Going Nowhere

Thaung Htun hasn't seen his homeland in 17 years. But the 49-year-old former doctor hasn't abandoned hope that one day democracy will come to Burma and it will be safe for him to return. In 1988, he participated in a student-led uprising against Burma's military regime and then fled to Thailand when the generals crushed the movement. Two years later, the generals purged the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, after it won a landslide victory in the 1990 elections, and Thaung Htun joined other fleeing democrats in a government-in-exile. Today, he...