Road of Bones: the Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 Free
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FREE ROAD OF BONES: THE EPIC SIEGE OF KOHIMA 1944 PDF Fergal Keane | 448 pages | 28 Apr 2011 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780007132416 | English | London, United Kingdom Fergal Keane - Wikipedia 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.