Road of Bones: the Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 Free

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InRoad of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 Keane reported for Index on the near impossibility of working as a reporter in Burma. Returning inhe found much had changed. But though the military is slowly loosening its grip, restrictions remain Old habits die hard. Walking to the door I felt my shoulders flinch. Any second now they would come running to tell me it was a mistake. Step this way NOW. I gibbered some words of thanks and headed out into the sweltering, glorious night. In the old days you presented yourself at passport control with a pounding heart and a dry mouth, convinced that at long last you were about to be found out. After all, you had made so many visits as a tourist even the most gullible of immigration officers would be bound to question your devotion to the beauty of Burma. What kind of person wants to holiday in Rangoon while thousands of people Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 being locked up and tortured? Yet I was never asked that question. The real problem was not the men and women who stamped passports. It was the ghosts who haunted the short walk from immigration to customs. If you Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 going to get nailed going into Burma on a tourist visa it would happen in this little space. So I always made a point of not looking at the spooks from Military Intelligence who were scanning the faces of new arrivals. I knew they had a blacklist of journalists and photographs of their most hated. For some years I numbered among these. Very occasionally a journalist visa would be issued, usually for an event like the opening of parliament or founders day. But most of the time we were forced to adopt the disguise of tourists. Never leave a compromising document, piece of paper in your hotel room. Destroy all notes when you were finished with them. Change taxis at least twice on your way to and from appointments with dissident figures. Lose yourself in markets and busy public places if you suspect you are being tailed. Never identify an informant on camera. This could have profoundly unpleasant consequences for them. Never travel with your tapes. Find an alternative route for them out of the country. Its funny how many different people prove helpful when they know the story is an important one. This is one of the really pleasant surprises, for me, of clandestine operating. There are more idealistic people, committed to press freedom, than you think. As the list —— and it is by no means complete —— indicates reporting from Burma in those days could be an exhausting business. Getting caught could mean a very unpleasant interrogation and deportation for the correspondent, but much worse for any of his informants. It was the knowledge of what could happen to the people who helped you that made reporting from Burma such a distinctly unnerving experience. Jail and torture were routine for those who took a public stand against the regime. Each trip has been on an official journalist visa. Not once have I been harassed, intimidated or interfered with. I have reported from city slums and rural villages, from huge opposition rallies and from within sedate government compounds. Again my expectation was that a secret policeman would appear from the shadows and bundle myself and the camera team away. But nothing happened. Suddenly it was possible to hire fixers who could organise interviews and translate without fear of arrest. We sat at a teashop Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 the middle of the city with a recently released pro-democracy activist who discussed his plans for the Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 by-elections. On the domestic media scene the iron fisted censorship has been substantially eased. I met young newspaper reporters out on the streets and asking questions of election candidates. The government has lifted restrictions on 30, websites, many of which provide political news and commentary. The privately owned press is testing the boundaries of this new freedom. Exiled journalists were invited to come home for consultations on a new media bill. The first ever Rangoon Film Festival featured a vivid documentary on the suppression of the Buddhist Monks protests in Yet there are still highly problematic areas. Journalist visas still tend to be issued only for landmark occasions: visits by foreign dignitaries, elections, national days of commemoration. Some foreign correspondents are thought to be still on a government blacklist. All blacklists must be scrapped. As for visits to troubled areas the old habits of concealment and restriction still rule. As a consequence the reporting of the ethnic violence in Rakhine state — which displaced tens of thousands earlier in the summer — was often confused or biased. Interviews with senior government ministers, especially the President, are very rare. The consequence is that an essential strand of the narrative of change is under-reported. How I long to ask the men at the top why they decided to embark on a process of such profound change, Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 to challenge both them and the opposition on their response to events in Rakhine state. It has been criticized for failing to challenge the outpouring of ethnic chauvinism directed against the Rohingya Muslim minority. In fact senior opposition activist Ko Ko Gyi, a former political prisoner, was among the louder voices that joined in the public marginalization of the minority. Interview requests can vanish into the ether. Finding the right spokesperson on a given issue is invariably a chore. Some of this is down to the inevitable stresses of a long suppressed organization struggling to come to terms with new freedoms. But the centralizing of the media focus around Aung San Suu Kyi leaves the international media largely ignorant of other voices. For all these misgivings the advance of media freedom in Burma is exciting. Burma has never really known a free press — not in the long years of British colonialism, not in the decades of military rule. The challenge now is to embed a culture of openness in which government and opposition are routinely challenged. Fergal Keane is an award winning journalist and author. Search for:. Reporting in those days meant following certain essential rules: 1. Fergal Keane. Latest posts by Fergal Keane see all. This site uses cookies: What does this mean? Japan's Last Bid for Victory: The Invasion of India,

Madmax32, Wikimedia Commons The boundaries of India may be clearly marked on a map but much of what lies there is blurred in the public consciousness. Largely unnoticed in the national media, this Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 marks the seventieth anniversary of the battle of Imphal and Kohima. A closing ceremony is planned for today, 28 June, where representatives of the British, Japanese, U. S and Australian governments are expected to attend. The British armies ofthat fought these battles were largely composed of Indians and Gurkhas. The strategy called for the Japanese to break British defences in Imphal. The INA would then march in and the people, it was thought, would rise up against the British. What happened was a little more complicated. The Japanese and the INA faced stiff resistance. Out of a total of 49 infantry battalions, 16 were Gurkha infantry battalions. There were soldiers from East Africa. The 11th East African passed through Imphal on their way to Burma. The Imphal War cemetery has 40 graves Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 East Africans. A major reason behind British victory was air power. The U. S provided air support as well as medical and ambulance services. Canada, New Zealand and Australian also sent planes. This made it possible to keep the Japanese air-force out and gave Allied forces crucial support for ground battles, as well as kept a life-line open for supplies and munitions. It ensured an Allied victory. A turning point The Japanese had won their way through Burma all the way to Kohima, but here they faced stiff resistance from a garrison they outnumbered ten to one. They fought over obscure villages and hills with brutal determination. Two Victoria Crosses, the highest award for valor, were given for the battle of Ningthoukhong, the Manipuri town not far from where the Japanese have now built an India Peace Memorial. The battle for Kohima became a turning point in the Burma campaign. It stopped the Japanese march into Asia. General William Slim, a highly respected commander who led the British forces, praised the Japanese for their courage, even when the odds were stacked against them. He wrote, "Whatever one may think of the military wisdom of thus pursuing a hopeless object, there can be no question of the supreme courage and hardihood of the Japanese soldiers who made the attempts. I know of no army that could have equaled them. The INA forces were also largely decimated by malaria. The balance of prestige, always so important in the East, changed. There were others who helped the Japanese as they saw them as liberators who shared a common ethnic background. Japanese colonialism always presented itself as a liberator of the East, and its wars as a fight against the domination of the West. Japanese forces initially won support among the Malay and Burmese, Indonesians and the Philippines, as their armies established the greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Imphal- Kohima and the Indian freedom A major effect of the war was a great churning of this region. War caused death and destruction but it also dragged the quiet region of tea plantations into the modern world. The armies had to be housed and transported, fed and clothed: roads, barracks and hospitals were constructed. Businesses sprang up to service these new needs. The chaos of war threw people out of their settled lives, sent them to the outside world. This massive movement of refugees created new rivalries, discontents as well as opportunities that are still with us. The larger political impact of the INA has also been marginalised in public consciousness. This was to be the last time the two parties would be together on an issue. Large-scale public demonstrations ensured that the sentences were not carried out, but former INA soldiers were kept out of the regular army Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 it was feared they would undermine loyalty to the Crown. The INA trials affected serving soldiers and inspired a series of revolts in the Royal Indian Navy in February Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944, as well as other mutinies in the army. Arguably, these mutinies played a crucial role in hastening the Indian freedom. The story of the Imphal-Kohima battle does not really end there. The war has been transformed from a memory of contending visions to one of reconciliation as war veterans, Japanese and British, have re-thought their actions and pondered over the brutalities they committed in the name of patriotism. Remembering them is a way to restore their place but also a way to think about the future. Brij Tankha is a scholar of contemporary Japan. Shop - Kohima Educational Trust

He is the nephew of Irish playwright, novelist and essayist John B. Born in London, Keane grew up in Dublin and later in Cork. In a interview with the IndependentKeane said that his gaelscoil education proved useful in later life: "The grounding in the Irish language I had at Scoil Bhride has never left me. In a foreign country when I'm on the phone and don't wish people to understand what I'm saying, I speak Irish and no Serb listening in is going to crack the code. His secondary education was at Presentation Brothers College in Cork, where Keane says he was encouraged to join the school debating society, and where he won the Provincial Gold Medal for Public Speaking on the subject of police brutality in Ireland. On finishing school inKeane started his career as a journalist with the Limerick Leader. Keane joined the BBC in as Northern Ireland Correspondent, but in August he was appointed their Southern African Correspondent, having covered the region during the early s. From to Keane's reports covered the township unrest in South Africa, Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 first multi-racial elections following the end of apartheidand the genocide in Rwanda. Keane was named as overall winner of the Amnesty International Press Awards in and won an Amnesty television prize in for his investigation of the Rwandan genocide, Journey into Darkness. Murrow Award for foreign reporting, the Index on Censorship prize for journalistic integrity, and the Orwell Prize for his book Season of Blood. In the three-part documentary Forgotten Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944serialised on the BBC in MayKeane travelled across the country meeting people living on the edge in affluent societies. He visits and interviews residents living on a drug-infested housing estate in Leedsinterviews a Govan shipyard worker faced with the constant threat of redundancy and travels through the idyllic landscapes of Cornwall and Wales interviewing independent dairy farmers who claim they are being ruined by competing supermarket chains. Inhe published his first history work Road of Bones: the Siege of Kohimaan account of the epic battle which halted the Japanese invasion of India in Keane has been awarded honorary degrees in literature from the University of StrathclydeBournemouth University and Staffordshire University. In NovemberKeane provided the commentary for the Westminster Abbey service marking the centenary of the Armistice. The BBC revealed in January that Keane had suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder PTSD for several years, and consequently was moving out of his role as Africa editor in order to aid his recovery. From Wikipedia, the Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 encyclopedia. This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediatelyespecially if potentially libelous or harmful. Limerick Leader. Retrieved 7 October The Independent. Retrieved 1 May From Our Own Correspondent. Retrieved 28 October Retrieved 15 June International Review of the Red Cross. December The Guardian. Retrieved 24 January Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. Wikimedia Commons. Presentation Brothers College, Cork.