“Burma joy as freed prisoners head home“
When Ko Ko Gyi arrived at Rangoon airport the crowd had been waiting several hours and rushed to greet him.
People almost jumped on him, shouting, cheering, thronging him, calling out his name.
Ko Ko Gyi is one of the best known of the 88 generation of student leaders, along with Min Ko Naing, the most famous. …
This latest prisoner release is much more significant than previous ones.
Under the current government, this is the fourth time prisoners have been freed – but people did not think the most prominent leaders would get out of jail for some time.
“US to exchange ambassadors with Burma“
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that Washington will start the process of exchanging ambassadors with Burma.
The announcement came hours after the country’s most prominent political dissidents were released from jail.
US President Barack Obama described the move as a “substantial step forward.”
The move is seen as one of the key demands of Western nations before international sanctions can be eased. The US stopped short of lifting them.
Mr Obama said he had asked officials to take “additional steps to build confidence” with Burma.
“Much more remains to be done to meet the aspirations of the Burmese people, but the United States is committed to continuing our engagement,” he said.
These are big positive steps in the right direction. How far Burma will continue to go in that direction remains to be seen, and the oppressive regime in that country still has far, far to go. But that said, this is Very Good News.
Here’s another piece of unrelated Very Good News from a neighboring country:
“Polio breakthrough: India marks disease-free year“
India marked a year since its last new case of polio Friday, a major milestone in a country once considered the epicentre of the disease and one that gives hope the scourge can be eradicated worldwide.
There were 150,000 cases of the highly contagious virus in India in 1985, but the country has now gone 12 months since discovering a new case — in an 18-month-old girl in the eastern state of West Bengal.
India, which until recently accounted for half of all the polio cases in the world, is one of four countries — with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria — where the disease is still officially endemic.
The Indian government, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Rotary International and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation all deserve to celebrate and be celebrated for this achievement.
Both of these stories point to the benefits that can come from robust, constructive engagement with the wider world.
Here in America, the subject of “foreign policy” or the “international” debates in political campaigns tend to get reduced into a binary contrast between the imperial interventionism of Richard Perle or the cramped isolationism of Ron Paul. Neither of those extreme approaches is capable of contributing to the kind of good news described in the stories above. Those unable to imagine anything other than those two positions aren’t making much of a contribution either.
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