Monday October 1, 2007 7:01 PM
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) – One hundred shot dead outside a Myanmar school. Activists burned alive at government crematoriums. Buddhist monks floating face down in rivers.
After last week’s brutal crackdown by the military, horror stories are filling Myanmar blogs and dissident sites. But the tight security of the repressive regime makes it impossible to verify just how many people are dead, detained or missing.
"There are huge difficulties. It’s a closed police state," said David Mathieson, a consultant with Human Rights Watch in Thailand. "Many of the witnesses have been arrested and are being held in areas we don’t have access to. Other eyewitness are too afraid."
Authorities have acknowledged that government troops shot dead nine demonstrators and a Japanese cameraman in Yangon. But witness accounts range from several dozen deaths to as many as 200.
"We do believe the death toll is higher than acknowledged by the government," Shari Villarosa, the top U.S. diplomat in Myanmar, told The Associated Press Monday. "We are doing our best to get more precise, more detailed information, not only in terms of deaths but also arrests."
Villarosa said her staff had visited up to 15 monasteries around Yangon and every single one was empty. She put the number of arrested demonstrators – monks and civilians – in the thousands.
"I know the monks are not in their monasteries," she said. "Where are they? How many are dead? How many are arrested?"
Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) — Myanmar’s military junta blamed Western "neo-colonialists" for stoking the biggest anti- government protests in almost 20 years, as a United Nations envoy tried to hold talks today with the regime’s leader. Government troops last week "exercised utmost restraint" to subdue protesters who were "abetted by some powerful countries," Foreign Minister Nyan Win said in a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York yesterday. Democracy "cannot be imposed from outside," he said. "We are determined to proceed resolutely toward democracy along our chosen path."
I sure didn’t see any "neo-colonialists" in the pictures. Looked like a citizens revolt to me. Recall that Burma fought itself out from under the English in 1948, had a Democracy until 1962 when it was taken over in a coup d’etat, and has been controlled by a Military Junta ever since. When the democratic advocates won an election in 1988, the Junta invalidated the vote and jailed the leaders [including Aung San Suu Kyi,]. That term "neocolonialists" comes from a long, long time ago.
While the case doesn’t seem to be the same case as Rwanda was, I am reminded that the U.N. and the U.S. held back then as they are now. Nearly a million people were murdered in just a few months. I am afraid that our government only wants Western democracy when there is oil to be had and not when people are truly crying out for it. I guess time will tell. I hope the U.N. is more active than they have been in the past in cases like this. I just hope.