Shocking images of dead monk emerge
PARIS, Oct. 1 — Floating face down in a filthy pool of water, a tangled strip of saffron cloth – the distinctive garb a Buddhist monk – still clinging to his neck, the images are a gruesome reminder of the brutality of last week’s military crackdown on Burmese protesters.
The graphic video of what appears to be a dead monk was filmed Sunday in the Pazondaung area of the Burmese city of Rangoon, according to the Democratic Voice of Burma, an Oslo-based opposition group. It is not known when the monk died.
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The release of the footage comes as U.N. envoy Ibrahim Gambari prepares to meet Burmese junta supremo Senior General Than Shwe in the new capital of Naypyidaw Tuesday. The former Nigerian foreign minister’s visit — which included a meeting with Burma’s best-known opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi Sunday — has sparked hopes in some circles that a diplomacy of sorts might prevail to end the current crisis.
While it is difficult to get an accurate reading about the state of dissent inside the repressive Southeast Asian nation, many Burmese dissidents in exile as well as those inside Burma are afraid the current protests will be a repeat of the 1988 anti-junta demonstrations.
At least 3,000 people were believed killed in the brutal crackdown following the 1988 demonstrations. Martial law was promptly declared and thousands of opposition leaders – including Suu Kyi – were arrested. The charismatic leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) has been under various forms of detention ever since.
In a telephone interview with FRANCE 24, a Buddhist monk in hiding in Burma, who did not want his name or location disclosed due to security fears, appealed for international help.
“The monasteries are surrounded by troops and the monks can’t go outside,” he told FRANCE 24 from his place in hiding in the jungles of Burma. “We need help from the international community.”
Indeed public dissent in the main Burmese cities of Rangoon and Mandalay seems to have ceased. The streets of Rangoon were quiet Monday, according to news reports – a far cry from last week’s public demonstrations which drew as many as 100,000 people into the streets. The Burmese government has put the official death toll from last week’s protests at 10 – including a Japanese photographer who was killed in Rangoon. But human rights groups say the actual toll is much higher.
While the web was a critical source of information about the protests last week, the junta has since blocked network access inside the country. By Friday afternoon, the country’s only two Internet providers — MPT and Pagan Cybertech – had been taken offline.
Only the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) has been able to access images coming from Burma. In a telephone interview with FRANCE 24, the DVB site’s webmaster, “Thida”, explained that their associates in Burma use their own systems to connect to the Internet. She wouldn’t say more, but technicians familiar with communications technology say it would be technically feasible to feed images over a mobile phone line by connecting the phone to a laptop computer.
Attacking a symbol of peace
One of the more shocking aspects of the crackdown was the raw display of state aggression against Buddhist monks, the very symbol of a pacifist religion in this deeply spiritual country. In a country where nearly 90 percent of the estimated 50 million-strong population is Buddhist and where most males have spent at least some time serving in a monastery, monks are a revered symbol of an unchanging Burmese identity in the face of political upheavals.
According to the Asian Human Rights Commission, more than a dozen monasteries in major Burmese cities were raided last week and at least 700 monks were detained.
“It was a very significant turnaround that the military used violence against monks,” said Win Min, a professor at Thailand’s Chiang Mai University in an interview with the AFP news wire service. “It added fuel to the fire.”
While the 1988 demonstrations were led by Burmese students, they were subsequently joined by monks, who were not spared the subsequent brutal crackdown by the military regime.
For Burma’s omnipotent State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which has – under various acronyms — brutally controlled the country since 1978, the prospect of a politically mobilized Buddhist priesthood represents a threat to their power.
But from his jungle hiding place, the Buddhist monk — who said he was one of the leaders of the recent protest during an interview with FRANCE 24 last week — said his fellow monks were not giving up hope.
“Right now, our only way to protest is to pray,” he said. “There are different ways of protesting and prayer is one of them. But come what may, we will continue to protest. Even if they (the junta) are blocking us at the moment, we won’t stop.”
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