Road To Rangoon: Democracy In Myanmar

One of the icons of democratic voice is jailed Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for more than 15 years, and even though the Junta denounces her as a "foreign puppet", she has become a voice for peace and non-violence, having been awarded the Nobel peace prize laureate.

In the global play of politics, Burma became independent from Britain in 1948, but democracy did not last long and soon a military coup under general Ne Win filled the political void for almost a quarter of a century. In 1988, after the military government violently repressed demonstrations where hundreds of people were killed, there was an internal coup within the party. Multi-party elections were held in 1988 where Aung San Suu Kyi won by a landslide, but the unfortunate outcome was that the dictatorship refused to hand over power.

For the last twenty years or so, the military dictatorship has run the country into the ground economically and socially - the average life expectancy (as of 1995) is around 60 years old and the infant mortality rate is 62/1,000 births. There's no reasonable expectation that the standard of living has improved since then.

Political repression in Myanmar has immersed this country in decades of fear, and violent repression.