Foreign Perspectives

Let’s face us, the vast majority of us know diddly squat about the situation in Burma.

It’s one of those peculiar places in south-east Asia that aren’t on the flight path of the major airlines that we tend to get around on so there aren’t any stopovers there such as are commonplace in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. So, very few of us know anyone who has been there on holiday and therefore we know even less about it than we do about many countries around the world in this day of widespread international travel.

So, in many cases it is a country that simply doesn’t appear on our radar until something really serious happens there.

Sadly, that “something really serious” is happening right now. The government (if such a word can be applied to the people running that country) don’t want us to know about it but thanks to the communications infrastructure in place these days, the only thing that they can do is try to round up those that would write about it from within the country and yet still the news gets out despite their major-league clampdown on freedom of expression. So we have the Burma Blog among many others.

Buddism is one religion that just doesn’t get into any kind of conflict so it must be some measure of how bad it is when even they have been dragged into events taking place in Burma.

Let’s hope that the situation is resolved as quickly and with as little bloodshed as possible.

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