Video rebel
Burmese guerrillas are Hollywood's biggest fans

BRIAN EADS / CAMERA PRESS

In a village in Burma, we watch videos. The VCR and television are mounted on an ox cart. Traders sell cans of Heineken beer and boiled duck eggs. People from nearby villages come to watch B-Grade American films. The Burmese love stories. Three Burmese Army regiments are stationed ten kilometres from here. But there are no soldiers in the village, only ten ethnic Karen guerrillas. Two hours’ walk away, a military dictatorship terrorizes the Burmese people, but there is a democracy of sorts here.

A trader travelling with the video show asks me if I have seen the ‘Aung San Suu Kyi film’. He is talking about John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon, a film about the 1988 democracy uprising in Burma. The massacre of thousands of Burmese people by the military serves as a backdrop for the personal journey of an American doctor coming to terms with the murder of her husband and child. But in Burma the film is famous because it features Nobel Peace Prize winner and Burmese democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. In the West the film was a flop.

The trader says that everybody in the nearby occupied town has heard of Beyond Rangoon. He says everybody wants to see it. But if the Army knows you have seen the film, you will be sent to jail for five years. Screenings must be kept small and secret.

It would take only two hours for an informer to reach the Burmese army base and two hours for the Burmese army to return to kill ‘Karen terrorists and the foreign mercenary.’ The Burmese military dictatorship does not recognize journalists. In Burma there is one television station, one radio station and one newspaper. In Burma, the army considers Beyond Rangoon foreign subversion. But it is as popular with the people as Aung San Suu Kyi, who won 80 per cent of the vote in elections the army now refuses to recognize.

The Karen guerrillas carry their weapons at all times. We watch the video at night with our rucksacks on our backs. When we sleep, everything but our blankets stays in our rucksacks. The last time the Burmese army came to the village they fought a brief battle with the guerrillas at dawn. Two guerrillas and ten soldiers died before the guerrillas fled. The army then burnt down a quarter of the houses.

I spent three days and two nights with the guerrillas in the village. On the third evening we heard reports of Burmese Army troop movements, and ran towards the shelter of the mountains. Burma, every article will tell you, is a land of fear. It happens to be true.

Martin West

Move over, big boys
Japanese women are throwing aside their traditional, submissive roles and pushing their way into a sacred male preserve – sumo wrestling. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the men who control the sport are welcoming female fighters in hopes of boosting their Olympic credentials. Traditionally, sumo involves large men trying to push or throw each other onto the ground or out of a circular ring called a dohyo. Top professionals live like superstars. So far, about 70 women have registered with the Shin Sumo Federation, a subsidiary of the Japan Sumo Federation.

Gemini News Service

Prisons, by Microsoft
Many of Microsoft’s products are packaged and shrink-wrapped by prisoners in Washington’s Twin Rivers Correction Centre (TRCC). According to Dan Pens, co-editor of Prison Legal News, Exmark, a company specializing in product packaging used 90 prisoners at TRCC to package 50,000 units of Windows 95 demo disks and direct-mail promotional packs.

Red Pepper, No 34

Peace Prize
The International Peace Bureau is to award the Sean MacBride Peace Prize to the four women who were arrested last year for disarming a Hawk jet destined for Indonesia, and who were subsequently acquitted on charges of causing criminal damage estimated at $2.4 million. The women told the court that they had disarmed the Hawk jet – using household hammers – in order to prevent it from being used to continue the crime of genocide against the people of East Timor.

Seeds of Hope/East Timor Ploughshares

RICHARD OPEN / CAMERA PRESS

Snake alarm
Burglars beware! The citizens of Harare, Zimbabwe, are investing in new anti-burglary technology – the snake! For about $12 a day, Ben Vermuelen of the company Repsec leaves a few snakes inside the house of the client. Outside are signs in two languages and a cartoon version for the illiterate, that the house has new occupants with venomous attitudes. ‘People put in hi-tech security systems,’ said Vermuelen, ‘but criminals are going hi-tech as well. I’m getting back to basics: superstition and fear.’ In Harare, highly poisonous Egyptian cobras run wild. And Vermuelen picks them up for a fee from those who do not like freelance cobras patrolling their backyards.

Down To Earth, Vol 5, No 21

Dollar bills
Opening up to the world outside

MARTIN STOTT

A billboard by Havana’s main boulevard, El Malecon, shows a confident Cuban shouting across the water at a shaking cartoon Yankee: ‘Hey imperialist! We have absolutely no fear of you!’ It serves as a reminder of the tense relationship that has prevailed between the US and Cuba for over 35 years. And yet despite the US blockade, Cuba’s relationship with other Western nations has changed dramatically since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90.

The visible signs are striking. The dollar is the currency of choice, if not universal use, throughout Cuba. Tourism has replaced sugar as the main foreign currency earner. In the 1970s no more than 3,000 tourists visited Cuba each year. Last year numbers topped a million for the first time. In February, Fidel himself played host to a group of American aficionados who had defied the blockade to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Cohiba cigar. Guests, including movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger and top model Linda Evangelista participated in a lavish auction that raised more than $1 million. In January 1998 the Pope is due to make an historic visit of reconciliation.

Cuba is in the throes of rapid modernization. Not the kind witnessed in Eastern Europe emerging from the rubble of communism, but perhaps more according to the Chinese model. Joint venture companies are sprouting up all over the place, from the Mexican company that took over the telephone system at the beginning of the year to the Benetton franchise in the newly restored Plaza de San Francisco in Habana Vieja (Old Havana).

Habana Vieja shows the most visible signs of modernization. Declared a World Heritage site by the United Nations in 1988, large parts of the city were, and still are, falling down. But money is pouring in from Western Europe and Canada. Whole streets of buildings 200 years old or more are being rebuilt. For every dollar a foreign company invests, a third goes to rebuild the city and a third to sustain the public services that make the city work: schools, cheap public transport and hospitals.

The Government’s attitude to the changes puzzles the locals. For example paladares (private restaurants) have been legal with a government licence since 1995. They provide excellent food in private houses, paid for in dollars. However, because they compete with state-owned restaurants and hotels, only a limited number of licences have been given out, and no more than 12 seats and a restricted range of dishes are allowed. As our hostess in an unlicensed Havana guesthouse put it: ‘The Government cannot decide. They love the dollars you bring and they want to encourage a class of entrepreneurs like me, but it gives us an independence and freedom they are not sure they can handle.’

Martin Stott

Eco-terrorism
In the name of eco-tourism, the Government of Laos has given the green light to the Malaysian Syuen Corporation to develop a mammoth resort on 18,500 hectares of national parkland near the Nam Ngum dam reservoir. The $211 million ‘Phou Khao Khouay-Nam Ngum Resort’ project, including a mini-city of hotels, golf courses, casinos and a ‘lovers’ paradise centre’, will force local residents to move out of the area.

New Frontiers, Vol. 3, No. 3

CHINA

Mad cows in Africa
The suspicion that banned European products and wastes end up in Africa was confirmed when Kenyan customs and health authorities impounded at least 3.2 tonnes of suspected British ‘mad cow’ corned beef at Mombasa. The importation generated much anger because of earlier local press reports that Conservative British politicians thought Africa, with its food shortages and famine, was an ideal destination for the potentially lethal British beef. The corned beef arrived aboard the ship Annamaria with documents alleging that the consignment came from Brazil. However, authorities claim that close scrutiny indicated that the beef came from Britain.