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နိုင္ငံေရးသမားေတြအတြက္ လုပ္စားလို႔အေကာင္းဆံုး = ေကာလဟာလ

Monday, August 01, 2011  ME  5 comments



Myanmar Express

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5 comments:

ဧရာဝတီ ဆိုက္ ကိုမ်ား ေစာင္းေျပာေနသလား မွတ္ရ

ကၽြန္မ လုပ္မယ္ေလ ။

In particular, the social networking Facebook played a significant role in informing the Burmese public about what happened in Thuwwana, allowing people to express their feelings about the disgraceful occurrence.

“I think they [the Burmese fans] might not understand or be civilized enough to accept failure. It reflects the manner of the country’s leaders, who have practiced violence for decades,” one person posted online.

This remark shines a spotlight on the ignorance, impoliteness and aggressiveness that have been a fixture of Burmese life for decades, with the example being set by the ruthless military leaders who have controlled society through intimidation and terror, and their business cronies who have run corrupt operations without ethical principles.

In fact, the release of anger and aggression by fans may have been just what former junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe intended when he decided to pump up the sport of football in Burma. According to leaked US diplomatic notes from June 2009, Than Shwe ordered a group of cronies and businessmen to found—and fund— professional football teams, possibly to distract attention from the country’s political and economic problems.The cable revealed that in January 2009, selected Burmese business persons were told that Than Shwe had chosen them to be the owners of the new professional football teams. The informant, a top executive at one of the sponsor companies, said the owners were responsible for paying all costs, including team salaries, housing and transportation, uniform costs and advertising for the new league. In addition, the owners were required to build new stadiums in their respective regions by 2011, at an estimated cost of US $1 million per stadium.

Burma is certainly not the first country to be embarrassed by its sports fans. Just like in other football-crazy countries, in Burma there is a very thin line between arousal of nationalistic passions and violence, and after Thursday’s debacle, we know for certain that football hooliganism is not an exclusively “English Disease.”

After almost half a century of military rule, Burma is 167th—three places below Afghanistan—in the FIFA world football rankings. If we want to improve both our rankings and our tarnished image, everyone will have to participate—from the top down.

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