Burmese human rights, enviroment topic of activist's Nov. 10 lecture

A human rights and environmental activist will discuss the plight of Burma at a Nov. 10 public lecture in Simrall Hall auditorium.

Beginning at 7:30 p.m., Edith T. Mirante will lead a multimedia presentation on conditions in the military-controlled Southeastern Asian country. MSU's Office of International Services is sponsoring the program.

Mirante is a New Jersey native and 1974 graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. After graduation, she traveled to Asia while looking for subjects for landscape paintings.

Now a resident of Portland, Ore., she is the author of "Burmese Looking Glass: A Human Rights Adventure." In 1986, she founded Project Maje, an independent organization that continues to distribute information about human-rights conditions in the almost Texas-sized nation of some 48 million people.

A former British crown colony that gained independence in 1948, Burma has been ruled by the military since a 1962 coup.

Mirante became an activist in the early 1980s while living in northern Thailand. Crossing the border into Burma, she became one of the few outsiders to penetrate deep into the country's mountainous war zone and live among local ethnic minorities.

As a result of what she witnessed, Mirante began smuggling out information and photographs of government-sanctioned abuses taking place in the war zone. Among these were anti-democratic actions against the natives and deforestation of the area's vast rain forest.

For more information on Mirante's program, telephone Stephen Cottrell at 325-8929.