July 16, 2007
"It beats living in the jungle and getting the crap beat out of you."
All right, I'll admit it lacks some punch, but they did find 200 people who'd agree with that sentiment. The Akron Beacon Journal reported Sunday that about 200 refugees from Burma/Myanmar's Karen tribe will be settled in Akron. (Cached copy.)
I'll have to ask my Burmese friends, but the gist I'm getting is that out of the tribes/mini-nations that all got glommed into the British colony of Burma (later the independent nation of Burma, now renamed Myanmar by the ruling dictatorship) the Karen are at the bottom of the pile and thus catch all the crap rolling downhill.
Edit, 11:10 AM: Spoke to one of my friends, and I got that part wrong. I figured that Burma was like Iraq, cobbled together to make a nice, big colony; instead it was an existing kingdom (ruled by the Burma tribe). The problems came from Britain's divide-and-rule strategy, turning the groups against each other to make conquest and rule easier for them. That's what my friend was taught in school, anyway. In her words: "Maybe I was learning propaganda."
Hey, when I went to Mount Vernon I found out that George and Martha Washington "employed" 350 "African-Americans", so sugar-coating its own history seems to be any country's purview.
End edit
Gee, if Burma goes downhill fast enough the influx of refugees may keep Akron's population from decreasing any more.
