Guest contributor
Maung Zarni
For my fellow democrats from Myanmar, wherever they are, I have bad news. It is this: the United States (that is, the U.S. government) is not our friend in our uphill struggle for our basic human rights and democratic freedoms. As someone who was educated in the U.S., cut my political teeth as a grassroots activist and lived and worked there for 17 years, I have known this ugly fact for several decades. Washington talks the talk of democracy, human rights and freedom, but it typically fails to walk the talk.
This absence of genuine support and solidarity for our pro-democracy Burmese opposition on the part of U.S. policymakers – not simply the hypocrisy of their government as a whole – was one of the principal reasons I ended my exile in the U.S. after 17 years (the other is its illegal and immoral second invasion of Iraq,…
