Ko Tun Myint Win, a peasant from Aung Thabyae village in the Patheingyi township, Mandalay Region, died in police custody on 5 May. The authorities claimed that he died due to a high fever and alcohol withdrawal syndrome, and said the family members had to request a medical record of the autopsy from them as well.

Numerous land grabbings have taken place in Burma. More than 50 percent of these have been carried out by the military and governmental departments. The rest have been committed by their lackeys and the foreign capitalists. Numerous peasant struggles have been taking place in Burma for their farmland, communal land and roads, and communal forests. Among those cases, the recent peasant protest in Aung Thbyae village in the Patheingyi township, Mandalay Region, deserves special mention.

Today, In Defence of Marxism is proud to publish for the first time a number of articles in the Burmese language. They have been sent to us by the Social Democratic United Front (SDUF) in Myanmar (formerly Burma), an organisation that took an active part in the student protests against the military dictatorship, together with the Burma Federation of Student Unions.

Thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands of defenceless Rohingya Muslims are fleeing the brutal onslaught of Myanmar's armed forces. In the middle of all this, we have the western media’s darling “democrat” and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi.

In the past few months, the international media has been diligently covering the story of rickety boats full of Rohingya Muslims who are desperately trying to flee sectarian violence and systematic state persecution from Myanmar.

Further to our article on the movement of the workers in Burma, we republish this report from the daily Irrawaddy.

An important strike wave erupted recently in the Burmese textile industry. The workers have been resisting the brutal response of the military regime.

More people have been killed in Myanmar (Burma) as the military try and hold back the wave of protest. But pressure is building up on the regime. Whether it will clamp down firmly or move in the direction of negotiations depends on the power of the movement in the coming days.

The sudden steep increase in the price of fuel in Myanmar (Burma) in August pushed the already impoverished masses beyond the limit. Now a mass movement threatens to overthrow the rotten military regime. But the lack of a genuine workers’ alternative has left a vacuum into which the bourgeois opposition are stepping.