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Burma’s generals silenced the Buddhist monks yesterday morning.For a week and a half, the monks had been on the streets of Rangoon in their tens of thousands, and their angry calm gave courage to the people around them.But overnight, they were beaten, shot and arrested, and locked in their monasteries. Handfuls of them emerged yesterday-two or three brave individuals, a dozen at most-but nothing to approach the mass marches of the previous nine days. Everyone felt their absence.You could see it in the faces of the civilian demonstrators who took to the streets anyway, in defiance of the official warnings.You could see it too in the swagger of the riot police, banging their batons menacingly on their shields as they advanced.The monks were moral shields; without them the marchers had lost a lucky charm. They felt less like crusaders for justice and more like what they resembled-scared, angry kids in T-shirts facing well-drilled troops with automatic weapons.They stood their ground as long as they dared, too long for some of them. At least nine people were killed, according to patchy reports, and eleven others injured. The dead included a Japanese photographer.So far, though, this does not yet appear to be a repeat of the massacres of 1988, when 3,000 were mown down on the streets. The junta is showing patience and restraint, it is plotting its moves step by step, and it is displaying a subtle and malignant cunning.In the Mwe Kya Kan pagoda in the South Okkala district of Rangoon, it began at 2am, but seven hours later the evidence was plain to see – a dozen thick patches of congealing blood and human tissue splashed about the yard. The windows of the monks’ dormitories were smashed jaggedly by the impact of rubber bullets – hard, round spheres fired from green cartridges that the monks had carefully gathered up and put on display.Inside everything had been smashed – the thin plywood walls, the monks’ plaster statues of the Buddha – and the thin mattresses were soaked with blood.“We had to flee for our lives into the neighbourhood,” said a small bespectacled young man named Ashin Thu, one of the few monks to have evaded arrest. “A family let me hide in one of their houses, I was so scared.”The bullets may have been rubber, but at close range they can still do great damage. Seventy monks were driven away bleeding in 24 military vehicles and, to judge from the pools of blood in the yard, several of them were gravely injured.Most outrageous of all, in the eyes of the survivors, was the theft that the soldiers had carried out. They took money from locked boxes and carried off a gold statue and a hoard of golden rings. And so it becomes clear why the Government has imposed an eight-hour overnight curfew. It was not to protect the city from “terrorists”, but to prevent its citizens bearing witness to its own crimes.Similar raids – with beatings, terror and arrests – were reported in at least three other monasteries. Several senior members of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the political party of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, were also rounded up overnight.At 9am yesterday I had an appointment to meet U Myint Thein, the gracious and gentlemanly spokesman of the NLD. But U Myint Thein was otherwise engaged – in the headquarters of the police special branch, who took him away from his home in the middle of the night.By the afternoon, there were troops stationed in monasteries all over the city. For Buddhists, there is an element of sacrilege in this, as well as simple bad manners. These were men of violence, fresh from acts of violence, who were imposing themselves on places dedicated to peace. At Moe Kaung Pagoda, the olive-uniformed troops wore red kerchiefs around their necks. It is the belief of many of the demonstrators that this is a sign that they are permitted to shoot to kill. But the killing was to take place elsewhere, on the road that leads south towards the Sule Pagoda, the second-most famous in Rangoon after the mighty golden Shwedagon. By noon, thousands of people had gathered at a crossroads which had been sealed off by soldiers, riot police and barbed wire barricades.Around 1pm the police began moving forward, and the soldiers followed. Warnings were issued through loud-speakers on the roofs of vans.Then, amid impenetrable confusion, shots were fired, as well as smoke grenades. It would be inconsistent with the behaviour of the security forces during the rest of the day if these had been live rounds, aimed to kill. But one man, apparently a photographer, was seen by witnesses to drop suddenly, as if shot. His limp body was lifted on to a military truck and carried away.The crowd scattered and ran to reform a few hundred yards up the road. Banging their shields, the riot police advanced again with the loud-speaker van behind them.The message was both crude and courteous. It included an honorific form of the Burmese word for “you”, and might be translated like this: “Good sirs, please leave the area or we will open fire in ten minutes time.”To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah...
