Kyi May Kaung's comment on Burma "reforms" left on Irrawaddy website

Good. Now you've heard it from Larry Diamond, you'd better believe it. I and a few others have been saying throughout that all the sanctions should not be lifted too soon. I myself am of the opinion Burma: Reforms? What Reforms? As Prof. Diamond has pointed out, and so has Daw Suu, this is only the start, a lot more needs to be done. In the winter of 2008-2009, I acted as Coordinator for 5-6 well known (and well regarded)experts on Burma in money and banking, agricultural economics, civil and military relations, macro economics and constitutional and electoral law to draft a Plan for Democracy and Development for the National Coalition Government of Burma (NCGUB - or the Burmese Democratic Government in Exile) which you can still find on their website. Since Sept 2011, you media types were so drunk on the change rhetoric yourselves and getting a foothold inside Burma, that you never even bothered to read those 20 pages. While I worked on the Plan for Democracy and Development, I saw many reports by Diamond and others from the 90s onwards, which I advised the NCGUB/The Burma Fund to declassify and place on its website. The Plan does not specify how to get to the ideal state. I offered to work through step by step negotiation points with them, based on benchmarks which have been in place since the 90s, but NCGUB/TBF declined. In this way this Plan is like The Future of Iraq project which called on 200! Iraqi exiles for Transition ideas - see Washington Post's correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Inside Iraq's Green Zone, pp. 40-41. (chapter - Building a Bubble - A Deer in the Headlights) My 1994 dissertation of the stultifying effects of a top-down command economy and political system can also be read on line at Penn Commons. Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.)

Bronze strelitza leaf - Copyright Kaung