There’s a very funny Eddie Izzard bit that says there’s a key to getting away with mass murder.

“They killed their own people,” the bit goes, “and we’re sort of fine with that. Hitler killed people next door. Stupid man. After a couple of years we won’t stand for that.”

The recent conflicts in Burma, or the Union of Myanmar, were contained within the country’s borders, and as long as Burma kept off the neighbors’ lawns, the rest of the world didn’t have a whole lot to say about it.

The United Nations Secretary-General called the use of force against peaceful demonstrators “abhorrent and unacceptable,” which is roughly the equivalent of telling someone to stop beating their children via a harshly-worded e-mail.

Burma’s government enjoys close ties with China, and China’s veto power will stymie any harsher U.N. action against the Burmese authorities.

After the government crackdown, the streets have seen a return to what counts for normalcy, which means the rest of the world is rapidly losing interest.

Burma has slid off the front pages and Web sites with Teflon-coated speed. By this time next week, news from the country will have been completely nudged aside by Britney Spears’ slightly flabby shoulders.

Though the situation in Burma has indeed calmed down, the country’s people still live under the type of government you don’t often see outside of George Orwell’s fevered nightmares. The government responded harshly to pro-democracy protests, opening fire on protesters and killing anywhere between 10 or 200 people, depending on who you believe, including a Japanese photojournalist.

Reports of midnight raids and mass arrests are leaking out, the bodies of monks have been spotted in the Rangoon river and the (Nobel prize-winning) pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is under a house arrest that’s more or less permanent.

That people are gradually being released from prison and that the government isn’t currently shooting anyone doesn’t change the fact that that’s how they handle attempts at peaceful dialogue and political reform. If the people make a move toward change again, the government will respond in the same way.

Interestingly enough, the one place in the U.S. where Burma can never be entirely forgotten is right here on NIU’s campus. The Center for Burma Studies has served as the national Center for Burma Studies for the last two decades.
It’s also a repository of a wide variety of information, books, maps, and more.

As art history major Stephanie Sposito put it as she walked to her Burmese class, “For NIU, Burma’s a pretty big deal.”

I should stress that the Center for Burma Studies takes no stance on the current goings-on. As Catherine Raymond, director of the Center for Burma Studies said, “I see my duty as CBS Director to keep all doors open by maintaining our reputation as an apolitical resource center.”

Through that reputation, the CBS has been able to organize past trips to Burma for NIU students interested in doing fieldwork. Those students were able to visit the country, its cultural sites and academic facilities with generally little interference. As an organization with goals of academic enrichment and study, they’re doing their job quite well.

The people who aren’t doing their job are the news organizations that stop paying attention when things stop getting bloody, and world governments and the U.N., who don’t mind oppression as long as they don’t oppress the people next door.

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