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Burma: A Growing History of Violence

EI TU TA, Burma-At 35, Naw Win Schwe has already lost more than she cares to think about. During a government military offensive near Mon township in March, Naw Win's husband Maung Thanlwin was arrested and killed by Burma's ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). Since then she has also lost her home, land and almost everything she and her husband had once owned. Eventually she was forced to flee for her own life as well, which is how she ended up in the Ei Tu Ta refugee camp on the eastern edge of Burma's Karen state. 

Saparmurat Niyazov

What Transition for Turkmenistan?

The death of the President-for-Life of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, on 21 December 2006, the shortest day of the year, has again proved that all humans are mortal, and that death is the great equalizer.  The Turkmenbashi, "Father of all Turkmen" had set the stage for his own immortality, having written down from heavenly sources a two-volume book The Ruknama (The Book of the Soul) on the model of the Koran which was dictated to but not written by the Prophet Muhammad.

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Frozen, Like a Photograph: Injustice in Vietnam’s Central Highlands

I am sitting before my uncle. His eyes rove over documents typed on an archaic machine with a wild menagerie of Vietnamese punctuation-- squiggles, dots, and tiny circles-scrawled in by hand with black ink. The thin onionskin paper of the documents crinkles audibly with the rise and fall of his breath. We are in a single-story, door-less box that serves as the local police station in Vietnam's Central Highlands, tucked into lushly green coffee plantations of the foothills that surround for miles.