Skip to footer

Myanmar's about-face: 5 recent reforms

Since 1962, Myanmar's dictatorship has jailed the opposition, beat up monks, denied aid to disaster victims, and run scorched-earth campaigns against ethnic minorities. That may be changing, however. Here are five key changes the regime has made in just a matter of months.

4. Releasing prisoners

  • By Simon Roughneen Correspondent

The big story in Myanmar lately has been the freeing of some 600 political prisoners.

Among those released were Zarganar, the country’s most famous comedian, jailed after criticizing the government’s (lack of) response to 2008 cyclone Nargis, which killed at least 140,000 people – though Burmese officials quoted in WikiLeaks cables say the toll could have been twice that. 

Also freed was Paw U Tun, better known by his nickname Min Ko Naing, or “Conqueror of Kings,” who led student protests against Army rule as far back as 1988 and was again jailed after the 2007 “Saffron Revolution,” named for the color of robes worn by the thousands of monks who fronted the protest.

The sight of these men and women walking free has been compared to Nelson Mandela’s release from jail in South Africa in 1990. 

And the man at the helm, Thein Sein, has been called an F.W. de Klerk – the regime insider who ended apartheid in South Africa.

Aung San Suu Kyi says she trusts Thein Sein, but many dissidents, particularly those in exile, remain skeptical, saying he is the figurehead rather than the driving force behind changes that have baffled and surprised many.

4 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.