70 years of the Burmese Service
Rajan Datar is away this week. Our guest presenter, Tazeen Ahmad, has written this blog:
On Over To You this week we take a look at the work of the Burmese Service.
2 September will be their seventieth anniversary and, let's face it, covering Burma is no easy task.
The military junta who rule the country do not allow the ´óÏó´«Ã½ any access and the recent history of the country has been extremely turbulent; from the monks protests of 2007, to the cyclone which devastated the country in the same year, to the forthcoming elections due later on in 2010, Burma is a country which is rarely far from the news agenda.
And this is without even mentioning the continuing house arrest of Aung San Su Kyi, a woman who in spite of all of the odds, remains firmly in the public eye. How can a station with no access to its beat possibly continue for so long?
Also on the programme, how many of you speak the language of finance? A listener contacted us concerned that terms like "Quantitative Easing" conceal what he would describe as the far simpler "Printing Money."
Is there a danger that the language of finance could conceal more than it reveals?
Sometimes getting facts out of Burma seems a lot simpler than doing the same with the world of finance.
I do hope you manage to listen. Rajan Datar will be back from his holidays next week.
Tazeen Ahmad is this week's presenter of Over To You
Over To You is your chance to have your say about the ´óÏó´«Ã½ World Service and its programmes. It airs at 00:40, 03:40 and 12:40 every Sunday (GMT).
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