Burma: blog by "Finding George Orwell in Burma" author

Emma Larkin (a pseudonym) is the author of the book Finding George Orwell in Burma, and she recently returned from a couple of weeks in that country. She is now blogging on the Penguin USA website (that's her publisher) about the ongoing, violent crackdown by the military regime. Larkin has previously written about the state's brutal response to peaceful protests by Buddhist monks, and attempts to block information about human rights violations by blocking internet access.

Snip from today's post:

As soon as the protests had been violently quashed by the army, the regime set about making everything look normal again. At the UN General Assembly, the Burmese junta's Foreign Minister, Nyan Win, even went so far as to declare, "Normalcy has now returned to Myanmar [Burma]."

But Rangoon felt to me like a movie set. I imagined an invisible director ordering a cluster of fruit vendors to set up their stalls at the edge of a market, calling for a crowd of pedestrians to surge across a busy street, and hanging billboard advertisements for the latest cinema releases.

On my first day in Rangoon I telephoned an old friend who had a merry greeting: "Welcome to my wonderful country where nothing has just happened!" Later that same day I bumped into another friend who was visibly agitated by events: "Everyone is just pretending," she told me.

Things might look normal on the surface but, in the diary I kept while I was there, the adjectives I used to describe the moods of the various people I spoke to are repeated over and over again: angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed…

Link to full text of post. (Thanks, Sarah Odio)