A few weeks ago I wrote 'Women in Burma must act as an Agent of Change' but I don't mean to say that women are more able than men. As we require many points of view to recreate new ways of moving into a better future, we need the opinion and experience of both men and women. Women will bring different perspectives not because women are more warm hearted and care, naturally, but because women have different life experience.

Over the last year and a half, this has been the uppermost question in everybody’s mind regarding the Government of Myanmar’s ceasefire negotiations with the ethnic armed groups. This question became especially acute at the beginning of the year when President Thein Sein ordered a ceasefire but the Tatmadaw seemingly ignored the order and continued to press forward using heavy artillery to seize key Kachin Independence Army positions.

One thing that did not fail to fascinate me while I was in Shan State was seeing Buddhist monks driving.

I was on my way from Lashio to Wanhai, headquarters of the Shan State Progress Party / Shan State Army, 100 miles south of Lashio, when I ran into them: some driving cars and others motorcycles, with the tails of their saffron robes flying and flapping behind them in the wind.

By Sai Latt, Guest Contributor
– 16 April 2013 Posted in: Burma

Introduction

Former US President Jimmy Carter traveled to Myanmar in early April. In addition to meeting government officials during his trip, Carter also met ethnic leaders with whom he discussed the country’s long running civil war. Carter plans to open a branch of the Carter Center in Myanmar in order to study ethnic conflict and monitor the country’s political transformation. During Carter’s meetings, ethnic leaders, as usual, suggested that federalism and self-determination are the solutions to the country’s problems. But are they?

One of the things that struck me when I was in Lashio was the media, or rather its apparent freedom.

The first thing I did when I was shown into my room at the hotel was turning on the television for the latest news. And the Democratic Voice of Burma’s TV program greeted me right away with reports from Letpadaung.

Still more old songs.

One of the first questions asked by U Aung Min, Vice Chairman of the Union Peacemaking Work Committee (UPWC) and Naypyitaw’s chief negotiator, when we met in Lashio on 20 March, was whether I was still writing songs. The message was obvious: He knew who I was, although I had never tried to make it a secret.

This month, I’d like to talk about some old songs in relation to my trip back to Shan State last month.

So I was back in Lashio, a place I used to call my hometown until I left it in 1962, 51 years ago. I was 14 then.

As I was driven from the airport across the town to the hotel, I looked left and I looked right. Of course, I knew it would be nothing like what Tom Jones said in his song Green, green grass of home:

Sai S.W. Latt

Geography Department, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Correspondence: Sai S.W. Latt (email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

One major aim of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) integration programme, supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), is to foster regional ‘community’ for sharing resources, people and financial flows. This ‘community’ is the target of both economic growth and poverty reduction. The emphasis on ‘community’ in the ADB’s mushrooming quantity of documents raises important questions about what kinds of people are included, in what roles and with what kinds of support and protection. This paper explores these questions in relation to the political economy of regulating ethnic migrants from Myanmar working in Thailand. This paper argues that extra-legal relations between migrants and state/para-state agents constitute a crucial part of regulation. In transferring the regulation of migration to the national scale, the ADB inadvertently reinforces national differences between Thais and cross-border people. Additionally, the complicated and fluctuating implementation of national regulations in both countries leaves migrants subject to violence and extortion from state and quasi-state agents in Thailand. This paper shows that the dynamics of global capitalism require ‘deportable labour’ supplied by ethnic migrants who are included in the GMS community as the most invisible, vulnerable and exploited members.