Democracy: Burmese Style
I’ve just noticed this article on The Times web site.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned Burmese democracy leader, will be forced to quit her political party and banned from taking part in elections, under new laws published today by the country’s military dictatorship.
The laws bar from membership of a political party anyone serving a prison sentence, thus excluding Ms Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest. Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), has 60 days to expel non-eligible members and register with the election commission if it is to take part in elections promised for later this year.
Democracy? What democracy!
But at least the Burmese have their supporters and protectors; the Chinese. But then the Chinese know all about how you enforce human rights!
The Busway Makes the BBC
At last, the row about the Cambridge Busway seems to be getting serious.
It’s made the BBC.
Echoes of Orde Wingate
In The Times today, there is an obituary of Major-General David Tyacke. The first two paragraphs talk about how he worked for Orde Wingate.
David Tyacke was the last officer on the staff of the Chindit HQ at Sylhet in Assam to see General Orde Wingate on the morning he left to fly to “Broadway” and “White City”, the jungle bases of 77 and 111 Brigades attacking the Japanese lines of communication in Burma.
Writing in old age, Tyacke described how, when Wingate’s aircraft was first reported overdue, a strange euphoria spread among the HQ staff as they realised that the general would not be keeping them on tenterhooks that evening. But it was soon replaced by a grim foreboding that their eccentric but visionary leader was dead.
Somewhere my father must have met Wingate, or perhaps someone he knew had served with him. But he was one of my father’s heroes.
I have read quite a bit about Wingate and feel that although some of his views were questionable, on the whole his was the right sort of thinking in difficult times. Wingate definitely was not a conservative thinker. The trouble today is that we have far too many of those.
Andrée Peel: A Brave Lady
Andrée Peel was a heroine of the French Resistance and she died a few days ago. This is the first paragraph of her obituary in The Times.
The youthful Andrée Virot was running a beauty salon in the Breton port-city of Brest when Germany invaded and overran northern France in May-June 1940. Being adventurous and high spirited, she was an early recruit to the Resistance movement but her work was initially confined to the distribution of an underground newspaper. Later she worked for an escape line smuggling shot-down Allied airmen out of France to Britain and the reception and dispatch to safety of the occasional agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
She went on to survive the war and incarceration in concentration camps. After the war she married an Englishman and settled in Bristol.
Perhaps though she had the last laugh on all those who punished and imprisoned her. She lived to be 105.
Would we do the same now, if we were fighting a foe as ruthless as the Nazis?
The Anonymous Widower 