The past two years have brought some positive developments: Active talks between the government’s recently-appointed peace negotiator and newly unified ethnic minorities. But fighting in Kachin State continues, contrary to a presidential announcement last week.

As many as 100,000 civilians have fled the violence and reported human rights violations, many to IDP camps elsewhere in Kachin State or over the border in China. Some have ended up in northern Thailand. We met some Kachin on a Sunday in early December at Wunpawng Christian Church outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Wunpawng Christian Church near Chiang Mai, Thailand. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

About 90 people gathered for a Kachin-language service and a few seasonal songs, including a version of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.”

The Kachin are Christian; one source of tension with the country’s Buddhist majority. Reverend Wunnaw Naw Mai sees lessons for his congregation, most of whom are from Myanmar’s Kachin State, in the Old Testament.

“We should come back to our land, like the Israelites,” he told us with a laugh after the service.

The Kachin and other ethnic minorities never got the autonomy they say they were promised in 1947 as the country prepared for independence from Britain. They’ve been fighting for it on and off ever since.

The Kachin signed a ceasefire with the government in 1994; it held for 17 years. A year-and-a-half ago it broke down, sparked by disagreements over government-backed energy projects in Kachin State. Humanitarian groups say the fighting has driven as many as 100,000 people from their homes.

Among them is Reverend Naw Mai’s father, Hkawng Dau. He says Myanmar military forces invaded his village and burned down his church, and he fled to Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State. He’d just gotten to Chiang Mai for a short visit.

“The people who fled — a lot of them are old,” he said. “They’re glad they’re alive, but they’re also worried because everything they had is destroyed. Their farms, their livestock–everything.”

Fighting has continued since President Thein Sein called for a halt last week; in the past similar announcements have had similar results. And Kachin distrust of the government runs deep—they say they got nothing in return for laying aside their weapons back in 1994.

“KIO has experience in the last 17 years of ceasefire period. Nothing, never talk about those political issues in those time,” says La Aung, a member of the Kachin Independence Organization, or KIO, the rebel army’s political wing.

La Aung of the Kachin Independence Organization and Nai Han Tha, General Secretary of the United Nationalities Federal Council and the New Mon State Party, in Chiang Mai. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

“What you had was basically the Kachin now saying, ‘Look, we tried the ceasefire, we didn’t fight, and nothing changed for us. We still didn’t get rights that we wanted.’” says Paul Keenan, the author of several books about Myanmar’s armed ethnic groups and a researcher at the Burma Center for Ethnic Studies, Peace and Reconciliation http://www.burmaethnicstudies.net/. He says this time around, the Kachin want to see a plan for political concessions before they stop fighting.

And they’re not going it alone–they’re one of 12 members of the United Nationalities Federal Council, a newly-formed coalition aimed at negotiating ethnic goals in a unified front.

Chief among their goals is more political power for Myanmar’s seven ethnic states. They’ve moderated their aims since the 80s, when the goal was independence. The Myanmar government, in turn, no longer balks at the suggestion of increased state autonomy.

“It’s a completely different environment I’ve been told in relation to previous peace negotiations,” Keenan says, adding that ethnic representatives tell him they’re being listened to now, where before they were dictated to.

Kheun Sai, publisher of the Shan Herald Agency for News, at his home in Chiang Mai. On the wall behind him is the Shan flag, a map of Shan State, and drawings of the Shan long drum, a traditional instrument commonly played during Shan New Year and other celebrations. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

Of course, as negotiations proceed, bullets still fly, both in Kachin State, and in Shan State to the south. It illustrates what many say is a disconnect between the country’s new reformist president and a hard-line military.

“It is like having two governments in one country,” says Kheun Sai, publisher of the Shan Herald Agency for News and a longtime actor in ethnic issues. “In the urban areas it is the Thein Sein government. But in the rural areas it’s still the army, and you’re still fighting. It is a different kind of struggle.”

In recent weeks, the US, British and Chinese governments have expressed concern about the fighting, as has the United Nations. For the moment, though, lasting peace seems distant for the Kachin in their native Myanmar. And, in Thailand, most among the congregation at Wunpawng church are staying put.

As the country continues to figure out what a democratic system looks like, the NLD’s long-time activists, dissidents, and political prisoners, are figuring out how to work within that system. Phyu Phyu Thin is one of the NLD’s new parliamentarians.

Her office occupies two floors of a narrow building along a noisy street. It’s buzzing with activity—some related to her new role as an elected lawmaker, some to her old role as a prominent HIV/AIDS activist.

Her activism made getting out the vote easy. Supporters thronged campaign events, and she won handily in last April’s elections. Her party, the NLD, now has 42 seats. They’re a tiny, but symbolically significant, piece of the 664-seat parliament.

We visited her in her Mingalar Taung Nyunt township office in eastern Yangon. She paused and laughed a little when asked about making the transition from activism to parliament. She said she’s glad to be there as her country starts to democratize, and she sees potential to get a lot done. But parliament moves slowly and she sometimes feels like she’s wasting time.

One of the NLD’s first legislative actions actually aimed to speed things up.

“When they introduced bills, most parliamentarians would talk for an hour. Then questions would take another hour or two,” she said, speaking in Burmese. “Everything took so long. So Aung San Suu Kyi and our party made a motion to limit the time spent on these statements to 10 minutes. And it worked.”

In fact, Phyu Phyu Thin says the NLD’s working relations with the ruling party, the USDP, are pretty good. She says the USDP gave them a warm welcome. And they’re open to new ideas, even though they’re more conservative than the NLD. It’s remarkable considering the USDP is an offshoot of the former military government that was the NLD’s main antagonist and oppressor for decades. For many, including Phyu Phyu Thin, it was their jailer.

The current military has a block in parliament. The constitution reserves a quarter of the seats for them. And these guys? They’re not as welcoming, she says. They keep to themselves, sitting off to one side in the chambers.

“Even when we break for tea or lunch — most of the MPs will talk and socialize,” she says. “But the military MPs go off to a separate part of the room and don’t talk to anyone.”

Phyu Phyu Thin’s township office in Mingalar Taung Nyunt Township in eastern Yangon. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

Still, she’s upbeat about the progress her party has made in its short time in elected office. She points to efforts to upgrade some of Yangon’s major institutions—including Yangon University and General Hospital. Soon she hopes to move on her central concern—the country’s woefully inadequate health system.

Although observers note a severe lack of resources and the awkward isolation of the country’s new purpose-made capital, this parliament has surprised many by a willingness to flex its muscles.

“I live here in Washington where the congress doesn’t manage to take on many big issues in one session or even one congress,” says Murray Hiebert, a Southeast Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in D.C. “These guys have taken on some really heavy, heavy issues. They’re now looking at a mining law, they’ve taken on freedom of assembly. There’s just an awful lot of issues, very complicated issues that they’re taking on. And getting done with reasonable speed, which I think is impressive.”

Before the next general election in 2015, the NLD and others are hoping to push through constitutional amendments that would loosen the military’s grip on power. And these things, as Phyu Phyu Thin is learning, take time.

The new year brings new opportunities and new challenges for low-wage workers in Thailand. On January 1st, the country’s minimum wage was raised to 300 baht—or about $10-a day.

Migrant workers from neighboring countries like Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos make up as much as 10 percent of Thailand’s workforce. They should be eligible for the pay bump, if they can prove they’re in the country legally. For workers like those in a worker camp in the San Kham Pang district 30 minutes east of downtown Chiang Mai, that just got a little harder.

The main road through a worker camp in San Kham Pang district, Chiang Mai province. A car can fit down it, but it’s tight. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

Sai Tun Kyai lives at the end of a row of huts. He moved here from Shan State about two years ago.

He got a work permit soon after he arrived—Thailand has offered these to undocumented migrants on and off since the early 90s. Through an interpreter, he says his employer dropped the ball, his permit expired, and he missed the December 14th deadline for Nationality Verification.

“Right now I’m really confused,” he says. “Because my work permit’s expired, I’m basically illegal. If the police find me, will they arrest me? Will they send me back to the border? I don’t know what to do.”

He’s not alone. There are around two-and-a-half million migrant workers in Thailand. About three quarters are from Myanmar, also known as Burma. Most are manual laborers—construction and agriculture around Chiang Mai, fishing and factories elsewhere.

Less than half of them met the December 14th deadline that would make them eligible for the new minimum wage, national health benefits and schools. For the million-and-a-half workers who didn’t meet the deadline, there’s confusion: It’s been reported that the government will extend the deadline, but at the same time the Thai government has been threatening crackdowns and deportations.

Nong Foung, an 18-year-old immigrant from Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State in Myanmar. She works from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week pouring concrete at a nearby residential construction site. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

A couple months ago, immigration arrested seven people from her worksite. She laughs a bit when she talks about escaping into nearby woods to avoid being picked up.

Andy Hall, a migration researcher and worker advocate at Mahidol University in Bangkok, says that giving migrants a way to work legally is good.

“The process in itself in theory is a good process–to legalize the workers. It’s an original process which we haven’t seen anywhere else in the world.”

In practice, though, Hall says corruption reigns—government agents demand kickbacks and funnel applicants to private, unregulated brokers. He says a process which should cost 30 dollars can end up costing closer to 500–three months wages for a typical worker. The Thai Labor Ministry didn’t respond to questions about these points.

Thai business groups, the Myanmar government, and international workers groups have pressed for a deadline extension. The promised crackdown hasn’t materialized yet. In the past, Hall says, similar crackdowns have opened up an extortion bonanza.

“Every country has a right to define its borders. Every country has the right to deport people in humane conditions and deport them back to their country of origin if they enter the country illegally. I don’t think most people have a problem with that. But what we have a problem with is using this context to extort and undermine the rule of law,” he says.

Thailand’s policy is evolving as the whole region prepares for 2015’s economic integration of ASEAN–a European Union-style collaboration between 10 Southeast Asian countries. Integration will make moving between countries easier for some workers, although mostly in highly-skilled jobs.

Jackie Pollock, who directs Chiang Mai’s Migrant Assistance Program, does see it having a less tangible benefit for the low-skilled workers her group helps.

“There is more of a sense growing of being part of a region,” she says. “Now, in the schools, they’re teaching about ASEAN and they’re teaching ASEAN languages in the schools. Which was unheard of 10 years ago. So I think children now will grow up more of a sense of being ASEANite, and that can hopefully only be a good thing.”

For the moment, though, many are just focused on cementing their identity as legal, migrant workers.

Tazaungdaing, also called Myanmar’s Festival of Lights, happens every year on the full moon day at the end of the eighth month of the Burmese Buddhist calendar.

It closes a month of celebratory offerings to local monasteries, and is marked by street fairs and trips to local Buddhist landmarks.

This year the day fell on November 28th, the first day of a week reporter Bruce Wallace spent in Myanmar.

Photos, audio, and production by Bruce Wallace. Additional photos by Aung Kyaw Myint.

It’s a significant moment for Kyaw Zwa Moe, the English-language editor for the Irrawaddy “I look forward to seeing our readers inside the country reading the Irrawaddy magazine for the first time in public, legally. That will be a very exciting and wonderful moment for me,” he said when I visited him this week at the Irrawaddy’s office in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

And he insists that this new edition keeps the tone that had them banned for so long in Myanmar. “We haven’t changed anything in this issue,” he said. “This is as critical as ever of the government authorities. We try to disclose what we have seen, what we have thought about any issues inside the country.”

Kyaw Zwa Moe, English Edition Editor of the Irrawaddy, with copies of the new edition of the magazine–the first that will be openly distributed in Myanmar. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

They do take up prickly subjects–ongoing ethnic violence in the west of the country, fragile ethnic peace in the east, and Myanmar-China relations. The cover shows Barack Obama with his arm around Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader whose picture is now ubiquitous on the country’s newsstands–a fact itself unthinkable a few years ago.

Also unthinkable until recently was media of any sort — exile or otherwise — reporting openly in the country. For 50 years the landscape was dominated by state mouthpieces like the New Light of Myanmar, and weekly newspapers under the heavy hand of the censorship office.

But reporting was happening everywhere when we I was there last week. In fact many desks in the Irrawaddy’s Chiang Mai office are empty because much of its staff has moved to Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city. “I think now we have 20 people in a small office. The office is quite crowded,” Kyaw Zwa Moe says, laughing.

A visit to Mizzima another exile publication on the other side of Chiang Mai, found a similar skeleton crew holding down the fort. They said they’d gone from 30 staff here and in India to nearly double that in Yangon. Both publications say they’re still testing the waters. Myanmar’s government press office stopped pre-publication censorship in August, but watchers say there’s a ways to go between here and press freedom.

“All these periodicals still need licenses,” says Thiha Saw, a long-time journalist in Yangon and member of a new civilian-led press council. “And every license needs to be renewed at the end of the year. So if they don’t like you or your paper, they maybe say, ‘Sorry, we can’t renew your license — [we're] revoking your license.’ Or say suspend your license, ‘Your license will be suspended two months, six months’—whatever. The law is still there–the censorship is gone but the old law is still there.”

Others worry that media–particularly returning exiles–are tempering their voice in the interest of getting along with the new government.

Many desks at the Irrawaddy’s Chiang Mai office have been left empty as staffers relocate to Yangon. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

There doesn’t seem to be that much self-censorship, though, in Burma. The week I was there, papers ran regular, graphic images from a government crackdown. On my last day I was surprised to see one go after what people had told me was the last taboo–government corruption.

Kyaw Zwa Moe got a taste of the new in-country media landscape in April. He was back for the first time in 12 years to report on Aung San Suu Kyi’s campaign to represent a small township outside of Yangon. He estimates that the night before the election there were 150 journalists covering the event.

He was glad to see this freedom among journalists, and among people he interviewed too.

“They were also quite outspoken at the time, even the old people,” he remembers “Actually I still remember I did interview one old woman, she said she was the oldest lady in village. She was also quite outspoken, she said she voted for Aung San Suu Kyi.” Now Irrawaddy, Mizzima, and other media companies face a pressure that’s new in Myanmar, but familiar elsewhere: trying to turn a profit in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

At the end of October in New York City, two generations of bachata musicians gathered to pay homage to the classic style of the music—an acoustic, earthy brand that comes from the Dominican Republic’s rural north. That’s where guitarist Edilio Paredes and singer Ramon Cordero started playing it in the 1950s, and where singer Andre Veloz first heard it many years later.

Edilio Paredes says his relationship with Ramon Cordero is like that of a finger to a fingernail. “We were born in the same place, we were raised together,” Paredes said, reminiscing in Spanish in the dressing room after the show. “Since we were kids we were always together, together, together–never separated. And we have always understood one another. The most important thing in a partnership is one understanding the other.”

You can hear that understanding as Paredes’s guitar weaves around Cordero’s lithe, plaintive voice. They’ve been playing music together for more than 50 years; they grew up near each other in the Dominican Republic’s Duarte Province.

One song from their October 24th performance at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, part of the Live @ 365 world music series, “Condenado a la Distancia,” has been in their repertoire since the late 60s.

“The song is about someone who leaves a person behind,” Ramon Cordero explained in Spanish. “A woman goes away and leaves someone waiting. Like a mother who goes out to get something, a bit of milk, and she never returns. She leaves him there … condenado a la distancia. They say the distance causes one to forget and so you stay there waiting.”

The song has one of bachata’s main ingredients—amargue—a kind of bittersweet melancholy; a recognition of life’s sadness. Amargue runs through bachata’s songs, and its history. Through the 70s, the music was marginalized—associated with poor campesinos and kept off most radio stations.

“In those years, bachata was solely … it wasn’t always shunned but they treated it as if it was low class,” Paredes said.

“It was like a vulgar, poor-people music,” singer Andre Veloz said. “And now everybody sings it, and now everybody enjoys it. And even now, people who say they don’t do, because they are too fine for it, still do it.”

Veloz shared the stage with Paredes and Cordero in New York. She’s in her 20s, and lives in the Bronx now. She grew up in the Dominican countryside not far from where the two bachata elder statesmen are from. Music by them and other classic bachateros played around the house while she was growing up.

“And that is what the maids used to put all day–bachata bachata–old styles, old school, very cool. And I remember everybody was like ‘Aw stop listening to that, that’s not for ladies.’”

Veloz says that she always has to fight against that not-for-ladies stereotype. “It’s just very disappointing and frustrating. And I really hope that very soon more places will open for more women—not only in bachata, but in Latin music in general. And, yeah, I’m looking forward to being part of that.”

Ramon Cordero returned to close the night with another helping of amargue–the song “Adios.” “Life is so unjust,” one of the lyrics goes, “how cruel it has been to me; It has condemned me to live without the sweet warmth of your love. Adios.”

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At Yangon International Airport, travelers cluster around one shop selling postcards, reproductions of old Burmese currency, and small carved Buddhas. Tasteful woven scarves and carved wooden boxes at a second. Further along you can choose from a few bottles of whiskey or, like I did, spend your last kyat on a can of government-brewed Myanmar Beer. The shops petered out after that.

At Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport–which is closer to Yangon than Washington D.C. is to Boston–you can pause at a crossroads and see shops selling DKNY, Diesel, Fossil, Guess, Casio, Timex, Puma, North Face, Tag Heuer, Etude. There’s a Boots pharmacy, a McDonald’s, and a Burger King. I could have jotted down a bunch more in my notebook, too, but frankly I was a little overwhelmed.

The taxi you get from Yangon International likely didn’t have a meter but might have a hole in the floor, allowing you to watch the road pass by. When it’s stopped in traffic the driver will turn the car off and might have to hold the gearshift in place.

The taxies in Bangkok are new, metered, and lots of them are pink. (Don’t ask, I don’t know.) On the way in from the airport you pass towering billboards for Toyota and Fuji Xerox. For a while you parallel a new elevated light rail. A sprawling city skyline littered with cranes comes into sight. You’re soon being passed and passing Bangkok Mass Transit Authority’s sparkling buses. There are traffic lights.

On the way in from the Yangon airport, you pass an ornate “Welcome to the Golden Land” sign with the outlines of two pagodas. Some green space gives way to rows of roadside teashops with plastic, low-slung tables. A “shortcut” we took on the way back to the airport wound through tight slums and past a state-run furniture manufacturer next to an open-air poultry market where bicycles loaded down with chickens front and back teetered out into traffic.

Asia Green Development Bank building with Sule Pagoda in the foreground. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

There are not that many traffic lights.

I should say that, in a lot of ways, I really loved the Yangon time warp. In a city of four million, I was bumping into people I knew by the second day. I already miss the sidewalks lined with food sellers and booksellers and song-lyric-book sellers and vegetable and rice sellers and hand-tool sellers and a guy butchering a goat and another guy painstakingly fixing an umbrella and those card tables with two or three landline phones where you can stop and make a call.

A few hours before I left on Tuesday, I was stopped in traffic in a taxi–the one with the slipping gearshift. A guy walked in between cars selling paperbound copies of Myanmar’s brand new Foreign Investment Law. The law had been tweaked and re-tweaked to be more attractive to multinational companies.

The time warp is closing.

As you may have heard, though, things here are changing.

Two weeks ago, at a press conference at their main branch down by the Yangon River, Myanmar’s Cooperative Bank announced that machines at 36 of their Myanmar locations can now do business with any international MasterCard that works in an ATM. This follows a roll-out of a network for in-country cards earlier this year—a big step in itself for an antiquated banking system stunted by years of international sanctions, misguided domestic policy, and a widespread bank collapse nine years ago.

I was glad to find out about these new ATMs, when, on my second day in Yangon, I needed to head up north on an unanticipated — and un-budgeted-for — reporting excursion. Off I went to CB Bank’s main branch, MasterCard-stamped ATM card in hand.

I found the ATM in question and, after two bank employees finished up some diagnostics on the machine, I started in. The machine welcomed “Mr. Wallace, Bruce,” and things went well until I got to the part where you ask for the money.

That function was “not available at this time.”

A few more tries got the same result.

I asked from help from one of a number of super-obliging bank employees on hand. They seemed to be monitoring the international ATM rollout closely. She went upstairs to check the server and find the error code connected to my attempts. She came back down and suggested I try their other machine, outside and a few doors down.

After getting the same message there, she guessed it might be their internet connection, which could be slow, “when it was cloudy,” as it was today.

Or maybe the problem was on my bank’s end? My translator found a three-computer internet stall down a nearby alley. A VOIP call got me through to someone at my bank.

A few more tries and some good dialogue back at Cooperative yielded nothing, at which point I resorted to one of the final options for getting more dollars in Yangon: there’s a travel agency on the 15th floor of a nearby office tower which can approve a withdrawal through an only-vaguely-sketchy Thai internet exchange. There is a fee.

But, in theory at least, your MasterCard ATM should now work in Myanmar. Cooperative Bank says they should be up and running with Visa soon too.

Everyone in Yangon was talking about it, and now there was a demonstration starting at 5:00 p.m. – in about 20 minutes. The monk was understanding as we cut our conversation short. He was an activist too.

It was a little after 5:00 p.m. when we got to Sule Pagoda, the Buddhist shrine where the demonstration was to take place. It’s in the middle of a traffic circle in the center of Yangon, and we started making our way around the outside, looking for monks or chanting students or some other signs of direct action.

Partway around the building, we found the first sign – a gaggle of 25 or 30 journalists shouldering DSLRs or on cell phones or chatting behind video cameras on tripods.

Most of the journalists were Burmese.

I should pause here to point out a couple noteworthy things about this scene. Public protests haven’t always been a regular thing in Burma. Those that happened were often broken up viciously (the events at Monywa prove that this is still a very real possibility). And the coverage of the last mass protests here – 2007′s Saffron Revolution – got to the world thanks to shaky videos captured surreptitiously by brave local journalists and smuggled out of the country.

Sule Pagoda at Sunset. (Photo: Bruce Wallace)

In the end no action materialized. The explanation we got was that demonstrators were waiting to hear Aung San Suu Kyi’s statement on the events in Monywa before making a move. By 6 p.m. the pack of journalists was breaking up.

I grabbed a few photos of the pagoda as the sun was setting.

The following day we heard about another protest scheduled at Sule, but when we got there at 5 p.m. a pagoda attendant told us a small group of monks had already been there, demonstrated, and gone home.

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Hüsnü Şenlendirici says, “The clarinet came to Turkey from the Balkans, but it didn’t quite make it to the Middle East. You hear it more in music from the Aegean part of Turkey.”

There, on Turkey’s western shore, is where Hüsnü Şenlendirici found his instrument.

“It’s a major part of the music of that region,” he says. “That’s where I’m from, and it’s been a part of my life since childhood.”

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The 10th century Khmer sculpture at the center of a legal dispute between the US and Cambodian governments and Sotheby’s. (Photo: Court Complaint)

It is indeed. The five-foot-tall statue the guide is describing was carved during a burst of creativity in the 10th century, in what is today Cambodia—at the time it was part of the Khmer empire. A new king had come to power, moved the capital to a place called Koh Ker, and launched a temple-building spree. The statues that adorned the temples pushed already advanced Khmer artistry to new heights.

“They weren’t just creating large, monumental figures, they were creating figures that have extremely refined carving details,” Helen Ibbitson Jessup says of the Koh Ker craftsmen. Jessup is an expert on Khmer art and founder of the non-profit Friends of Khmer Culture. “The muscular tension—the power–is so vividly expressed by the sculptor. It’s extraordinarily dynamic statuary.”

Now, the Norton Simon statue, a companion piece at Sotheby’s auction house in New York, and two other related ones at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, are caught up in an international tug-of-war.

The skirmish heated up in April, when the US government, at Cambodia’s request, moved to seize the Sotheby’s statue, saying it was likely looted. Cambodia then made similar claims about the other statues.

One difficulty that’s playing out right now in the Sotheby’s case is that it’s just not clear what laws apply here.

“The cultural property law field is really a patchwork of different kinds of law,” says Rick St. Hilaire, a cultural heritage lawyer who’s been watching the Sotheby’s case closely. “It’s not a body of law that a law student would easily find in a case book.”

St. Hilaire thinks the case could have big implications. “How is this going to unfold? How is the law going to be impacted? How is policy going to be impacted? The outcome might very well dictate whatever policy might be embarked on in the future.”

Sotheby’s, Norton Simon, and the Met declined to comment for this story. In June, a Met spokesperson told The New York Times that, in the 80s when these statues were given to the museum, there weren’t clear rules on accepting such antiquities.

Helen Ibbitson Jessup says others argue that when major museums preserve and display such statues, it serves a greater public good.

“That preservation of antiquities from other countries is a great service that the museums of the West offer, that it shares the civilizations of other nations to a very wide audience and on a very meticulously well-preserved basis,” Jessup says, summarizing this argument.

In court hearings, Sotheby’s lawyers have wondered why the Cambodian government is only now expressing interest in these statues, some of which have been on display for over 30 years.

Jessup says one reason is that, for much of that time, Cambodia has been fighting–or recovering from–a devastating civil war. They’ve just recently started to take stock of their cultural heritage.

Chen Chanratana publishes a magazine and website devoted to Khmer culture, and recently finished his doctoral dissertation on Koh Ker. He says that recovering works like these statues, and incorporating their stories into the broader Cambodian story, is part of his country’s rebuilding process.

“We can create the new story, or the history, about Cambodia. And we can see our ancestors have a lot of culture, have a lot of treasure in the past. And we have to learn about that, we have to know about that,” he said over Skype from Phnom Penh.

In the next few weeks, the judge will rule on a Sotheby’s motion to dismiss the case.

We found some things about the General Assembly that all cab drivers seem to agree on. It’s awful, for one. Driving anywhere takes forever. Often, passengers just give up, get out, and walk.

Kashan Walayat had a fare Tuesday who needed to get near the UN. She was disabled, and walking wasn’t an option.

“She got no choice, so I have to take her there. So I took her there and she appreciate, but she said ‘Thank you for your patience too,’” he said, laughing.

Once you get into geo-politics, though, cabbie perspectives diverge. Most drivers we talked to didn’t have opinions about what the General Assembly was talking about–they weren’t paying that much attention. But what it should be talking about? They had opinions about that.

Fakir Mostafa is originally from Bangladesh; he’s been driving a cab in New York City on and off since the late 1990s. He wants the UN to talk about “Innocence of Muslims”—the video that sparked protests in Bangladesh and many other Muslim countries because of its ridicule of the Prophet Mohammed.

“He’s a holy man,” Mostafa said. “He’s a prophet from God, and prophet for not only Muslims–prophet for all–like Christian, Jew, for everybody.”

I asked Mostafa if he thought President Obama went far enough Tuesday in his address to the UN, where he called the video “crude and disgusting,” but said protecting free speech was essential. Mostafa said Obama needs to take some sort of action to stop videos like that from being made.

Ismail al Nour listened to Obama’s speech in his cab, and thought the president covered a lot of bases. But if he had the UN’s ear, al Nour says he’d tell them about the troubles still roiling his homeland of Darfur in Sudan.

“Everybody has his own problem,” al Nour said. “As a Sudanese, I have my own problem; as a Darfurian I have my own problem that’s going on. I need action on the ground from the UN to solve this problem as soon as possible.”

Another driver, Jalal Maache, came to the US from Morocco in 2004. What does he think the General Assembly should be focused on?

“The drones, I heard, are killing a lot of civilians. I hope the UN will do something about it,” he said.

Maache, who says he’d earned a masters degree in international relations back home, got plaintive when asked about Syria—a central subject at the UN this week.

“These people are getting killed every day; it’s crazy. I mean I don’t even, I always skip Syrian issue every day. I have on my iPhone here, I have the Huffington Post,” Maache said, unlocking his phone as he talked. “That’s where I read my news, sir, right here. And every time I see the Syrian issue, I skip it. I skip it. Because I can’t…it’s heartbreaking.”

Maache says if he could tell the members of the General Assembly one thing about Syria, it would be to look to the military intervention in Libya as a model.

Most cabbies we talked to didn’t think much action would come out of this week’s meetings. Alongside this pessimism about the power the UN does wield, though, was often an optimism about the power the UN could wield.

Mohammad Zaini is from Indonesia and has been driving a cab for two years—before that he drove a limousine. He says it’s simple what the UN should be talking about: “[The General Assembly] should be talking about peace, peace. And do it, not just talk!”

Zaini was driving us toward the UN. Soon we were stuck in traffic. We asked him how people should get around Manhattan when the General Assembly is in town.

“The best way: walk,” he said, laughing slightly. “You take any transport this time it’s not good.” He thought a minute, then amended that: take a cab as far as you can, then walk.

The New York Gypsy Festival—a celebration of the diverse music and culture that falls under the “gypsy” rubric, is going on now in Manhattan. (Festival organizers use the terms “gypsy” and the more precise “roma” interchangeably.)

The festival’s headliners, a brass band called Fanfare Ciocarlia, were in town on Saturday to perform a rollicking set for a sold-out audience at Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts. It didn’t take long for that audience to get out of their seats. By the third song the aisles and floors were packed.

Oprica Ivancea, the band’s clarinet and sax player, was impressed. “You are a very good dancer,” Ivancea told the crowd partway through the set, rather appropriately referring to the excited crowd in the singular. “In fact you are one of the best dancers which I have seen in my life. But the next song, you cannot dance. Because it’s too fast.”

He was kind of kidding about not dancing, but the song’s tempo was no joke. Fanfare Ciocarlia plays really, really fast.

Costica Trifan, who plays trumpet and sings in Fanfare Ciocarlia, was coy when asked about the band’s velocity. How we do it is a secret, he said, but we never set out to be so fast. We just want to make sure everyone is having a good time.

Bringing the party is in the group’s DNA. The 12 members hail from a village in northeastern Romania called Zece Prajin. They started playing together in school, and were soon doing village baptisms and weddings.

And they might have remained on the Zece Prajin wedding circuit if Henry Ernst, a German guy who’d become obsessed with Romanian music, hadn’t stumbled into their remote village one day in 1996. Within a few minutes, Ernst had a beer in his hand and about 20 musicians playing for him.

“They simply blowed me away,” Ernst remembered when we sat down with him shortly before Saturday’s show. “It was magic, it was so powerful, it has such a humor, that I decided not to stay for one hour; it’s better to stay for three months.”

Ernst soon had the band touring Europe, then Japan and Australia and North America. They’ve cut a few albums too.

Their live shows blend the traditional music of their Roma ancestry with other music from the Balkans and beyond. Among the songs in that “beyond” category are the James Bond theme, Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and the Steppenwolf song “Born To Be Wild,” which was featured in the movie “Borat.”

Fanfare Cioccarlia (Photo Credit: www.asphalt-tango.de)

Costica Trifan, speaking through an interpreter, said that hits like this were always a part of their repertoire—they were, after all, a wedding band. “We always played different musical styles,” he said. “Weddings would start off with traditional music, but later in the night people would start requesting ABBA or pop music or themes from TV soap operas.”

Their catchall repertoire and their frenetic musical delivery has won the band fans the world over. Trifan said that their popularity abroad has actually sparked a brass renaissance in their own village.

“By the 1990s, people in our village had lost interest in the traditional brass music—people wanted to hear other types of songs. But now the roots—the kinds of music we play—are coming back,” he said.

There were glimpses in Saturday’s show of what the epic, daylong parties back in Zece Prajin must be like—the exuberant dancing and clapping and shouting and singing. At the end of the show, the band came back for a second encore. Instead of taking their places onstage, they launched into a song and marched straight into the audience.

They snaked through the crowd and out into the lobby. Fans circled around them. They played through chorus after chorus, notching up the energy a bit each time. You got the sense that they could have gone on forever. They didn’t, though. There was an after party to get to.

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“I am now a member of the legislature,” she noted on Tuesday, in her first public remarks during her US trip. Suu Kyi talked about the transition she and several other Burmese democracy activists are making as they settle into seats in parliament. “We are finding our way,” she said. “We are beginning to learn the art of compromise — give and take — the achievement of consensus.”

One big part of finding her way is figuring out how to share public and political space with Myanmar President Thein Sein.

Their evolving relationship has had some friction. Her trip to the World Economic Forum in Bangkok in May was so highly publicized that, at the last minute, Thein Sein canceled his trip there. Suu Kyi has also spoken out against one of Thein Sein’s main goals: an end to US sanctions on Myanmar.

“I think it’s a relationship in progress,” says Suzanne DiMaggio of Asia Society, a host of Suu Kyi’s talk on Tuesday. “Let’s keep it in perspective: he was a member of the military regime that had essentially imprisoned her all those years.”

This week, Suu Kyi modified her stance on US sanctions. She’s now calling for an end to the few that are still in place. DiMaggio says this is one of several public moves Suu Kyi has made that helps lay the groundwork for Thein Sein’s visit. “Not only did she endorse further easing of sanctions, but she also endorsed him, and his government,” she says.

In her speech, Suu Kyi said: “We must also remember that the reform process was initiated by President Thein Sein. I believe that he is keen on democratic reforms.”

And that point — that Thein Sein deserves credit for setting reforms in motion — is a crucial one, says David Steinberg, a Georgetown professor and longtime Myanmar watcher. He says it’s getting lost in the fanfare surrounding Suu Kyi’s visit.

“Having them come at the same time, approximately, I don’t think was a good idea,” he says. “To my mind they need each other to make the reforms inside the country work. And I don’t want to see their relationship jeopardized by her overshadowing him.”

Suu Kyi received Congress’s highest civilian honor yesterday in Washington. She then met with President Obama. The meeting was announced quietly and there was only a brief photo-op for the press. That choreography seemed intended, in part, to avoid further overshadowing Thein Sein’s visit.

It remains to be seen if Thein Sein will have a similar meeting with Obama on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly next week. The decision could have implications for the still nascent relationship between the US and Myanmar, and the relationship between Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein. Murray Hiebert, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says it could also have implications for Thein Sein’s standing with the more hard-line elements in his own party.

“It’s very important for him to be encouraged, so that when he goes back…his opponents can’t say, ‘So you did all these reforms, you freed political prisoners, you opened the press, you opened the internet, and what do you get for it? President Obama refuses to see you when you go to New York,’” Hiebert says.

Of course, the mere fact that people are discussing these issues of diplomatic nuance is testament to how much Myanmar has changed in the past year.

Alongside these raw documents, sites like Vimeo and YouTube have also become home to a variety of pieces of video art dealing with the Syrian uprising. One YouTube series, which recently launched a second season, uses puppets to portray and comment on the events in Syria.

The series is called “Top Goon.” Its first episode opens on a lone, snoring finger puppet. It stirs and rises abruptly, escaping a nightmare. The puppet, named Beeshu, is wearing red and white striped pajamas and a matching sleeping cap. As soon as you see the face it’s clear: this is a caricature of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Soon he’s being soothed by a military aide. The aide assures him that his regime isn’t in danger. Then he sings a cooing Beeshu back to sleep.

“We were very, very nervous,” says Jameel, the director of Top Goon, about uploading this first episode. (Jameel is a pseudonym—most members of Masasit Mati disguise their identities for safety reasons.) But Jameel says the fear was mixed with joy and anticipation. “It’s the first time in our lives as artists, as young men and women, that we can criticize the regime. We wouldn’t dare to even make a little gesture at them before. Now we’re able to criticize them big time,” he says.

And this is not subtle criticism. Another episode in Top Goon’s first season has Beeshu victorious in a game show called “Who wants to kill a million?”

Others show him dressed as Dracula, sinking his fangs into a protestor’s neck; and consulting with his father Hafez’s ghost.

Donatella Della Ratta is a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen who studies Syrian popular television and knows the members of Massasit Mati, most of whom are based in Syria. She says that mocking the Assads was unheard of before the Syrian uprising began.

“There might be criticism in Syrian drama, vis-a-vis the government, even high ranks,” she says. “But this criticism will never touch the leader, ever. So yes, I was shocked when I saw that that they were touching Bashar al-Assad himself, and even more surprisingly they were touching Hafez al-Assad, his father, which is a kind of sacred monster in Syria.”

Della Ratta has seen an outpouring of user-generated, creative culture blossom in the Syrian uprising—from video art and theater to music and slogans and re-purposing of regime propaganda.

“So in a way the uprising, plus the use of the Internet, has democratized this way of expressing yourself. It has given a certain amount of power to the citizen to express his view,” Della Ratta says.

She says this sort of creative resistance is still happening, even as things in Syria have grown more deadly in recent months.

The increasingly dire situation in Syria is clearly reflected in Top Goon’s second season, which launched at the end of July. The tone is darker and the violence more foregrounded.

This is particularly true in an episode from a few weeks ago called “The Monster.” Beeshu tortures a prisoner with whip, a knife, an electric shock, all while taunting the prisoner—telling him that everyone has this kind of brutality in them. “Let the monster out,” Beeshu says. These are finger puppets, and still it’s a bit hard to watch. The prisoner snaps and starts to strangle Beeshu. Beeshu is pleased.

Arwa, the group’s writer, who asked that his last name not be used, said this is a real tension among Syrians, and one reflected in Masasit Mati’s work. “The goal of the group itself is to reflect what people feel. As best we can we try to express the feelings and questions people are living with. And we try to point out the mistakes and present alternatives,” Arwa says.

It’s a tension that Masasit Mati has experienced. Two of the main actors from last season aren’t with the group for this season. They split with them because they wanted to push for violence against the regime more actively.

There is some optimism in this season of Top Goon. There are new characters meant to show the growing diversity of the resistance, and the creators say several of the forthcoming episodes are set in a post-Assad Syria.

Donatella Della Ratta sees hope in the broader creative resistance she still sees going on in Syria. “It proves there is a civil society in Syria. It proves there is an active citizenship that is, despite all the events that are happening in Syria, still making its voice heard.”

Jameel hopes the world will hear their voice. “It is important for them to know that we need them, and we’re disappointed by this shameful silence we’re witnessing lately toward the Syrian people,” he says.

But there are signs some are listening. A recent comment on Top Goon’s YouTube page reads “We are watching in the US too and praying for all.”