Last week a strange thing happened in Burma-Sorry-Myanmar, after jet fighters, bombers and helicopter gunships strafed the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) lines.

While the government went on to protect the attackers by saying the air force was merely using its planes “to deliver food supplies to its troops and local people and to provide security for the workers who are repairing roads and bridges damaged by the KIA attacks,” the military’s own mouthpiece Myawaddy website reported that a key KIA base had been seized on 30 December “with the help of air strikes in the region.”

I have written at least once about Emperor Asoka Maurya, who had flourished in the 3rd century B.C. and had conquered most of India today and several kingdoms outside it.

On 10 October, the alliance of 10 political parties, which includes 5 ethnic parties, reached agreement to draft a parliamentary proposal for the 14 states/regions to be granted a federal system. “We envisage a federal system similar to the United States,” Thu Wai, leader of the Democratic Party Myanmar (DPM) told Irrawaddy.

Burma’s commander-in-chief, speaking at the graduation ceremony for the military’s Medical Academy in Rangoon on Friday, 21 December, that development of nuclear technology in the country would not be to produce destructive weapons but to use it in medical, research and energy purposes.

According to Aung Thaw, Deputy Defense Minister, as reported by Reuters last month, “the military is both the architect and guardian of his country’s embryonic democracy.”

His statement said a lot of things unsaid:

The most prominent inquiry commission set up in Burma’s new history was the Frontier Areas Commission of Enquiry (FACE) in 1947. Its job was to find out the best way a union between Burma and the Frontier Areas, as the non-Burman territories were known at the time, could be forged.

I was thinking about catchwords – well known phrases that would reflect the situation and the players involved – when the Palaung Women’s Organization (PWO)’s The Burden of War report came into my hand yesterday.

First of all, I would like to make it loud and clear I don’t consider myself wise. Only that I’m still finding my way to that sublime state. I would therefore be speaking here only as a bearer of messages from the wise.