital of the world. Paper parachutes, it turned out, would not work, but jute ones would. Slim now contacted the leaders of the British jute industry in Calcutta, asking for their help. He told them that to save time they were to deal with him and Snelling direct and warned them that he had no idea when exactly they would be paid. Despite this, within ten days they were experimenting with various types of ‘parajutes’, as they called them. By trial and error they soon arrived at the most efficient shape and weight of cloth, and within a month they had parajutes that were 85 per cent as reliable as normal silk parachutes. It was agreed they would be colour-coded – red, green, yellow, black, blue and orange, each denoting a different type of load. The cost of producing a parachute was around £20 at that time; the cost of a parajute was £5.

Despite this, Slim was rebuked for not going through the proper channels in securing these essential additions to the air-supply operation – not that he was bothered; some things were more important, and in South-East Asia they all had to use their initiative and think outside the box, no matter what some desk-wallahs thought. The entire war there was becoming an exercise in lateral thinking.

Bengal Famine, 1943

From Burma '44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 112-114:

Most Bengalis lived an extremely precarious existence. Some ten million were utterly dependent on agriculture, but of these more than half held less than 2 acres of land and many none at all. There was charity and relief but no social welfare; they had to fend for themselves. Through the first half of 1943 food prices had increased dramatically. ... This was due in part to the shortages in Bengal but also to increased demand for the feeding of troops in India, as well as demand from around the world. It was artisans who suffered first, because as poverty increased so the money available for goods dried up. Then the shortages hit the wider Bengali population, many of whom left the country for the cities. By the time Tom Grounds was on leave in Calcutta, the city was bursting with the influx of impoverished families searching for food.

Yet while the cost of food was certainly a factor, the biggest problem now facing the authorities was how to get food to Bengal and urgently. The state had already been an importer of food for over a decade and most of it had come from Burma, now closed to India. The loss of Burma had been disastrous for Bengal’s fragile economy and the subsequent cyclone had made it catastrophic. Where else could it be sourced? North America and South America were the obvious places, but the amount needed was enormous and would have required a major diversion of shipping at a time when the demands on such seaborne transport had never been greater.

That August, Churchill was not prepared suddenly to release shipping to take food to Bengal; however draconian that may seem, far away in Britain the problems of the Bengalis seemed less pressing than the urgent need to maintain supplies at a crucial moment in the war. Britain and America were fighting in Sicily – an island that could be supplied effectively only by ship; they were about to invade mainland Italy, which also required an amphibious operation and supply; they were preparing for the invasion of north-west Europe; and they were fighting the Japanese throughout the Pacific. Was Churchill really expected to interrupt the war effort, and current operations, with millions of lives at stake in theatres of war around the world? Who was to say what effect such a diversion of shipping would have on the eventual length of the war, with its implications for further loss of life? In any case, ships could not be diverted from the far side of the Atlantic, for example, at the drop of a hat. Churchill was not to blame.

Not all India was facing famine – only Bengal and the north-east. One problem was that in 1935 the government had ceded considerable central power to the provinces, where the regional governments were all democratically elected. The previous year, 1942, these had all agreed to introduce trade barriers between one another. The central government of India now announced there should be free trade in grain, but plans to send relief to Bengal had been obstructed by local government officers, police and other officials who feared their own provinces risked suffering a similar fate to that of Bengal. Wavell, in one of his first acts as Viceroy-Designate, had forced the issue by threatening legal and even military action, and by August substantial amounts of grain had finally begun to arrive in Bengal. It was, however, too little too late to bring a swift end to the humanitarian disaster rising horrifically throughout the region. Relief kitchens hastily set up in Calcutta and elsewhere were simply not enough. With malnutrition came disease; those not dying of starvation were just as likely to succumb to typhus, malaria or cholera, and there were not enough hospitals or medical care to cope.

The famine had certainly been exacerbated by the war and by the fact that the Indian government had prioritized combatting the Japanese above all other matters. Yet the authorities, although slow to react, were certainly not immune to the horrors unfolding and, of course, while the tragedy of human suffering was truly appalling, the famine was yet another massive problem for the Allied command to overcome. It stretched already overstretched lines of supply, pushed the limited medical services to breaking point, affected food supplies to the troops, further sapped the morale of those who witnessed the starving, dying and dead throughout Bengal, and damaged the reputation of the British even more, and all at a time when there was a new Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief.

V Force Intelligence in Burma

From Burma '44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 86-89:

There were code-breakers too, and radio listening, but possibly the most important of all – especially to those now heading to the front – was V Force.

This extraordinary group of native Burmese under British command operated all along the front and were purely intelligence gatherers and reconnaissance – but they were mightily effective. The commanders had detailed knowledge of the local language, culture and conditions. One of them, based further to the north-east in the Naga Hills, was indicative of the unorthodox approach taken by V Force: Ursula Graham Bower was an anthropologist who had befriended the Naga head-hunters before the war, and, as her Christian name suggested, was a woman.

Another was Captain Anthony Irwin, who was operating in the Arakan, and running his own team under the overall charge of one of the V Force originals, Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Donald.

...

V Force were the eyes and ears of the British effort in the Arakan. While Irwin was dependent on his local recruits to collect intelligence, his task was to be the brains behind the operation. An inadequate brain, it seemed to him to begin with, but he learned quickly enough. On parting, Donald had told him: ‘Trust [your] men with everything you’ve got, and they will never let you down.’ Nearly a year on, Irwin knew those had been wise words indeed.

‘These men’ were Mussulmen – local Muslims who had settled in the area some two hundred years earlier. There was now an ethnic split in the Arakan between Muslim and Maugh, who were Hindu, which had led to civil war in the area as recently as 1941; like any civil conflict, it had been brutal, with entire villages decimated by the opposing factions. The result had been that the southern half of the Arakan was now predominantly Maugh, while the north was almost entirely Muslim. This local tragedy rather played into the hands of the British, however, because the Arakan had been conveniently split into two distinct spheres of influence, something they were able to exploit. Muslims hated Maughs and, because the Maughs were helping the Japanese, they hated the Japanese too. Conversely, the Maughs were willing to work for the Japanese against the Mussulmen and, by association, the British. There were two factors, however, that made this a better deal for the British than for the Japanese. The first was that most of the fighting so far had been in the north of the Arakan, where there were fewer Maughs. The second was that because the Japanese held dear the cult of racial superiority, they treated all conquered people with violent contempt, including the Maughs. Furthermore, because Japanese forces were generally so badly supplied – especially with food – they tended to loot what they could from the Burmese without paying any kind of compensation. This was not conducive to winning trust.

Irwin very quickly became an ardent Burmese Mussulman-ophile. They were tenacious, courageous and had an uncanny knack for remembering data. Details of enemy columns were recalled with accuracy; they could tell Japanese planes from Allied long before Irwin himself could ever distinguish them. They would remember with precision exactly where enemy dispositions were and be able to mark them on a map. ‘If they see a British soldier lying wounded and lost in the jungle, they will get him in somehow,’ noted Irwin. Barney Barnett of 136 Squadron, had first-hand experience of this: ‘If they see a Jap body, they will cut off the head and proudly bring it to me, demanding baksheesh’, he noted.

Once, Irwin was sent a map, beautifully drawn and with Japanese positions clearly marked. Also written on the map was a note. ‘Many Japs are looting the publics,’ had been neatly scrawled in pidgin English. ‘Please tell the bombing mans and bomb nicely. Please tell the bombing mans that there are many good publics near and only to kill the Japanese.’

Fighting Malaria in Burma, 1944

From Burma '44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 54-55:

[A] pragmatic mindset was most definitely needed in the battle against endemic sickness. Slim recognized, just as the new Supreme Commander recognized, that prevention was better than cure. Mountbatten had made bringing new medical advances and research to the theatre a priority – something that was far beyond Slim’s own influence; but he could improve medical practice and discipline at the front and he was determined to do so as a major priority. Up until the autumn of 1943, if a soldier contracted malaria, for example, he was then transported, while his disease was at its height, hundreds of miles by road, rail and even sea to a hospital in India. This, on average, took him out of the line for around five months. All too often he might then be re-employed in India and never return to Burma. To get around this problem, new Malaria Forward Treatment Units – MFTUs – were now set up. These were, to all intents and purposes, tented hospitals just a few miles behind the front lines. A man with malaria would reach these within twenty-four hours and remain there for three weeks or so until he was cured. When fit, he was sent straight back to his unit.

Mepacrine anti-malaria tablets were also issued to the men, but their introduction was met with the rumour that they caused impotence. This was entirely without foundation, and Slim rigidly insisted that regimental officers make sure the men were taking their Mepacrine. He even introduced spot visits where every man was checked; if the result was less than 95 per cent positive, he summarily sacked the commanding officer. He only ever had to sack three; the message got around quickly and, equally swiftly, that autumn cases of malaria began to fall.

The regimental officers were also told to maintain strict medical discipline in other areas. Trousers were to be worn, not shorts; and shirts were to be worn with the sleeves down before sunset when insects were at their worst; minor abrasions were to be treated immediately and before, not after, they turned septic. The fight against sickness, Slim insisted, had to be a united effort: discipline, sound practice and common sense were key. And already, as the year drew to a close, the health of Fourteenth Army was showing signs of improving – not massively so just yet, but on the chart that hung on Slim’s wall in his office at Comilla the curve indicating hospital admissions was beginning to sink.

Driving Tanks into Burma, 1944

From Burma '44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 10-12:

Before taking over 7th Indian Division, Messervy had been Director of Armoured Fighting Vehicles in New Delhi and had been a vociferous advocate of more tanks in theatre. It had taken much beating of drums, but eventually he had managed to prove to his superiors that medium tanks such as US-built Lees and Shermans could operate in South-East Asia. The 25th Dragoons had been the first to equip with these 30-ton machines, and it had been planned some days earlier that during the night of 4/5 February the regiment would cross over the Ngakyedauk Pass and report for duty with 7th Division to the east of the Mayu Range, ready to take part in Messervy’s planned assault on Buthidaung.

Later that night, C Squadron also crossed the pass. Among them was twenty-year-old Trooper Norman Bowdler from Dunchurch in the English Midlands. Just a week before, Bowdler had been the loader in his five-man crew, but when the driver had got sick he had taken over and now was responsible for getting their mighty Lee up and over this treacherous pass – and in the dark. He found it a terrifying experience. Above them, Allied aircraft were flying over in order to disguise the sound of the tanks, which would have easily carried to the Japanese positions in the still night air. ‘It was a bit dodgy,’ Bowdler admitted. ‘I mean, getting a thirty-ton tank round these S-bends – well, some of the bends were so severe that you had to go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards to negotiate them.’ He was keenly aware that for all the feat of engineering the creation of the pass undoubtedly was, it was little more than a widened mule track and certainly a long way from being a proper road. In some places, parts of it were bridged by laid tree trunks and Bowdler was worried that at any moment stretches of it would simply crumble away and they would tumble down one of the sheer precipices to the ravine floor 200 feet below. ‘It was so narrow,’ he said, ‘and the tank so heavy – we were fully loaded with ammo, fuel and everything.’ At times, one of the tank’s tracks was actually overhanging the edge of the road as he slewed the beast around a corner. At best there was little more than a yard or so either side of the Lee, and the margins were especially tight around corners that offered very, very little room for manoeuvre.

As a result, it took them much of the night to cross. Bowdler found it more difficult going down the reverse side without the natural braking effect of the climb. Low gears helped, but he was very mindful that this huge weight, crunching over a road that would not pass muster in most people’s book, and being hurried by gravitational pull, could all too easily slip out of his control. The levels of concentration needed were immense, but at long last the road began to level out and in bright moonlight they emerged into an area of paddy, criss-crossed with bunds – the paddy walls – and then eventually leaguered up in an area of elephant grass. Not so very far to the south, Bowdler could hear small arms firing and even the occasional shout. He’d already been in battle before, but here, in the milky darkness of the 7th Division Administrative Area, there was a distinct air of menace.

1949: Vietnam War Goes International

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 290-293:

BROADER INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ALSO SHAPED ACHESON’S thinking on Vietnam in 1949. He began to pay more attention to Southeast Asia’s economic potential, particularly in terms of facilitating Japan’s recovery. Given the instability in China, Washington planners deemed it absolutely essential to secure a stable, prosperous Japan under U.S. control. Southeast Asia, rich in rice, tin, oil, and minerals, and with a population of 170 million (bigger than the United States), could play a principal role in this endeavor. George F. Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff, influenced Acheson in this direction, as did the young Dean Rusk, deputy undersecretary of state and a man Acheson asked to take on a larger role in Asian policy. The maintenance of a pro-Western Southeast Asia, they and other government analysts argued, would provide the markets and resources necessary for Japan’s economic revival—and help the recovery of Western Europe (by then well under way, but showing signs of a slowdown) as well. According to Rusk, the importation of rice from Indochina, for example, could be a terrific boon in securing Japan’s revitalization.

Then, in the second half of the year, came two momentous developments: In August, the Soviet Union for the first time detonated an atomic device; and in September, Mao Zedong’s forces completed their rout of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Specialists had known that it was only a matter of time before Stalin got the bomb, but most thought the time would be the early or mid-1950s, not August 1949. The implications were huge (if not quite as enormous as some doomsayers in Washington proclaimed). It meant the end of the U.S. atomic monopoly and immediately raised fears that Stalin might embark on an aggressive course to expand his global reach. That worrisome thought only gained more currency the next month, when Mao Zedong consolidated his victory in China. Here neither the event nor the timing was a surprise to specialists—Nanjing had fallen in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August—but for ordinary Americans it was sobering to hear Mao dramatically declare, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang and the remnants of his army fled to Formosa (now Taiwan).

Though some senior U.S. officials, Acheson among them, believed that the USSR and Mao’s government would ultimately experience a rift, in the short term the dangers seemed all too real. Instantly, the number of major Communist foes had doubled. As a report by the National Security Council (NSC) had put it in June, “the extension of Communist authority in China represents a grievous political defeat for us.… If Southeast Asia is also swept by Communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia.… The colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements, and it is now clear that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”

There was in fact no such coordinated offensive. Stalin’s interest in Southeast Asia remained minimal, it was soon clear, and his feelings about the Chinese developments were decidedly mixed. Still, U.S. leaders could be forgiven for thinking that Communism was on the march in the region. In addition to Mao in China and Ho in Vietnam, there were Communist-led rebellions in Indonesia, in newly independent Burma, in Malaya, and in the Philippines. All four rebellions would fail in due course, but in late 1949 their mere existence fueled American fears. Did the historical momentum now lie with the Communists? Even if it didn’t in objective terms, might the perception gain hold that it did, producing a bandwagon effect that could have a pernicious impact on American national security interests? It seemed all too possible.

The NSC report, with its warnings of the far-reaching consequences—the Middle East! Australia!—of a loss of Southeast Asia, was an early version of what would come to be known as the domino theory. Knock over one game piece, and the rest would inevitably topple. For the next twenty-five years, high U.S. officials, on both the civilian and the military sides, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, linked the outcome in Vietnam to a chain reaction of regional and global effects, arguing that defeat in Vietnam would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Though the nature and cogency of the domino theory shifted over time, the core claim remained the same: If Vietnam was allowed to “fall,” other countries would inevitably follow suit.

Retreat from Burma, 1942

From Japan Runs Wild, 1942–1943, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 69-70:

The retreat out of Burma into India was a race against time, as it had to be completed before the onset of the monsoon. The troops made it, just. The last stage of the British withdrawal was bogged down by torrential rains, which began in May. Pearl “Prue” Brewis, a British nurse, was on a train that managed to travel 65 miles in six days, since movement could only take place at night. On the sixth day, while the carriage was sitting idly on the tracks, a senior railway official entered and offered a ride up north on his train. It was crowded, but fast. “Standing room only, you know,” Brewis said about the 100-mile ride north. “Actually, we got the last plane to leave Burma because the next day the aerodrome was bombed.”

More than a million Indians lived in Burma prior to the war, but most still considered India their home. When the Japanese launched their invasion, there was a mass exodus of Indians, and soon most major Burmese cities were virtually emptied of them. The senior medical officer, Brigadier Short, described the Indians who arrived at the town of Ledo in easternmost India in the summer of 1942: “Complete exhaustion, physical and mental, with a disease superimposed, is the usual picture… all social sense is lost… they suffer from bad nightmares and their delirium is a babble of rivers and crossings, of mud and corpses… Emaciation and loss of weight are universal.” Slim watched how an Indian woman died from smallpox, leaving behind her small son. He and his staff bribed an Indian family to take the boy with them. “I hope he got through all right and did not give smallpox to his new family,” Slim wrote in his memoirs.

In the manner of Dunkirk, the defeat in Burma was in a way turned into a victory by the British. “The Army in Burma,” the official British history says, “without once losing its cohesion had retreated nearly one thousand miles in some three and a half months—the longest retreat ever carried out by a British Army.” The American assessment of the British record was less kind: “Though there were cases of individual heroism and desperate fights by small isolated forces, the main body of the British made little or no efforts to stand and give battle,” an official US military report on the Burma campaign said. “The piecemeal defense was a piece of stupidity which resulted in tens of thousands of casualties to the troops, the complete destruction of every town and city in Burma, and the loss to both the Chinese and the British of a vast amount of irreplaceable installations and equipment.”

Where Religion Preserves Language

From The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China, by David Eimer (Bloomsbury, 2014), Kindle pp. 181-182:

‘Many young Dai can’t read our language and don’t really understand our culture or Buddhism. A lot of Dai people can speak Dai, but they don’t teach it in normal school any more so you have to become a monk to learn how to read and write it,’ said Zhang Wei. As in Tibet, the monasteries have become the only place in Banna where locals can get an education in their native language. But unlike Tibet, and in another sign of the Dai’s success in convincing the CCP of their essential affability, novices in Banna are allowed to participate in the regular school system as well.

‘You can study Dai here in the morning and go to normal school in the afternoon,’ said Zhang Wei. He believed that was behind the recent rise in the number of monks. ‘A lot of young Dai were put off becoming monks because they thought it was a hard life and what they learned wasn’t useful in the outside world,’ he told me. ‘Now it’s not as strict a life as before. When I was a young novice, the teachers would beat you if you disobeyed them. But we’re not allowed to do that any more.’

Less welcome has been the diminishing of Banna’s role as a key centre of Buddhist learning for Dai people across South-east Asia, a result of the devastation wrought on Banna’s monasteries during the Cultural Revolution. Large numbers of monks fled across the frontiers, while villagers buried scriptures and icons in the jungle so the Red Guards couldn’t destroy them. Many of the temples have since been restored, but Wat Pajay’s status as a spiritual university has been superseded by monasteries outside Banna.

‘Before the Cultural Revolution, Thai and Burmese and Lao monks came to Wat Pajay to study. Now, we go to Thailand and other places. It’s a complete change,’ said Zhang Wei. Fluid borders mean Banna’s monks can visit monasteries in Myanmar and Laos unofficially. But the Dai’s position as a model minority makes getting permission to go abroad far easier than it is for Tibetans or Uighurs. Zhang Wei had already spent a year in Yangon, as well as three in Singapore.

Wat Pajay’s links with overseas monasteries are a crucial element of the cultural and religious networks that tie the Dai of different countries to each other. Da Fosi is an irrelevance in that scheme; its imposition on Jinghong just another instance of Dai culture being appropriated by the Han for the purposes of tourism. And, inevitably, pretty Dai women act as the guides there. But out in greater Dailand, in Banna’s villages and across the borders, the Dai are quietly getting on with worshipping their way, while keeping their language and traditions alive.

Burma's Own Trouser People

From The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in the Shadow of the Empire, by Andrew Marshall (Counterpoint, 2003), pp. 78-79:

At the far end of the carriage sat the soldiers: armed, sleek, hostile. I guessed that some were recent graduates of Maymyo's military academy. Earlier I had watched them on the platform. Some had stood alone, while others had grouped into silent conspiracies of khaki; none of them had mixed with the civilians. I wondered what the academy had taught them. 'They spend four years getting brainwashed, and when they come out they expect all civilians to behave like soldiers,' a Burmese dissident told me later. 'But of course we don't want to behave like soldiers. That's why we chose to remain civilians. But they think they are the greatest people in Burma. They think they know what's best for the rest of us. They don't.' Casual visitors to Burma are unaware of the visceral hatred most people have for the military, particularly among ethnic minorities. The same dissident told me how a group of Kachin farmers stood by and watched as six young Burmese soldiers writhed in agony in the wreckage of a crashed army truck. When the dissident's sister, who had witnessed the crash, pleaded with the farmers to do something, one of them chillingly replied, 'Why should we? They will only live to make our lives worse. It is better to let them die.'

As far as I could work out, the military seemed utterly unaware of its unpopularity, although its guardians were alert to any potential blots on its escutcheon. I had heard, for example, that Burmese cartoonists working for newspapers or magazines were forbidden to draw men in trousers. This was because the only Burmese men who worse trousers were soldiers, and soldiers could not possibly be allowed to appear in such an undignified and dangerously satirical art form.

Football Comes to Burma, 1878

From The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in the Shadow of the Empire, by Andrew Marshall (Counterpoint, 2003), pp. 28-30:

Even before the Football Association was established in England in 1863, wherever the Brits went in the world the beautiful game went with them. British railway engineers took the sport to Argentina; Scottish textile workers taught the Swedes; the Russians learned it from English cotton-mill managers. And one day in 1878 George Scott strode on to the bumpy games field next to St. John's College with his curious students, punted a football through a blue afternoon sky, and the Burmese game was born.

The first organized football match ever played in Burma took place at St. John's College around 1879. Scott captained the St. John's team, whose opponents were a scratch eleven from the southern port town of Moulmein....

Matches were soon drawing large crowds, not only in Rangoon but across British-occupied Lower Burma. There was some concern at the passion the game aroused among the natives, but also relief that Association rules had been adopted. 'To think of hot-headed Burmans engaged in the rough-and-tumble of Rugby excites lurid imaginings,' shuddered one colonial official. For the British, football was a way of communicating ideas of fair play and respect for authority. For the Burmese it was something else: a rare opportunity to thrash their colonial masters at their own game.

The Burmese were no slouches with their feet. They had grown up with chinlon, a kind of volleyball played only with the feet and the head, and using a rock-hard rattan ball which could split a man's eyebrow clean open if headed wrongly. Hard-fought contests between British and Burmese footballers became regular affairs during the cool season. The Burmese team was called The Putsoes, a putso being a longyi that has been tucked neatly up around the thighs like a large, decorative nappy. The British team was called The Trousers.

Burmese Junta's Policies toward Minorities

From Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, by Thant Myint-U (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Kindle Loc. 1569-1581:

In a way, the Burmese army’s policies towards their opponents were the direct opposite of the policy of Western governments towards the ruling junta. Western governments had employed economic embargoes and diplomatic isolation, hoping that by shunning the Burmese generals, the generals would eventually come around. They didn’t. The Burmese army employed very different tactics. They fêted their erstwhile foes, calling them ‘leaders of the national races’. They took them to the big cities, created new desires and allowed them to enrich themselves. Business links, even illicit ones, were actively promoted. They did this knowing that it would sap the insurgents’ strength as fighting organizations. By 2010 the Burmese army was in a far stronger position than when the ceasefires were first agreed.

Under the new constitution, some power would be devolved to local governments, each with their own semi-elected legislatures. It would be far from a federal system and the real authority of the local governments would be heavily circumscribed. But it was a small concession to ethnic minority leaders who had been fighting for genuine self-determination.

The Burmese military leadership also offered the ex-insurgent armies a deal on their future armed status: reorganize your men into a ‘Border Guard Force’, that will partly be officered by us and that will ultimately come under our authority. It meant a partial but not complete integration with the Burmese army. Acceptance would mean sweet business deals and a place for former rebel leaders in the new order. Some of the smaller militias accepted. The rest have not, so far.

Burma's Student Nationalists, 1940s

From Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, by Thant Myint-U (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Kindle Loc. 1280-1290:

When the British left Burma in 1948, they left the country in the hands of the men who had been on the extreme fringes of the student nationalist movement just a decade before. They were almost all Buddhists (by background if not practice) and ethnic Burmans. Before the Japanese invasion, they were not particularly important, but the war had radicalized society and they had seized the opportunity, first to collaborate with the Japanese and then to turn against them, in March 1945, just in time to avoid being arrested and hanged as Quislings. They included men like Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi. They were immensely popular and even though they were still in their late twenties and early thirties stood head and shoulders above the older politicians, who were tarred as not having been daring enough. Aung San and many of his colleagues were then gunned down in 1947 in a still puzzling assassination plot, but others from the pool of ex-student radicals formed the first independent government. They would take Burma out of the British Commonwealth and launch the country down what was to be a not very happy path through the rest of the twentieth century.

Some on the British side had been worried about the fate of the Shan and other ethnic minorities in an independent Burma and suggested detaching the upland areas and keeping them as a British crown colony. British frontier officials were particularly fond of the hill peoples, such as the Karen along the Thai border, who had fought consistently and often very courageously against the Japanese.

How Yunnan Became Chinese, and Muslim

From Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, by Thant Myint-U (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Kindle Loc. 2475-2501:

Seven hundred years before the present wave of tourists was an altogether different wave, of Mongols, Turks and Islam. The Mongol conquest of Yunnan in the thirteenth century brought this hitherto independent kingdom for the first time under Beijing’s control and began a process of integration into ‘China proper’ that has continued to today. The Mongol conquest also brought an astonishingly diverse influx of mainly Muslim peoples, from across their Eurasian domains.

Though the invasion forces were ultimately under Mongol command, many of the officers and most of the soldiers were Turks or people from further west. The force that invaded Burma for example is said to have included no fewer than 14,000 men of the erstwhile Persian Khwarezmid empire, under their own commander Yalu Beg. Others came to garrison the new possession. They included Turks from Samarkand, Bokhara, Merv and Nishpur. They also included tribal peoples like the Kipchaks and even Bulgars from the lower Volga. Yunnan itself had been conquered by the Mongol Prince Uriyangkadai who had also conquered Baghdad, and his forces most likely included captive soldiers from the Abbasid caliphate as well as southern Russia and the Ukraine.

There were even more exotic immigrants. They included the Alans–a Sarmatian tribe today known as the Ossetians–who had submitted to the Mongols and had provided a thousand warriors for the personal body guard of the Great Khan. A son of the Alan chief, Nicholas, took part in the conquest of Yunnan, and men from the North Caucasus were posted along the Burmese borderland.

A member of the Mongol imperial clan, Prince Hugeshi, was appointed ‘prince of Yunnan’ whilst the old ruling family, the Duans, were allowed to stay in Dali and keep the title of ‘maharaja’. The Muslim newcomers, based at Dali, became extremely powerful and the most powerful of them all was a native of Bokhara named Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din Omar. He claimed descent from the emir of Bokhara (though some say his family were originally from Cairo) and by the late 1250s he was a rising star in the Mongol establishment. He served in Baghdad and in China and was appointed as the top administrator in Yunnan in the 1270s. Today the Muslims of Yunnan regard him as the founder of their community, a wise and benevolent ruler who ‘pacified and comforted’ the peoples of Yunnan.

Sayyid Ajall was officially the Director of Political Affairs of the Regional Secretariat of Yunnan, about as bureaucratic a title as one can imagine in medieval times. According to Chinese records, he introduced new agricultural technologies, constructed irrigation systems, and tried to raise living standards. Though a Muslim, he built or rebuilt Confucian temples and created a Confucian education system. His contemporary, He Hongzuo, the Regional Superintendent of Confucian Studies, wrote that through his efforts ‘the orang-utans and butcherbirds became unicorns and phoenixes and their felts and furs were exchanged for gowns and caps’. There were many other civilizing missions on China’s periphery but only in Yunnan was one conducted under Muslim (and essentially Turkish Muslim) leadership.

In this way, Yunnan became known to the Islamic world. When Sayyid Ajall died in 1279 he was succeeded by his son Nasir al-Din who governed for five years and led the invasion of Burma. His younger brother became the Transport Commissioner and the entire family entrenched their influence. There were still very few Han Chinese in Yunnan and the growing Muslim community began to excel as long-distance traders as well. In the early fourteenth century, the great Persian Jewish historian Rashid al-Din Hamadani stated that the Dali region had become exclusively Muslim.

What the River Kwai Meant to Thais

From In Buddha's Company: Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War, by Richard A. Ruth (U. Hawaii Press, 2011), pp. 42-44:

Behind the confident statements issued by Thai and US leaders throughout the first half of 1967, the battle readiness of the regiment was uncertain. American military personnel who had come to train the Thai [Queen's Cobra] regiment were unimpressed by the volunteers' level of preparedness. From early June, in the ten weeks that remained before embarkation, the American advisers guided the Thai unit through field exercises and training missions in Lopburi, Chonburi, and Kanchanaburi. The Americans had designed "an intense training" program that "drilled the Thai [troops] in the exact tactics and methods of operation employed by the Viet Cong." They hoped that this crash course would help the Thais counter the guerrilla warfare methods being used by the Vietnamese guerrillas. All of the American instructors came from experienced combat units in South Vietnam and were eager to impart the lessons they had acquired. They attempted to simulate the conditions that the Thais would face in South Vietnam, but despite the physical similarities between Thailand's and South Vietnam's landscapes, the Americans found it difficult to impose a sense of urgency or even realism on the regiment that had hitherto been regarded as a domestic symbol. In Kanchanaburi the Americans led the Thai troops in field training exercises that crisscrossed the jungles along the Khwae (or Kwai) River, not far from the site of the bridge built by forced labor for the Japanese Imperial Army's "Death Railway" during World War II. The fictionalized retelling of the bridge's construction, as presented in Pierre Boulle's 1954 novel and its 1957 film adaptation, was on the minds of the Americans as they trained the Thai troops. The hint of cinematic make-believe suggested by the Khwae River location may have contributed to the growing unease among the American instructors. It was as if their appreciation of the book and film undermined their own attempts at simulating realism in the jungles there. The Americans' effort to impose realistic conditions on the exercises were compromised by the feeling that they had been dropped into a movie set on which a familiar, unrealistic film had been made. While the Thai troops were certainly aware of the cinematic resonance that the Khwae River setting elicited, the region offered them another set of specifically Thai symbols born from a different semifictional source: Thailand's nationalist history.

The area used in the training exercises was not far from several sites important to the historical imagination shared by most Thai soldiers in this era. Kanchanaburi's location below the Three Pagoda Pass put it on a major route traditionally used by the Burmese and Siamese armies while invading and raiding each other's kingdoms. In the nationalist version of Thailand's history prevalent in 1967, a retelling of events that was particularly popular with members of the Thai military, the Burmese of old were always portrayed as the Thai people's archenemy. The natural corridor created by the mountains to the west and the Chaophraya floodplain to the east was the site of several celebrated (and historically embellished) clashes between these occasionally bitter rival kingdoms.

The battle of Nong Sarai was certainly on the minds of the Thai volunteer soldiers as they trained for their South Vietnam mission. It had occurred during a phase of Ayutthaya's history when the kingdom's Thai rulers were struggling to retain their sovereignty after several decades of Burmese military occupation. At this site in January 1593, King Naresuan the Great, the most revered figure in this nationalist history, won Siam's greatest military victory. With his forces pressed to the breaking point, Naresuan was said to have called out the Burmese crown prince to challenge him to a duel on war elephants. After a few minutes of fierce combat, Naresuan got the better of his Burmese rival and killed him with a well-aimed slash of his sword. The Burmese forces panicked and fled south-southwest toward Burma. Naresuan's army pursued them through Kanchanaburi, decimating their scattered lines.

The Thai soldiers preparing to fight in South Vietnam relished their proximity to the site of Naresuan's victory. Joseph Callaway described his Thai trainees talking about a centuries-old victory over the Burmese "as though it took place only a few years before." They cherished the historical memory of the warrior king and asked his spirit to bless their upcoming adventure. The men prayed in an ubosot (Buddhist ordination hall) said to have been visited by Naresuan while he was fighting in the area. Many recalled dreaming of Naresuan while training in Kanchanaburi and fighting in South Vietnam....

In the midst of this atmosphere of competing cultural and historical symbolism, the Thai troops added one realistic detail to their training procedure that may have trumped even the Americans' passion for realism. The Thai troops carried live ammunition along with the simulated rounds used in their training because they felt they required protection against the dangerous forces that inhabited the Thailand-Burma frontier, everything from cobras and tigers to opium smugglers. Although the American trainers felt that the Thais did not fully comprehend the danger posed by the Viet Cong guerrillas, they were flabbergasted to discover how anxious this apparently sleepy western province made the volunteers.

Flickr's Fractured Greetings: Korean

Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by Flickr's cutesy attempts to improve international understanding (or whatever) by telling you how to say some equivalent of Hello in a randomly chosen language whenever you refresh your Flickr homepage? The one that set me off most recently is Korean Bangawoyo 'Pleased (to meet you)', which corresponds in usage to Japanese Hajimemashite, French Enchanté, or Romanian Îmi pare bine (or Frenchified Încântat), and so on. None of those equivalents are on Flickr's list of greetings. For Korean, I would have expected something like Annyeong (안녕), which is a good match for Arabic Salaam or Hebrew Shalom.

Do Flickr's intrepid researchers just ask random speakers of random languages for greetings and then accept whatever they're told? Have they never heard of Omniglot? Can someone tell me what Mingalaba really means in Burmese? 'Come eat!' perhaps?

One could occasionally hear schoolboys in rural Japan (when I was a kid in the 1950s) greet the rare European-looking foreigner with the first English phrase they had had to memorize in school, "This is a pen!" A former Peace Corps volunteer in Korea told me that the equivalent greeting there was "You are a monkey!" Both would be refreshing additions to Flickr's randomly generated greetings.

UPDATE: Of course, "Haro! Haro!" was by far the most common greeting directed at Westerners when I was a kid, but was somewhat less common when the Outliers visited in 1985, and much, much rarer during our sabbaticals there in 2005-2006, even when we were pretty far off the usual foreigner circuits. Being greeted as if I were a talking parrot used to irritate me a lot as a kid, as did constantly being stared at, or having my skin or hair stroked or cheeks pinched by little old ladies when I was a child. When a bunch of junior high school boys tried out their "Haro!" on me in the gardens of Ginkaku-ji (the Silver Pavilion) in 1985, I responded in Japanese with "Haroharo tte ningen no kotoba desu ka?" ('Is "haroharo" a human word?'). That seemed to silence them for a few moments.

Foreign Policy on Indonesia vs. Burma

In Foreign Policy's Shadow Government, Dan Twining compares recent positive developments in Indonesia with negative developments in Burma.

Indonesia's political revolution was also spurred by a regional wave of democratization that spread from the Philippines in 1986 to South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, and beyond over the following decade. After free parliamentary elections, Indonesia held its first direct elections for president in 2004, followed by those which have just given President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a decisive mandate for a second term.

The popular and performance legitimacy required by a system of democratic accountability has led SBY, as he is popularly known, to aspire to lead Indonesia to new heights. With the country's respected former central bank governor as his new vice president, the leadership team has set a target of matching China's economic growth rate and attacking entrenched corruption, a corrosive legacy of Suharto's clientelistic rule. Democratic Indonesia is finally beginning to punch its weight geopolitically: international newspaper headlines celebrate "Indonesia Rising" and suggest Indonesia as "Another ‘I' in the BRIC Story." The U.S. National Intelligence Council predicts that Indonesia will have an economy larger than those of most European nations by the 2020s. Leading Indonesian public intellectuals like Rizal Sukma ambitiously propose "a post-ASEAN foreign policy" of "strategic partnerships with global powers" grounded in Indonesia's values as a democracy. Yudhoyono speaks proudly of Indonesia's democracy as a source of soft power in the world and wants to leverage it to expand respect for human dignity and government accountability as sources of regional security, including through new institutions like the Bali Democracy Forum.

Burma is a different story. Its widespread poverty and brutal autocracy are a cancer in the heart of ASEAN, the club led by Asia's "tiger" economies that inducted Burma in 1997 in the hope that doing so would spur the kind of opening of Burma's economic and political system that has transformed the fortunes of its neighbors. It hasn't. Leaders in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and elsewhere are embarrassed by the Burmese junta's misrule and have been increasingly outspoken in saying so -- including during the debate over ASEAN's new charter, which creates a regional human rights body and is grounded in a framework of political and economic modernity that is anathema to the generals in Naypyidaw (Burma's new capital, built deep in the jungle and featuring plush underground bunkers for the country's paranoid leadership).

Since the junta rejected the results of the country's last elections in 1990, Burma's people have grown poorer as its ruling elite have grown richer from trade in gems, timber, narcotics, and other commodities, as well as the development of offshore natural gas fields that will deliver billions of dollars in revenues to Burma's governing elite over the coming decade. Civil conflict stemming from the junta's rule has produced millions of internally displaced people and refugees. Forced and child labor are rampant. The regime's security forces fired on peacefully demonstrating monks and rounded up large numbers of innocent civilians following non-violent protests in 2007. The country's political opposition has been eviscerated. The junta may be cooperating with North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

In short, the pathologies that afflict Burma's failing state, all either derived or exacerbated by political misrule, make its regime a threat to its people, its neighbors, and the wider world. Burma's descent is in many respects a mirror-image of the success of Indonesia's vibrant democracy next door.

via Oxblog

Burma: Engagement Has Failed, Isolation Has Failed

I've posted a good bit about Burma since starting to blog almost four years ago, but I've been hesitant to post much now because I feel we are all little more than drive-by rubberneckers, turning our heads toward Burma just long enough to catch a glimpse of yet another passing segment in the endless video of disaster news that no one can really do much about—apart from finding a way to pin the blame on one's favorite ideological demons, of course. Every disaster is good for blind partisans.

But a current article in Foreign Affairs seems to offer a useful retrospective on two opposing diplomatic dead-ends. Both engagement by its neighbors and isolation by more distant but powerful forces seem to have failed.

U.S. policy toward Burma is stuck. Since September 1988, the country has been run by a corrupt and repressive military junta (which renamed the country Myanmar). Soon after taking power, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), as the junta was then called, placed Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition party the National League for Democracy, under house arrest. In 1990, it allowed national elections but then ignored the National League for Democracy's landslide victory and clung to power. Then, in the mid-1990s, amid a cresting wave of post-Cold War democratization and in response to international pressure, the SLORC released Suu Kyi. At the time, there was a sense within the country and abroad that change in Burma might be possible.

But this proved to be a false promise, and the international community could not agree on what to do next. Many Western governments, legislatures, and human rights organizations advocated applying pressure through diplomatic isolation and punitive economic sanctions. Burma's neighbors, on the other hand, adopted a form of constructive engagement in the hope of enticing the SLORC to reform. The result was an uncoordinated array of often contradictory approaches. The United States limited its diplomatic contact with the SLORC and eventually imposed mandatory trade and investment restrictions on the regime. Europe became a vocal advocate for political reform. But most Asian states moved to expand trade, aid, and diplomatic engagement with the junta, most notably by granting Burma full membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997.

A decade later, the verdict is in: neither sanctions nor constructive engagement has worked. If anything, Burma has evolved from being an antidemocratic embarrassment and humanitarian disaster to being a serious threat to the security of its neighbors. But despite the mounting danger, many in the United States and the international community are still mired in the old sanctions-versus-engagement battle....

If ASEAN and Japan are critical components of any international approach to Burma, China and India could be the greatest obstacles to efforts to induce reform in the country. China has many interests in Burma. Over the past 15 years, it has developed deep political and economic relations with Burma, largely through billions of dollars in trade and investment and more than a billion dollars' worth of weapons sales. It enjoys important military benefits, including access to ports and listening posts, which allow its armed forces to monitor naval and other military activities around the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea. To feed its insatiable appetite for energy, it also seeks preferential deals for access to Burma's oil and gas reserves....

It will also be a challenge getting India on board. Despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's trumpeting of democratic values, India has actually become more reticent when it comes to Burma in recent years. This is particularly regrettable considering that Congress was one of the Burmese democratic opposition's strongest supporters during much of the 1990s and that Suu Kyi continues to cite Mohandas Gandhi as a model for nonviolent resistance. The change occurred during the past decade, after New Delhi detected that China's political and military influence in Burma was filling the void left by the international community's deliberate isolation of the junta. Like China, India is hungry for natural gas and other resources and is eager to build a road network through Burma that would expand its trade with ASEAN. As a result, it has attempted to match China step for step as an economic and military partner of the SPDC, providing tanks, light artillery, reconnaissance and patrol aircraft, and small arms; India is now Burma's fourth-largest trading partner. Singh's government has also fallen for the junta's blackmail over cross-border drug and arms trafficking and has preferred to give it military and economic assistance rather than let Burma become a safe haven for insurgents active in India's troubled northeastern region....

Given the differing perspectives and interests of these nations, a new multilateral initiative on Burma cannot be based on a single, uniform approach. Sanctions policies will need to coexist with various forms of engagement, and it will be necessary to coordinate all of these measures toward the common end of encouraging reform, reconciliation, and ultimately the return of democracy. To succeed, the region's major players will need to work together.

Fat chance of that happening, I'm afraid.

Etymologically, Myanmar = Burma: Round Two

I've blogged on Myanmar = Burma before, but it seems to bear repeating before that sad country once again fades from international consciousness. Here's the email I sent to the PBS NewsHour last week.

As a regular NewsHour watcher, I find it painful to hear Jim Lehrer pronounce Myanmar as ME-and-Mar, for two reasons.

(1) One is the same reason English speakers insist on pronouncing Kyoto in three syllables. They can pronounce kyu in one syllable (as in 'cue ball'), but not kyo. I'm sure Jim can pronounce myu in one syllable, as in 'musing', but can't get mya out in one syllable.

(2) But I wouldn't bother to write you about it if I hadn't heard Jim offer a lame bit of newsroom CW to explain why he insists on using the name he can't pronounce rather than the name he can pronounce. Etymologically, Myanmar and Burma are the same word, just pronounced differently. One is formal and literary, the other more common and colloquial. Here's what a reputable academic specialist says on the matter: "Myanmar/Burma," by Bertil Lintner, in Ethnicity in Asia, ed. by Colin Mackerras (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 174:

In 1989, Burma's military government changed the name of the country to Myanmar. The reason, it said, was that the British colonial power had named it 'Burma' after the main ethnic group in the country, the Burmese, who inhabit the central plains. 'Myanmar', it was argued, included the Burmese and all other 'ethnic races', including the Shan, the Karen, the Mon, the Kachin and more than 100 other nationalities. This is, however, historically and linguistically highly dubious. The once-British colony has always been called Burma in English and bama or myanma in Burmese.

The best explanation of the difference between bama and myanma is to be found in the Hobson-Jobson Dictionary, which remains a very useful source of information. 'The name [Burma] is taken from Mran-ma, the national name of the Burmese people, which they themselves generally pronounce Bam-ma, unless speaking formally and emphatically.'

Both names have been used interchangeably throughout history, with Burma being more colloquial and Myanmar more formal. Burma and Myanmar (and Burmese and Myanmar) mean exactly the same thing, and it is hard to argue that the term 'Myanmar' would include any more people within the present union than the name 'Burma'.

There is no term in the language that includes both the Burmans and the minority peoples, since no country with the borders of present-day Burma existed before the arrival of the British in the nineteenth century. Burma, with its present boundaries, is a colonial creation rife with internal contractions and divisions.

If an academic source is too arcane, then perhaps Jim will listen to what a fellow journalist, James Fallows, has to say. He, too, insists on saying Burma not Myanmar [but for political reasons].

The BBC has also weighed in on the topic, favoring the alternative Burma, but its pronunciation guide for those who insist on using Myanmar lists several possibilities—MYAN-mar, my-uhn-MAR, MEE-and-mar, and mi-AN-mar—but recommends myan-MAR (all without pronouncing the final r).

For more discussion, visit Language Hat.

UPDATE: I'm way out of my depth on the issue of Burmese orthography, but from what I understand, written Burmese and spoken Burmese are in a diglossic relationship perhaps akin to that between Classical Arabic and the rich diversity of contemporary colloquial Arabic, or between Classical Chinese and modern spoken Chinese languages and dialects. Written Chinese underwent drastic reforms during the early 20th century to reflect modern spoken Mandarin, but Burmese still awaits such orthographic reforms. So people may write Burmese as it was spoken 1000 years ago (e.g., Mran-ma) but pronounce the same words the way they have turned out after 1000 years of sound change (e.g., Bam-ma), even writing millennium-old grammatical elements that are now archaic or obsolete in the spoken language. It would be as if all English speakers shared no writing system except a Runic version of Anglo-Saxon.

The Race for Burma's Natural Gas

The February issue of HIMAL SOUTHASIAN reports on the competition for Burma's huge deposits of natural gas and what it means for human rights in one of the most oppressive regimes in Asia.

Even as Southasia’s energy-strapped, fast-growing economies have led many to wonder whether antagonistic neighbours may be pushed together into forced cooperation, on the eastern edge of the region a less optimistic dynamic is playing out. Indeed, the huge natural-gas reserves of Burma have caused many Asian governments to turn a blind eye to Rangoon’s continued oppressive and non-democratic tactics.

Burma stands on the world’s tenth largest natural-gas reserves, estimated at more than 90 trillion cubic feet (tcf) in 19 on-shore and three major offshore fields. As the economies of South, Southeast and East Asia have soared upwards in recent years, the Shwe ‘gas block’ in western Burma’s Arakan state has instigated intense competition between India, China, South Korea, Thailand, Japan and Singapore. South Korea’s Daewoo International estimates that just two blocks from the Shwe gas field together have a reserve of about 20 tcf, equivalent to about 3.5 billion barrels of oil. There are currently four stakeholders in the Shwe Gas Project – Daewoo (which controls 60 percent), KOGAS of South Korea, and two Indian interests, the Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL)....

Burma remains one of the most repressive countries in Asia, despite promises for political reform and national reconciliation by its government, which continues to spend 40 percent of the country’s national budget on defence, and just five to ten percent on health and education. Burma’s military, the Tatmadaw, is Southeast Asia’s second largest conventional force, estimated at over 400,000 troops. The junta stands to profit by up to USD 17 billion dollars from the Shwe Gas Project over its lifespan, which could become the government’s single largest source of revenue – up to USD 825 million per year....

Meanwhile, in early January 2007, just days after China and Russia jointly blocked a proposal before the United Nations Security Council to censure Rangoon’s continued human-rights abuses, the Chinese government landed a new deal to further explore Burma’s petroleum resources. Negotiations between India and Burma over gas pricing are continuing, with an agreement expected by the middle of the year. Such is the desperation for Burmese natural gas in India, and such a fear of growing Chinese influence on Burma, that human-rights issues will cut much ice in New Delhi – particularly if the Indian civil society continues to keep mum.

via The Marmot

Finding Burmese Speakers During WW2

On Language Log, Mark Liberman has been excerpting passages from J Milton Cowan's brief memoir, "American Linguistics in Peace and at War."

It is difficult today to visualize some of the obstacles we had to overcome. To illustrate I will tell the Burmese story because it has multiple punch lines. In the lottery of languages William S. Cornyn drew the Burmese straw. This frightened him a bit but Leonard Bloomfield promised to hold his hand. Nobody knew where to find any native speakers of Burmese and the files of the Alien Registration Act were classified. The Department of Immigration and Naturalization said there were no Burmese legally in the country at the time. There were supposed to be some sailors who'd jumped ship in New York and San Francisco but they hadn't caught up with them yet.

Mortimer sent me to the Pentagon to see a young fellow in G-2 (Military Intelligence), Major Dean Rusk, a name not so well-known in those days, but known to Mortimer. I described the non-existence of known Burmans and why we wanted some. He volunteered to see what could be done with the roster of Alien Registration. He phoned our offices the same afternoon, saying tht he had over a hundred names and he'd call back as soon as he could have them decoded. Next morning he phoned to say there was something funny, there were Abernathys, Browns, Davenports, Fitzgeralds and so on down through the Youngs. It turned out that the Roster listed those foreigners residing in the U.S. who had been born in Burma, regardless of their current nationality. These were the names of children born to business people and missionaries while living in Burma. There were only two names that sounded exotic enough to be possible Burmans.

Read the rest at Language Log

When I was a missionary kid in elementary school in Kyoto, I remember reading a biography of Adoniram Judson, a pioneering Christian missionary in Burma at a time when converts risked death sentences for changing their religion. Judson was no slouch as a linguist, either.