[HN Gopher] A Journey into Rebel-Held Myanmar
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A Journey into Rebel-Held Myanmar
Author : jprohov
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-07-18 18:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.noemamag.com)
| beacon294 wrote:
| Hi Charles, I can't read your devex article about interfacing
| with local governments unfortunately due to some sort of login
| wall.
|
| What if, instead of struggling to acknowledge local pariah
| governments, aid organizations ONLY recognized local governments?
| moffkalast wrote:
| A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working
| for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of
| tribal leaders by bribing them with a tangerine. But their
| caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a
| bandit. So we went looking for the tangerines. But, in six
| months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day, I saw
| a child playing with a tangerine the size of a ruby. The bandit
| had been throwing them away. Some men aren't looking for anything
| logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or
| negotiated with. Some men just want a tangerine.
| lukan wrote:
| A very interesting article about a conflict I know allmost
| nothing about. With the intention to figure out, how to
| effectivly help people, under oppressed governmen, by helping the
| local community structures directly.
|
| _" I was making the trek into Myanmar to get a sense of how
| communities were organizing themselves in the vacuum created by
| the retreating Tatmadaw"_
|
| _" The restrictions placed by Western governments on engaging
| with pariah regimes limit the ability to negotiate access to
| communities and peoples in desperate need of assistance."_
|
| _" or however dramatic and intense the conditions ordinary
| people confront in such contexts, their community structures
| continue to function. It is on such local governance structures
| that any international effort in contested political settings
| should be built."_
|
| _" What I discovered in the course of the five-week trip was a
| country in the midst of a profound transformation. The struggle
| against the Tatmadaw has morphed from a fight by ethnic groups to
| control territory into the emergence of a new form of
| participatory governance. This governance model has been created
| organically by a new generation of activists"_
|
| But meeting the goal here concretely is not so easy, as
| traditionally international help goes to strictly civilian
| organisations only, to not participate in the war. But here there
| is no seperation.
|
| _" I mentioned to Arkar Min Tun, one of the founding members of
| the group, that in order to receive international support it
| could be in the organization's interest to clearly separate the
| military and civil components of KA-Zero's activities, he told me
| it was not possible for as long as the fighting continued. The
| country was in the midst of an all-encompassing revolution; any
| separation of activities would be artificial and would undermine
| the legitimacy of the movement in the eyes of the population"_
|
| All in all, the rebels sound quite nice:
|
| _"When you give a soldier a gun to fight, you need to tell him
| that he needs to know that he will have to give it back."_
|
| But there are also dark sides, for sure:
|
| _" Sometimes this creates challenges. Marwi explained to me that
| many of his backers exhort him not to take prisoners."_
| Unbefleckt wrote:
| If it wasn't for Rambo 4, I wouldn't even know about this
| conflict, and I'm not entirely ignorant of world events.
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(page generated 2024-07-19 23:14 UTC)