Academic literature on the topic 'Behind the Burqa'

Geographically, Indochina consists of the South East Asian countries Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Geologically, Indochina includes all the land bounded by two very large-scale strike-slip faults—the Sagaing fault, which runs down the length of Burma, and the Red River fault, which extends more than 1,100 kilometres from the south-eastern corner of Tibet south-east through Yunnan and North Vietnam to Hanoi and the Gulf of Tonkin. Both faults are active, and show that Indochina is moving south-east relative to both the Burma micro-plate to the west and the South China block north of the Red River fault. The unresolved questions were how far Indochina was extruding away from the India–Asia collision zone and when these faults became active. The eastern margin of the Indian plate lies along the Burma–Andaman– Sumatra–Java trench, where the Indian oceanic plate is subducting beneath the great island arc chain of Indonesia. Behind the island arc, a new oceanic basin has formed in the past 5 million years, with basaltic ocean crust forming along a small active spreading centre in the Andaman Sea. The northern extension of the Andaman trench extends into the Arakan-Yoma Hills of western Burma, but the nature and location of the transition from oceanic lithosphere beneath the Bay of Bengal to continental lithosphere in Burma is poorly known. In the south of Burma, where the Irrawaddy River drains into the Andaman Sea, a vast delta has built up with over 10 kilometres’ thickness of sediments eroded off the mountains of Burma. The Sagaing fault continues offshore and is connected to the young oceanic spreading centre in the Andaman Sea. In northern Burma the fault passes close to the cities of Meiktyla and Mandalay and then splays into several branches that terminate in the Jade belt and other mountain ranges that ripple northwards towards the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. Burma is a hauntingly beautiful country of serene landscapes, golden pagodas, green rice fields, range upon range of distant hills, teak forests, and wide muddy rivers. It is also a land of great mineral riches.

Asian Americans also joined Special Operations. Their work for this section involved engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Imperial Japanese forces in Burma. Led by Carl Eifler, they were immensely successful against the enemy who outnumbered their units operating behind the battle lines. While they found their linguistic and cultural skills used far less than imagined, they nevertheless contributed to the defeat of the Imperial Japanese forces in the region. Other Asian Americans planned, trained for, and were about to penetrate Japanese-occupied Korea before the war ended. Two of these missions, known as Eagle and Napko, involved the former contacting the Korean underground movement and the latter planning to use YuHan Corporation pharmaceutical offices as their safe houses while operating covertly inside Korea. Both projects, however, were cancelled once the war ended.

This chapter assesses Idi Amin's seizure of power, which was central both to his life story and to his image and myth. For most, including many Ugandans, the 1971 coup represents the key moment in Uganda's post-independence history, at which the country began to slide downwards economically, socially, and politically, towards a penurious despotism. Unsurprisingly, there are widely differing accounts of the actual events of January 25, 1971, even among those who were there at the time and knew many of the participants. At the time, Amin's seizure of state power was widely welcomed in both Uganda and the West. The chapter considers British archive material from the period and later Ugandan analyses of the coup. The evidence suggests that the British High Commission knew little about what was going on, while the Israelis certainly seem to have had greater involvement, and Burka Bar-Lev may well have advised and assisted Amin before and during the coup. This does not, however, mean that the Israelis were 'behind it', rather than simply trying to steer and take advantage of events that were unfolding anyway.