Any day, the Burmese bush telegraph suggested, a fleet of warships, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers would sail up the Irrawaddy and launch yet another invasion.The generals, already smarting from tough US sanctions on textile exports and the banning of all new investment, have apparently been making serious contingency plans, with anti-aircraft artillery and missile silos in place. There are reports that the new military complex now extends over 10 square kilometres and that the infantry is already in place.Immediately after the US-led war in Iraq, Burmese exiles circulated rumours that the US would surely back regime change in south Asia next. By Sunday, a great convoy of vans was lumbering up the main road towards Mandalay and away from the golden pagodas of old Rangoon. In the erstwhile capital, residents are baffled by this sudden exodus and wonder if foreign diplomats and all their foreign currency may soon follow. Protective spirals of razor wire and concrete security bunkers, erected in front of Rangoon's foreign embassies shortly after the 11 September attacks, were inexplicably dismantled yesterday.Not everything, however, has changed that radically: roadblocks were still in place outside the lakeside house of Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy icon and imprisoned Nobel peace laureate.The junta's secret dream scheme for a new command centre far away from Rangoon was well under way even before Ms Rice stood in front of the US Senate last January and lumped Burma together with North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe and Belarus as "outposts of tyranny."Quietly, the sleepy trading centre of Pyinmana has become the focus for a mania of construction. After months of government dithering, speculation and denial, unmarried civil servants from nine ministries were ordered on Friday to start packing their bags.
Hardline Likud lawmakers bent on punishing Mr Sharon voted against three key cabinet appointments, including Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as finance minister. Warning there would be "consequences", Mr Sharon immediately convened a cabinet meeting to consider a revised proposal to be brought quickly to another parliamentary vote.. No one knows whether to blame it on the dire predictions of a powerful Burmese soothsayer or recent tough talk from Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State. That is why we have to talk about it more and more, to show the magnitude of what happened." * Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has suffered a stinging parliamentary defeat by members of his Likud party. General Than Shwe, the country's most senior leader, has shifted the capital from its dilapidated riverside site to a purpose-built jungle "command and control centre", located about 250 miles up-country in Pyinmana. But today, Rangoon, the capital of Burma, is even more of a backwater than usual because the ruling military junta has abruptly abandoned its British colonial-era headquarters to head for a Burmese-style Brasilia in the hills.
Similarities with the Holocaust included a genocidal ideology, a highly centralised state, and the use of death squads comparable to the Nazi SS. Like several of the Rwandan participants, Mr Bizumuremyi, who is doing a PhD thesis on the 1994 genocide, was impressed by their journey to see the educational work done with and by children on the Holocaust and Jewish resistance at the Ghetto Fighters' Museum in Kibbutz Lohamei Haghetaot in Galilee. For all the talk since the Second World War that "never again" would such genocide occur, he said, "it happened again and it may even happen yet again. Pointing out, like others at the seminar, that not all Hutus took part, he said the genocide had been fomented by a "small group of extremists" legitimised by state power and historically aggravated by the colonial power's use of Tutsis to help run the country.