Burma: An Upside to the Relief Effort | Newsweek Scope

Wrongs Council
9/22/2009 12:00:00 AM
Despite a high-profile effort to reform the world's top human-rights panel, the new U.N. Human Rights Council continues to face the same criticisms that plagued its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights. Experts say bloc voting, loose membership standards, and bias against Israel are keeping the two-year-old council from living up to expectations as a responsible watchdog over global human-rights norms. It is earning a failing grade from a broad range of groups, including human-rights advocates, international-law experts, and democracy activists. Experts say the council's condemnation of the human-rights situations in Darfur, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are steps in the right direction, and there is also a broad expectation that a new U.S. administration in Washington could change the contentious relationship between the council and the United States, which is not a member. But in a year during which the world body marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many see the new rights council as a stain on the U.N.'s reputation.
Letters: August 24 & 31, 2009
8/29/2009 12:00:00 AM
Player Hater
John Barry 8/21/2009 12:00:00 AM
Why? Now that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are home from North Korea and John Yettaw has been freed from a Myanmar prison, that's surely the question. Why were three idiots worth rescue missions by a former U.S. president and a serving U.S. senator? They weren't kidnapped; they weren't hostages. All three knowingly broke the laws of the countries they were in, and, in the process, brought harm to innocents. The pair caught inside North Korea put at risk members of the human-rights network that was helping them with their story. (The two have still to give their version of events; Brent Marcus, spokesman for their employer, Current TV, says the network is respecting their request to have time to reunite with their families.) Yettaw's adventure led to a further 18 months of house arrest for the iconic opposition leader, 64-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, who has already been confined for 14 of the past 20 years.
The Swimmer Speaks
Tony Dokoupil 8/21/2009 12:00:00 AM
How was a retired bus driver from Missouri able to make a flipper-clad, two-kilometer swim to the heavily guarded house of Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi, one of the world's most famous dissidents? While John Yettaw languished in Burmese jail during his trial for "illegal swimming," all we could do is speculate. But now, in an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK, Yettaw has offered an explanation: Burmese security officials let him. "I don't know why they didn't stop me," he says. "The man with the AK-47 shook my hand and let me in."
Same Old Song and Dance
Ginanne Brownell 8/21/2009 12:00:00 AM
The guilty verdict handed down last week came as no surprise to those following the bizarre case brought against Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi by the country's military government. The junta—in power since 1962—claimed that the Nobel Peace Prize winner broke the rules of her house arrest when she allowed American John Yettaw into her house after he swam across a lake to see her last May. Her original sentence was three years' hard labor, but in a PR play, Gen. Than Shwe, the junta leader, commuted it to 18 months' house arrest.
WORLD AFFAIRS
The Stealth Rescue

They line the roads south of Burma's main city, Rangoon. Aid groups call them "separated children" because many don't know if their parents are dead or alive. They await food, water and other essentials delivered by private groups operating without legal authority in this brutal dictatorship. It's all surprisingly open; drivers stop, pop their trunks, and hand out noodles and water as soldiers look on. The kids then return to the churches, temples and schools that have become refugee camps across the Irrawaddy Delta.