Monthly Archives: January 2009

Having just returned from a an absolutely lovely holiday in Myanmar I really need to put a few pictures and can only encourage anyone who has any interest to please visit the country. This country is absolutely stunningly beautiful and worth all the time you can put aside for it.

So where or what is Myanmar? Myanmar is the biggest country in mainland South-East Asia by land area and has a population of 55 million. You never heard of it? Maybe that’s because you’re still calling it Burma – the same way Ceylon and Rhodesia are now called Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe, Myanmar stopped being Burma a while ago.

Ok, so by calling it Myanmar we are accepting the “evil regime”? No we are not. In the Burmese language the country is known as Myanma-h (as there is no alphabet ‘R’ in the language like in many other South-East Asian languages). The biggest race in the country might be the Burmese race but it also includes many others – so no you are not respecting the regime, you are just disrespecting all the non-Burmese citizens of the country as well as intentionally ignoring what they themselves call it in their own language when you call it Burma.

Before I left someone asked me where I’m going on holiday and when I said where I was going all they could say was “supporting a military dictatorship are we?”. So everytime I take a cab in Yangon, buy a drink at a bar or buy some flowers at the marketplace I’m obviously not supporting the locals, I’m only supporting the military regime?! People, seriously?

I want anyone who reads this to know that I donot criticise for the sake of crticising – one of the things that annoyed me most when studying political science at university were those who disrupted any discussion by being ‘anti’ everything and criticising anything and everything by default and never having any constructive suggestions (most of these then became journalists). So no, I’m not criticising for the sake of it. I’m criticising because I went to an absolutely beautiful country with wonderful people who are being neglected and ignored by a world who thinks it knows better than to give them any positive attention at all.

The local population can really use the tourism money and this boycot is only making things worse for the civilians while it hardly affects the “evil regime” at all. Myanmar is a country rich in natural resources – be it teak wood, minerals, precious and semi-precious stones or natural gas. This is where the regime is making their money and not from small tourist dollars. By boycotting the country it is the local civilian population who suffer and the regime remains largely unaffected while China banks in on their resources as the rest of the world boycott them (the same way the Chinese bank in and drain natural resources on a major scale in central Africa and anywhere else the rest of the world decides to ‘boycott’ – but I’ll stop before I go too off track).

Coming to think of that – how come we don’t criticise China anymore huh? Or what about the world’s little darling Cuba? When exactly did supressive communist regimes turn into such a good thing that we should support?

Anyway, check out the next post for the lovely pictures of this absolutely beautiful contry.