Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Life & death blogging

Spare a thought for our fellow bloggers in Burma, now on the run from the regime, sleeping in a different place every night because they dared to tell the world what was happening on the streets.

Like all totalitarian regimes, paranoia characterises the military dictatorship. Because they control every part of the process they can easily check what bloggers are saying, their names and addresses.

They didn't like what they saw, so they started to crack down by blocking individual blogs, then blocking all blogs, now they've simply shut off the internet.

Their record of human rights abuses doesn't bode well for the bloggers, which is why they've gone into hiding.

What can we do? Just about nothing effective. For what it's worth we can pester our governments to take stronger action against the regime, but the world has been aware of their excesses for decades and has simply looked the other way.

It's very depressing.

The story is in The Times and you can read it in full here.

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