Trade Bolsters Myanmar Junta

Another birthday of imprisoned dissident Daw Aung Sung Suu Kyi has come and gone, and the plight of Burma slips again to the back burners of the highest-profile international press. But dig into local and regional media, and you’ll find a wealth of coverage of the repressive junta that took control of Burma and renamed it Myanmar in 1989. More than a million refugees have fled the country since the coup, many to India and Bangladesh, where dissidents publish newspapers and Web sites about their homeland. Inter Press Service reports that forced labor on a mass scale persists despite agreements with the International Labor Organization to monitor and register complaints directly within the country. The agreements have fallen by the wayside since an internal coup replaced the ruling military faction with another, less accommodating group.