Thirteen years ago, on a reporting assignment for The Boston Globe, I described “Burma” as a “deteriorating” country where “the frayed fabric of a nation [was] coming apart at the seams.” The capital, Rangoon, was “clogged with 20-year-old cars running on spare parts and spewing black exhaust.”
Today, Yangon is an entirely different world. And the politics of Myanmar have progressed so rapidly that long-time visitors can be forgiven for doing double takes. Referring to Aung San Suu Kyi as the leader of a democratically elected government rather than an opposition activist detained under years of house arrest still boggles the mind. Yet ethnic tensions, which lead to decades of civil war, remain, as do human rights abuses by the military.
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