In 2009, Moe Thee Zun, a famous student leader during Burma's 1988 pro-democracy movement and a former chairman of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front, flung his shoe at a car carrying then-prime minister Thein Sein while he was attending the UN General Assembly in New York. He argued that Thein Sein and the repressive military junta ruling Burma do not represent the people of Burma -- whom they brutally killed during the peaceful protests of the 2007 Saffron Revolution.

Now Moe Thee Zun is back in Burma after 24 years in exile. The student leader, who was condemned to death in absentia by the old military regime, can now legally return to his homeland -- now that-President Thein Sein's pseudo-civilian government has removed his name, along with 2,081 others, from a blacklist denying him entry into the country. After his arrival on Saturday he held a press conference at which he declared that he had returned to help the president's reform process and make peace in the war-torn areas of the country.

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Silent Voices, a new play at the National Theatre in Kampala, questions the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation in Northern Uganda. The rhetoric in the last couple of years about Northern Uganda has focused on the forgiving nature of the people -- and thus on how reconciliation will successfully remove the stench of the long and terrible war against the Lord's Resistance Army.

Written by Judith Adong, Silent Voices deftly captures the experiences of the people affected by the conflict. Adong was inspired by the research she carried out in 2006, looking at the use of drama therapy for former child soldiers, at the World Vision Children of War Rehabilitation Centre and at the Gulu Support the Children Organization.

But the concepts of forgiveness and reconciliation were only negotiated at the political level; the Amnesty Act forgave perpetrators who surrendered, and in cases protected them from future litigation. Adong's meetings with community members led her to realize that, "there was a feeling of betrayal, bitterness, a need for revenge and a feeling of having been neglected, while crime perpetrators were instead being rewarded and victims being ‘forced' to forgive."

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As you drive out of Caracas International Airport, one of the first things you see as your car starts up the Coastal Range into the city is an abandoned toll booth. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when the rickety, 60-year-old highway linking the capital to the coast and its airport actually charged a toll.

The idea that Venezuelans would have to pay for their inherent right to drive their cars was deemed as nonsense by the Chávez administration, and was abandoned not long after the new president took power. It's a shame, because if there is one thing this country needs, it's some sort of congestion pricing.

Caracas does not top the ranks of the world's worst cities for traffic. That dubious honor usually goes to cities like Moscow, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, or Beijing. Yet if there is one thing the inhabitants of this polarized metropolis can agree on, it's that traffic is nerve-wracking.

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Amidst the current national debate about Indonesia becoming a failing state, one important factor that has been completely overlooked is the question of whether or not the world's fourth most populous nation is dealing with demographic pressures effectively.

The Failed State Index 2012 puts Indonesia in 63^rd place out of the 171 countries surveyed by Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace. This is dangerously close to the category of failed states in the top 60 of the table. Indonesia scores higher than 7.0 in five of the 12 areas surveyed (the higher score indicates higher failure): group grievance, uneven economic development, security apparatus, the rise of factionalized elites, and demographic pressures.

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The rains that swept across Uganda Monday afternoon left devastating effects. While the press showed images of the flooded capital, Kampala, more chilling pictures emerged of the mudslides in Bududa, a region in eastern Uganda.

Located on the slopes of Mount Elgon along the Uganda-Kenya border, Bududa is a fertile area, but vulnerable to disaster. Extensive pressure on the environment from human encroachment is manifesting negative results: Mudslides occur whenever there are heavy rains. The area first made news with the landslides of 2010, when over 350 people died and many others were injured and displaced.

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We already know that drones are powerful weapons. In "Predators for Peace," Jack C. Chow depicts a not-too-distant future in which airborne robots can be used to boost humanitarian relief efforts and good governance.

As governments cut back on foreign assistance budgets, Peter Passell makes the case for a smarter approach to development aid.

Alina Rocha Menocal, noting that Latin America still suffers from gross inequality, sees the answers in sound public policy.

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To our readers:

Welcome to the revised version of the Democracy Lab Weekly Brief. We'd love to get your feedback, so please send us your thoughts via Facebook or Twitter.

Democracy Lab Highlights:

In his profile of the Tibetan government-in-exile's democratically elected leader, Sudip Mazumdar explores the grim options facing Tibetans fighting for greater autonomy.

Jackee Budesta Batanda explains that Uganda's biggest problem isn't the Lord's Resistance Army. It's nodding disease, a mysterious ailment that is ravaging the countryside - with little response from the Ugandan government or the international community.

Mohamed El Dahshan reports on the peculiar saga of an Egyptian parliamentarian's wayward nose.

And Christian Caryl argues that, from Russia to Burma, political personalities are more important than ever. (Above,  Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin celebrates his victory in Sunday's presidential election -- flanked by his sidekick, current President Dmitri Medvedev.)

Democracy Lab's recommended reads:

Elsewhere on the FP website, Michael Wilkerson offers a critical take on the #StopKony campaign, which, according to Wilkerson, is presenting distorted claims in its highly publicized effort to stop the Lord's Resistance Army.

In a provocative piece entitled "Don't Despair of Democracy," the FT's Gideon Rachman argues that "the world's democracies are still winning the global beauty contest." (Subscription may be required.)

Leigh Nolan, an expert at the Brookings Doha Center in Doha, describes how monarchies in the Gulf are trying to manage the expectations of their citizens through the educational system.

Just in time for International Women's Day, the International Federation for Human Rights  presents a skeptical report about the state of women's rights in the Arab Spring.

An analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, offers a fine-grained look at the capabilities of the Syrian guerillas now fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Stephanie Strom at The New York Times offers a must-read on an India-based website that tracks bribery. The site aggregates reports on bribes submitted by anonymous donors.

The excellent Democracy in Africa website offers an illuminating podcast and a number of other resources that examine the continuing electoral turmoil in Senegal.

The Ugandan president's office has announced that it is requesting 92 billion Ugandan shillings [$39m] in additional funding to run its activities. This comes just five months after State House already asked for a supplementary budget of 66.6bn [$28.3m]. This is, to put it mildly, outrageous.

The request comes just weeks after the government announced that it is refusing to increase spending (except for the security sector). The government had offered to increase teachers' salaries by only 15 percent, an offer rejected by the teachers, who were demanding a 100 per cent raise.

Here's more from The Daily Monitor piece:

If approved, the State House budget will balloon to more than Shs158.6 billion [$67.3m] -- more than twice the 2011/12 Budget for Mulago National Referral Hospital. This money would meet the Shs75 billion [$31.8m] required to answer teachers' demands for a 100 per cent salary increment.

(The photo above shows Mulago National Referral Hospital, Uganda's largest.)

Meanwhile, the northern part of the country is being ravaged by a strange disease referred to as "nodding disease." Of the 7 billion shillings [$2.9m] requested by the Ministry of Health to address the outbreak, the government only released a miserly 100m [$42,436]. The ministry's supplementary budget for tackling the outbreak is being delayed amid reports of bureaucratic infighting.

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Last week the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a statement saying that Burma has a chance to become "the next economic frontier in Asia." But the IMF went on to note that the country can realize its potential only "if it can turn its rich natural resources, young labor force, and proximity to some of the most dynamic economies in the world" to its advantage.

In a word, it's up to the government.

Contrary to what you might think from the headlines, it's not western sanctions that are causing Burma's economic woes. It's government policy. The Burmese government's Industry Minister, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, admitted as much when he responded to a journalist who asked whether the country has done enough to get U.S. sanctions lifted: "We have a lot of things to reform and lots of things have to change: laws, regulations and institutions, not only in the political sector but also in the economic sectors. But sanctions are up to them."

In 2004, the well-known U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote that sanctions against Burma had "systematically weakened the economy by limiting trade, investment and foreign aid." It's an argument that many critics of sanctions have made.

The media love to use terms like "pariah," "isolated," and "closed" whenever they describe Burma and the effects of sanctions on the country.

If the term "pariah" denotes a country that utterly disregards international norms and behavior, and correspondingly meets with unrelenting censure from the international community, then that's a pretty good fit for Burma. But when the word is used in a way that's supposed to characterize the country's overall economic position (invariably in combination with words like "closed" and "isolated"), then it doesn't describe the situation at all.

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, in 2010 Burma's exports and imports stood at $8.7 billion and $4.9 billion respectively. That's higher than the data for some of the comparable members of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), such as Cambodia and Laos. Meanwhile, many experts caution that the official figures for Burma's exports fall far short of the real numbers because they don't cover the value of timber, gems, narcotics, rice, and other products smuggled to neighboring countries.

As far as foreign direct investment (FDI) is concerned, Burma reached a record high in 2010-11 of almost $20 billion. That's more than the figure in the same year for Southeast Asia's latest investment darling, Vietnam.

These facts suggest that Burma's exposure to trade and FDI is higher today than ever before, and even higher than that of some comparable ASEAN countries. In this light it becomes extremely hard to argue that sanctions have deprived Burma of FDI and trade, much less that Burma is "isolated" or "closed." (This also offers an eloquent commentary on how ineffective the sanctions regime has actually been.)

Of course, sanctions do have negative effects on the economy (for instance, job losses in garment industry after the 2003 sanctions imposed by the U.S.), and there are many spillovers to other sectors, ranging from education to the growth of civil society. But the government cannot use sanctions as an excuse for its mismanagement and kleptocratic corruption.

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