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YANGON-Myanmar's junta arrested 48 activists on Friday for a protest march marking 20 years since the army crushed an "8-8-88" democracy uprising with the loss of an estimated 3,000 lives, an opposition official said.The group of mainly young men in t-shirts bearing the numbers 8-8-88-a reference to the August 8, 1988 nationwide revolt-staged a silent walk through the northwest town of Taunggok before being stopped by a police barricade."They were all picked up and are being questioned at the moment," Ko Thein Naing, a local official from the opposition National League for Democracy, told Reuters.Given last year's widespread fuel price protests, the junta was taking few chances with the anniversary, posting armed police and pro-government thugs at strategic sites in towns and cities.Leaders of the 1988 uprising, the biggest challenge to army rule dating back to 1962, have been behind bars since the start of the fuel-price demonstrations last August. They are just a few of an estimated 1,100 political prisoners.Some students in the northwest city of Sittwe wore black, one of them said, but for most of the former Burma's 57 million people, the sense of fear and futility, as well as the daily struggle to survive, trumped any lingering outrage."Nobody is happy with the present situation, but most people know from experience that protests will not change their lives," English teacher Hla Maung told Reuters.Outside the pariah Southeast Asian nation, however, human rights groups and activists who fled the 1988 bloodshed staged demonstrations outside Myanmar and Chinese embassies.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
