Christina Fink

Zed Books, 2001. £16.95. 286pp.

Anyone who has friends planning to visit Burma should make them read Living Silence, to find out what is really going on beneath the still vibrant and lively surface of Burmese life. Drawing on over 150 interviews with Burmese inside and outside the country, Christina Fink describes in detail the means by which the regime exercises its total control.

Amnesty International and others have documented forced labour, confiscation of crops, forced displacement and killing of civilians in areas where insurgency continues, torture and mistreatment in the prisons. What is new here is the author's description of the pressures on families and communities to conform to the draconian discipline of the regime. For instance, there are sanctions on the whole family if any individual steps out of line. Penalties for possessing a political pamphlet are harsher than for possession of heroin. There is also a fascinating chapter on the military themselves, an army of half a million for a nation with no external enemies. But do the generals sleep easily at night when they reflect that many of the soldiers voted for Aung San Suu Kyi in 1990?

Christina Fink is donating the royalties from Living Silence to Prospect Burma, and our warmest thanks go to her for her generosity.