[DOWNLOAD] "Burmese Days: The Junta is Content to Rule over Ruin (World)" by The American Conservative ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Burmese Days: The Junta is Content to Rule over Ruin (World)
- Author : The American Conservative
- Release Date : January 12, 2009
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 60 KB
Description
AS THE WHEELS LOCKED DOWN on the final approach to Burma's Yangon Airport, the young Japanese diplomat sitting next to me said; "If you haven't been here since '95, I expect you will see a lot of changes." The cavernous marble and glass terminal building, its corridors echoing with the footsteps of our arriving planeload of people, was new. The smiling, attractive, female immigration and customs officers were quite a change from the scowling, hostile guys I had become familiar with in previous visits, scattered between 1971 and 1995. The Kuwaiti Government Airbus parked at the only other active gate was new, too, but somehow not surprising. As I stood in the immigration line, I saw, waiting on the other side of the glass, a familiar face. It would be hard to credit, if I hadn't known, that this serene, dignified 70-year-old man had spent more than 15 years in the infamous prisons of longtime Burmese dictator Gen. Ne Win and his successors, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. When I first met him back in 1994, U Ye H'toon, dissident attorney and scion of two of Burma's great families, had just been released from his latest three-year stint as a guest of the regime--leaded water provided free of charge for guests of a political persuasion--and he did not look well. Now he appeared to have fully recovered.