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a sad tale from Burma…

Posted on Thursday 11 October 2007


Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon’s residents hear their neighbours being taken away. Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month’s pro-democracy uprising.

The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime’s soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching. The hidden crackdown is as methodical as it is brutal. First the monks were targeted, then the thousands of ordinary Burmese who joined the demonstrations, those who even applauded or watched, or those merely suspected of anti-government sympathies.

"There were about 400 of us in one room. No toilets, no buckets, no water for washing. No beds, no blankets, no soap. Nothing," said a 24-year-old monk who was held for 10 days at the Government Technical Institute, a leafy college in northern Rangoon which is now a prison camp for suspected dissidents. The young man, too frightened to be named, was one of 185 monks taken in a raid on a monastery in the Yankin district of Rangoon on 28 September, two days after government soldiers began attacking street protesters. "The room was too small for everyone to lie down at once. We took it in turns to sleep. Every night at 8 o’clock we were given a small bowl of rice and a cup of water. But after a few days many of us just couldn’t eat. The smell was so bad. "Some of the novice monks were under 10 years old, the youngest was just seven. They were stripped of their robes and given prison sarongs. Some were beaten, leaving open, untreated wounds, but no doctors came."

On his release, the monk spoke to a Western aid worker in Rangoon, who smuggled his testimony and those of other prisoners and witnesses out of Burma on a small memory stick…

This is a very difficult story to listen to. It seems outrageous that such things could go on in a modern world, in a civilized country. On the other hand, I rue the day that President Bush invaded Iraq, the site of a repressive and violent dictator. The world has not evolved to the point where human rights can be effectively policed. We can’t even police our own government’s stance on human rights – though we were previously known as one of the most civilized in that regard. Less than a century ago, there was something widely known as the Armenian Genocide – currently being debated in our Congress. Sixty plus years ago, there was an unspeakable Holocaust in Europe that still reverberates in the politics of the Middle East. Ethiopia, Biafra, Dafur, and other African countries have long suffered endless wars with the same kind of atrocities. Now, Burma, a country rich in natural resources that wrested itself free of the British Empire after World War II is destitute, crushed under the forty-five year rule of a Military Junta. While most of us seem to think that we’re creeping towards a world where all human beings will have certain basic rights, there are times when that seems to be a pipe dream.

Though world-wide economic sanctions on Burma seems to be a lame response to this kind of repression, one that will be felt by the oppressed people long before it affects the government or the army, it does seem to be the only response available right now. Someone said that General Shwe’s wife was looking at Real Estate in Dubai [implying an escape route], but I don’t know if that was the truth or some kind of wish. And even if the Junta left tomorrow, the Burmese people are in for a long period of hardship – no matter what fate awaits them. It’s a very sad story, and, I’m ashamed to say, it’s a story I knew absolutely nothing about before the short-lived Saffron Revolution.

While there’s a hope that the Burmese uprising will yield results, it’s hard not to recall the Hungarian Revolution [1956] or Prague Spring in Czechoslovokia under Alexander Dubček [1968]. Both populist uprisings were squelched and conditions changed little for 30 to 40 years…
  1.  
    joyhollywood
    October 12, 2007 | 5:24 AM
     

    Check out thinkprogress.org with Lyn Cheney and Jon Stewart from the Daily Show tape. It is very revealing. What a bunch of cold and lying creeps.

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