Is this place “Burma” or “Myanmar”? Should the US call other countries by its preferred name? Or should Washington follow the example of the UN and defer to the ruling regime, no matter how odious? The BBC refers to the country as Burma, and the BBC News website says this is because most of its audience is familiar with that name rather than Myanmar. The Washington Post and the Atlantic use “Burma.” But The New York Times and The Economist go with Myanmar. NPR tries to split the difference, with the clumsy “Myanmar, which is also called Burma.”
What does the government of Burma of Myanmar want their country called now that ther0 eis a better government?
One year after their brutal crackdown on democracy activists in 1988, Burma’s ruling junta renamed Burma as Myanmar. The army junta, passed an “Adaptation of Expressions Law” that aimed to replace the country’s Anglicized place names with words more congruent with the Burmese language. Therefore, Myanmar replaced Burma and “Rangoon,” the country’s largest city and then-capital, became rendered as “Yangon.”
Much of the international community and the United Nations agreed to the name change, as they had done with Zimbabwe, Cambodia, and Burkina Faso in the years before. Persia became Iran and part of Yugoslavia renames itself Macedonia .. angering the Greeks but of this seems to go however who is in rule wants it. There may be another test case soon. The dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, publicly expressed an interest earlier this year in changing the country’s name to Kazakh Yeli. Then of course there is the challenge of the self proclaimed Caliphate in Syria and Iraq and Hamas’ insistence that there is no Israel, only Palestine!
Back at Burma in 1988, the U.S. and U.K. insisted on using the name Burma despite the Junta’s choce of Myanmar. Over the next two decades, as Burma’s military government resisted economic development and brutally suppressed dissent, neither Washington nor London found any reason to change its policy. In 2005, then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice even named Burma as an “outpost of tyranny,” grouping the country with North Korea, Iran, and three others.
Forms of the words “Burma” and “Myanmar” have existed for centuries, and mean about the same thing. “Burma” (also written as “bama”) is used primarily in spoken language while Myanmar (or “Myanma”) is the more formal term used when writing. But under British colonial rule, Burma became the country’s official name, and the name stuck after independence. Those who prefer “Burma,” as the country was known until 1989, argue that “Myanmar” lacks legitimacy because the name change occurred without the consent of the Burmese people. The Burmese government, on the other hand, has argued that the word “Burma” referred only to the country’s largest ethnic group, and that “Myanmar” was the more inclusive term. To make matters worse, the Burmese majority and the government have been repressing the Rohingya Muslims.. According to the United Nations, Rohingyans are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Many Rohingyans have fled Myanmar to refugee camps in Bangladesh and to areas along the Thai-Myanmar border.