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The Day Burma Was Silenced    [
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    True Burma Death Toll May Never Be Known
    By Graeme Jenkins
    The Telegraph UK

    Friday 28 September 2007

    A crowd of around 3,000 people, with six monks at the front, faced the riot police and soldiers across barbed wire.

    Beyond them shone the great gold dome of the Sule Pagoda. When three trucks of soldiers drew up the crowd began to run.

    Seconds later, without warning, there were several cracks of automatic gunfire.

    A Japanese man carrying a camera fell to the ground, grimacing in pain.

    A few minutes later the soldiers removed his limp body. It took six of them to do so.

    Many people have been shot in Rangoon yesterday and the true death toll may never be known.

    Japan later confirmed that a journalist, Kenji Nagai, 50, had been killed.

    The Burmese Government said nine people were killed, which is almost certainly a gross understatement.

    Automatic gunfire rang out across the city all afternoon. In many cases it appears to have been directed at groups of unarmed protesters.

    According to one version the army often moves in three trucks because there is one platoon to shoot, one to pick up the bodies and one to clear up afterwards.

    One witness said that the government has dug a pit in the centre of a football field near the Shwedagon Pagoda and surrounded it with a bamboo fence. Its purpose, up to this point, is unknown.

    In another indication that the true death toll may be far higher than the confirmed figures suggest, a source from the National League for Democracy, citing hospital contacts, said 30 bodies had been brought to the hospital on Wednesday.

    Most counts put fatalities on that day at around five. Hospital workers are too terrified to speak about the subject.

    The day began with brutality when security forces carried out dawn raids on at least nine monasteries.

    At one, where soldiers rammed the gate with a truck, there were bullet casings on the floor and blood on the walls. A monk was reported to have died.

    A rumour in Rangoon said that soldiers had disrobed an abbot and made him crawl on the floor like a dog.

    Hundreds of monks were arrested. The raids incensed local people, who revere the monks.

    But the raids, combined with the presence of soldiers posted outside monasteries, succeeded in keeping most of the monks away from the protests.

    Later in the morning near the Shwedagon Pagoda, where the streets are lined with monasteries, there were few people to be seen besides soldiers lying in the shade with their guns.

    The city awoke with an air of surreal normality. Policemen led pedestrians freely past their barbed wire, coiled in readiness for the afternoon's demonstrations.

    On the pavements where protesters were later shot down, people sold second hand books and caged song birds like on any normal day.

    As usual, the demonstrations started at noon. In the absence of the monks ordinary people and students came to the fore, but the movement seemed leaderless.

    It was difficult to estimate the number of demonstrators, who were more dispersed than earlier in the week, but they ran into tens of thousands.

    They gathered seemingly spontaneously at different points in the city, and they were under no illusions about the violence they faced.

    Trucks mounted with loud speakers warned them to disperse in 10 minutes or face "extreme action". The protesters jeered.

    As the loud speakers counted down the minutes, riot police slowly advanced, beating their clubs against their shields.

    Behind them followed the soldiers dressed in green drab, with their rifles and their brightly coloured scarves to signify their platoon.

    Soldiers roamed around the city in trucks mounted with heavy machine guns all afternoon.

    Reports said that two battle-hardened units, usually deployed against Burma's oppressed ethnic minorities in the provinces, had been sent to the city.

    Cordons were set up all over Rangoon. Near one, the army reportedly ran into a group of students with their truck before opening fire. Yet another report spoke of troops opening fire at a shopping centre.

    Hazy accounts of possible atrocities around the city were bewildering and hard to confirm.

    Groups of protesters remained on the streets through four hours of this violence, refusing to be defeated by fear and brutality.

    There were hundreds of arrests, of protesters or anyone deemed to support them.

    "They are hunting us," a Burmese journalist said by telephone.

    Mid-ranking members of the National League for Democracy were arrested overnight, but it now appears that the party's iconic leader, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, may remain under house arrest, not at Insein jail as previously rumoured.

    Finally, the regime broke its silence in a briefing for diplomats at their new and remote jungle capital in Naypyidaw, literally meaning "seat of kings".

    "The government is committed to showing restraint in its response to the provocations," a diplomat quoted the regime as claiming.

    Official comment had previously been so scant that even state radio was unsure whether the curfew came into effect at 6pm or 9pm.

    Military officials set up barricades, bloodshed in Burma as soldiers open fire

    The official newspaper reserved its pity not for the protesters but for foreigners.

    "It is so heart-rending," it wrote on the front page, "to see groundless and unabashed news reports released in the name of the people."

    Commentators believe that such bizarre propaganda is probably aimed more at mid-ranking security officials and regime cronies than at ordinary people.

    The bureaucracy has been moved to Naypyidaw, far away from ordinary people, and army families live in colonies cut off from civilians.

    "I think the regime really believes this is just a few individuals stirred up by 'destructive elements", not the makings of a popular uprising reflecting the will of the people," said a western diplomat.

    "I think they believe their own propaganda."

    But he added that, although isolated, the generals are not completely immune to foreign pressure.

    "They have the BBC up there in Naypyidaw. They have CNN. And I'm sure they"re watching it," he said.

    Apparently that is not enough to restrain their violence. The demonstrators and the army will be back on the streets.

    No one here knows how much longer Burma's freedom struggle can survive such harsh repression.

 

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    Go to Original

    The Day Burma Was Silenced
    By Kenneth Denby
    The Times UK

    Friday 28 September 2007

The junta showed a subtle and malignant cunning, and then moved against the monks.

    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."

    No one had difficulty believing this and with oaths and screams of rage (one man lifted up his traditional longyi skirt to present a full moon to the forces of the junta), the protesters moved back, and back, and back again.

    Late in the afternoon, shots were heard from the streets to the east of the pagoda. But by that stage none of the small corps of foreign diplomats, reporters and photographers following the demonstrations felt much like going out to have a look.

    There are so many heartbreaking things about what is going in Burma, but for a foreigner one of the hardest to bear is the optimism. There are few foreign journalists here, but people treat them as saviours, encouraging them to get the story and the pictures out, with a touching faith that it will make a difference.

    "Tell them to send foreign troops, UN troops," said a young monk at the Mwe Kya Kan pagoda. "Please, fly them to our country to save our lives."

    An American in Rangoon told me yesterday about an opinion poll carried out on Burmese attitudes to US foreign policy.

    "Like most people, they thought that it sucks," he told me. "But not for the usual reason. Burmese wanted to know why George Bush hasn"t invaded their country yet."

    A boy named Raphael came up to practise his English, as the crowd screamed at the soldiers, and asked for my address so that he could visit me one day. A very small and old but irrepressibly vigorous white-haired man took my hand and led me to safety when he thought that I was too close to the trouble. "I am a teacher," he said proudly. "PhD!"

    Small, human encounters - and yet in these dark circumstances they become almost unbearably poignant. They are based on a very questionable assumption: that the people of Burma are going to be saved.

    I wish that I could have told the monk, and the boy and the old man, that I believed everything would be well and that soon they could expect the basic decency from their Government that so many of us take for granted. Nothing is settled, of course, and the future is impossible to read - but on the basis of what I saw yesterday the Burmese junta is winning.

 

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    Go to Original

    Shot Dead Trying to Show the Real Picture of Burma
    By Claire Soares
    The Independent UK

    Friday 28 September 2007

Images suggest that Japanese video journalist was a victim of Burma's repressive junta.

    Dodging the bloodstained sandals and the panic-stricken masses who fled troops near Sule Pagoda in the centre of the Burmese capital Rangoon yesterday, Kenji Nagai kept his camera rolling, recording vital footage of Burma's closed society and providing a lifeline to the outside world for the protesting monks and civilians who were risking their lives for much-needed change.

    Then, in one dreadful moment, the Japanese video journalist took a bullet in the chest - almost certainly from the gun of a Burmese soldier.

    We cannot be certain of the exact circumstances in which Mr Nagai died, but a series of pictures appears to suggest he was callously gunned down, a victim of the repressive junta who are almost as keen to quell the worldwide media coverage of the protests as they are to quell the protests themselves. Burmese state television has been running news bulletins accusing global broadcasters of pumping out a "Skyful of lies".

    It fell to Mr Nagai's father to identify his son, who was working for the Japanese news agency APF News, from photos and videos taken in the street where he was killed. Japan has lodged a protest with the Burmese authorities. Mr Nagai was one of at least nine people known to have been killed in Rangoon yesterday. There may have been more. It seems unlikely that they will have been the last.