Vol. 28 No. 5 · 9 March 2006
pages 38-39 | 2839 words
Diary
Tariq Ali
‘We’ve been trying to get you to come and talk here for the last three years,’ my host complained as we shook hands at the airport. ‘Here’ was Tripoli, capital of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, bathed in mild February sunshine; my host a functionary from the World Centre for the Studies and Researches of the Green Book – the Green Book is the Libyan equivalent of the Little Red Book. ‘The lecture is just an excuse,’ I told him. ‘I’m really here to see Leptis Magna’ – the capital of Rome’s African empire. We both laughed. He because he thought I was joking and me because I wasn’t.
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Letters
Vol. 28 No. 6 · 23 March 2006
From Liz Gladstone
Tariq Ali writes that Leptis Magna was incorporated into the Roman Empire by Tiberius after the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC (LRB, 9 March). A good while after, surely, since Tiberius was emperor from 14 to 37 AD?
Liz Gladstone
Maidstone
Vol. 28 No. 7 · 6 April 2006
From Basil Morley
It is difficult to believe that Tariq Ali would knowingly harm the cause of liberty in Burma, but that is what he does by choosing to use the regime’s name for the country, Myanmar, in his Diary (LRB, 9 March). That Amnesty International and the UN also do is, of course, to their disgrace.
Basil Morley
Skerray, Sutherland
Vol. 28 No. 9 · 11 May 2006
From Robert Leary
Basil Morley is wrong to blame the ‘regime’ for the naming of Myanmar (Letters, 6 April). The centre of the country between Bangladesh and China/Laos/Thailand was infiltrated in the mid-ninth century by a nomad group which called itself ‘the Myanmar’. These people were the original Burmans, who went on to conquer the whole country; they used ‘Myanmar’ as the formal royal name for it.
In the 1930s young nationalists debated the use of ‘Myanmar’ as against the colloquial ‘Bama’ which had been morphed by the British into ‘Burma’.
Robert Leary
Bangkok
Vol. 28 No. 11 · 8 June 2006
From John Jenkins
Robert Leary is wrong to suggest that there is no political significance in the use of the name ‘Myanmar’ (Letters, 11 May). The regime renamed Burma ‘Myanma Naing Ngan’ in June 1989, in the wake of the 1988 elections and the subsequent military coup. This was part of a series of actions, some symbolic, some all too material, designed to contest the meaning of recent Burmese history. ‘Myanmar’ (the ‘r’ being an orthographic addition in English), it was claimed, better reflected the multi-racial character of the country. Most ethnic minority leaders rejected this, as, of course, did Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues. Leary refers obliquely to the Dobama Asiayone, formed by young Burmese nationalists in May 1930. They made exactly the same claim for the semantics of ‘Bama’ as the present regime did for ‘Myanmar’. Following their example, Aung San, whom no one could accuse of being anything other than a Burmese nationalist and patriot, was content with the use of ‘Burma’. That the late Ne Win was not perhaps tells its own story.
John Jenkins
British Consulate, Jerusalem
