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More Deaths in Myanmar, and Defiance
By SETH MYDANS
Published: September 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/world/asia/28myanmar.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
BANGKOK, Sept. 27 — Brutality and defiance marked
the second day of an armed crackdown in Myanmar on
Thursday as the military junta tried to crush a wave
of nationwide protests in the face of harsh
international condemnation.
The violence began before dawn with raids on
Buddhist monasteries and continued through the day
with tear gas, beatings and volleys of gunfire in
the streets of the country’s main city, Yangon,
according to witnesses and news agency reports from
inside the closed nation.
Witnesses said soldiers fired automatic weapons into
a crowd of protesters. State television in Myanmar
reported that nine people had been killed and that
11 demonstrators and 31 soldiers had been wounded.
The numbers could not be independently verified, and
exile groups said they could be much higher. The
Japanese Embassy said one of the dead was a Japanese
photographer, Kenji Nagai.
International pressure on Myanmar built when
President Bush asked countries in the region with
influence on Myanmar’s authorities to urge them to
cease using force, and the Treasury Department
imposed economic sanctions on 14 identified senior
Myanmar government officials.
China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, at the White
House for a scheduled meeting on Thursday with the
national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, soon
found himself in an impromptu Oval Office session
with the president. Mr. Bush urged Mr. Yang to have
Beijing “use its influence” in Myanmar to facilitate
a peaceful transition to democracy, said the White
House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe.
As Myanmar’s chief international patron, China
blocked an effort on Wednesday by the United States
and European countries to have the Security Council
condemn the violent crackdown. On Thursday, while
not going as far as Mr. Bush might have wished,
China added its voice to criticism from abroad when
it publicly called for restraint.
“As a neighbor, China is extremely concerned about
the situation in Myanmar,” the Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said at a news briefing in
Beijing. “China hopes that all parties in Myanmar
exercise restraint and properly handle the current
issue so as to ensure the situation there does not
escalate and get complicated.”
Despite a heavy military and police presence,
protests gained momentum through the day in several
parts of Yangon.
But with the authorities clamping down on telephone
and Internet communications, human rights groups and
exiles said they were having increasing difficulty
in getting information.
The violence of the past two days has answered the
question of whether the military would fire on
Buddhist monks, the highly revered moral core of
Burmese society. For the past 10 days, the monks
have led demonstrations that grew to as many as
100,000 before the crackdown began.
“The military is the one who proudly claims to
preserve and protect Buddhism in the country, but
now they are killing the monks,” said Aung Zaw,
editor of The Irrawaddy, a magazine based in
Thailand that has extensive contacts inside Myanmar.
Like others monitoring the crisis, which began on
Aug. 19 with scattered protests against steep fuel
price increases, he said it was difficult to learn
the numbers of dead in a chaotic situation in which
hospital sources are sometimes reluctant to talk.
Mr. Aung Zaw said he had been told of one death on
Thursday when soldiers attacked two columns of monks
and other people.
“The military trucks, I was told, just drove in, and
soldiers jumped out and started shooting,” he said,
describing a scene that was reminiscent of the mass
killings in 1988, when the current junta came to
power after suppressing a similar peaceful public
uprising.
The Treasury Department included Senior Gen. Than
Shwe, who leads the junta in power in the country,
in the list of officials on whom it will impose
sanctions. The measures will freeze any assets that
the officials hold within the United States and
prohibit Americans from transacting or doing
business with them.
The foreign ministers of Myanmar’s regional group,
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, issued a
strongly worded statement on Thursday saying they
were “appalled to receive reports of automatic
weapons being used” against demonstrators.
The statement said that at a morning meeting at the
United Nations, the officials from the 10-nation
group had “expressed their revulsion” directly to
Myanmar’s foreign minister, U Nyan Win, “over
reports that the demonstrations in Myanmar are being
suppressed by violent force and that there has been
a number of fatalities.”
The foreign ministers of Asean are at the United
Nations for the opening of the General Assembly, and
George Yeo, the foreign minister of Singapore, the
chairman country, put out their statement.
It said Mr. Nyan Win had given them assurances that
Ibrahim Gambari, the special envoy whom Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon sent Wednesday evening on an
urgent mission to Myanmar, would be given a visa to
enter the country once he arrived in Singapore. The
statement said Myanmar should cooperate fully with
Mr. Gambari and give him access to all parties.
“Mr. Gambari’s role as a neutral interlocutor among
all the parties can help defuse the dangerous
situation,” it read.
The statement called upon Myanmar to “resume its
efforts at national reconciliation with all parties
concerned and work towards a peaceful transition to
democracy.”
It also called for the release of all political
detainees, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the
pro-democracy leader who has been held under house
arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.
Superstitious Burmese had predicted violence on this
date, whose digits add up repeatedly to the
astrologically powerful number 9: the 27th day of
the ninth month in 2007.
There was no indication that international pressure
would have any more effect on the junta than it has
had over two decades of political pressure or
economic sanctions like those announced at the
United Nations this week by Mr. Bush.
“The big missing piece of the puzzle is what is
going on in the minds of the senior leadership,”
said Thant Myint-U, a former United Nations official
who is the author of a book on Myanmar, formerly
Burma, called “River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of
Burma.”
“Nothing that they have said in the last 20 years
would suggest that they will back down,” he said
The government’s actions in the past two days seemed
to bear this out.
In the raids early Thursday, The Associated Press
reported, security forces fired shots at one of
several monasteries, Ngwe Kyar Yan, where one monk
said a number of monks were beaten and at least 70
of its 150 monks were arrested.
A female lay disciple said a number of monks were
arrested at Moe Gaung Monastery, which was being
guarded, like a number of other monasteries, by a
contingent of armed security personnel.
Other unconfirmed reports from exile groups
described scenes of brutality and humiliation of
monks and their superiors when soldiers entered the
monasteries.
“We were told by a lot of residents that the
soldiers came in very rudely and told them to kneel
down,” Mr. Aung Zaw said. “Their senior abbot was
beaten in front of the others. They were told to
walk like dogs. That news quickly spread, and
whether it is rumor or true, people got very, very
angry.”
Sunai Phasuk, a representative of Human Rights Watch
in Thailand, said that he was concerned about the
apparently large numbers of arrests of monks and lay
people but that information about them was scarce.
Like others seeking news from inside the country, he
said that the mobile telephones of his sources had
apparently been cut off. There were also reports
that the authorities were closing Internet cafes,
where people had been loading and transmitting
images from their telephone cameras.
“We have lost all contacts inside Burma,” he said.
“We cannot reach them any more.” |
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