BURMA: TWO NAMES FOR ONE DICTATORSHIP

A few months after the violent suppression of the demonstrations against the military dictatorship, fear is palpable in the streets of the old capital. There where the sound of gunfire drowned out the cries of the monks and the impoverished citizens, tourists hailing from well-fed republics are beginning to reappear. In a countrywhere a foreign journalist is branded“persona non grata” andwhere the arrest of dissidents, the torture and execution of political rivals, the rape of democracy and brutal suppression constitute a daily, nightmarish practice, the War Zone film crew managed to evade the police and the military’s secret services, filming rare footage of the new capital and interviewing the protagonists of the popular uprising that was drowned in blood. Opponents of the regimewhowere forced to flee the country overnight, displaced persons who found themselves in refugee camps, guerillas who are still fighting against the junta and representatives of humanitarian organizations talk about a dictatorship with two names: Burma or Myanmar...