Issue 411 of New Internationalist

Reader-owned global journalism

May 2008

May 2008

Burma should be celebrating 60 years of independence, but instead the country is colonized from within. The military dictatorship that’s got its jackboot on the nation’s neck now goes by the name of the State Peace and Development Council. But peace and development are just two things among many it has not managed to deliver – large sections of the country are riven by civil war as armed groups fight military rule and, often, each other. The *NI* speaks with Burmese people, both inside and outside the country. With great fear and courage they are trying to keep the flame of freedom alight.

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In this issue

  • Former political prisoners speak out.
  • Among Rangoon’s six million souls, a few have secret conversations with *Dinyar Godrej*.
  • A spate of murders of gays (known locally as ‘batty men’) and lesbians is just the most recent chapter in the sordid history of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF).

  • It was the meddling British who used their cartographic skills to delineate the country that would become Uruguay in the early 19th century, as a buffer zone between the two regional giants, Argentina and Brazil. The result was a country stuck in the shado
  • Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French writer and philosopher
  • Jesus kept some shady political company. And his lifestyle has obvious radical resonance. But was he out to overthrow the state? *Terry Eagleton* examines the Gospels for evidence.
  • Today over 80 per cent of Burma’s people are Buddhist and the country has the largest number of monks as a percentage of the total population.