THE DAY BURMA WAS SILENCED
By Kenneth Denby
Times Online
September 28, 2007

Original Link

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 (see below for more details).

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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VIDEO SHOWS JAPANESE JOURNALIST 'BEING SHOT DELIBERATELY'
By Leo Lewis
Times Online
September 28, 2007

Original Link

Footage capturing the last, terrible seconds of Kenji Nagai’s life has been aired on Japanese television -- horrifying a nation and raising official suspicion that the 50-year old photo-journalist was murdered by Burmese troops.

The shaky, indistinct moments of footage appear to show Nagai, who was on the edge of a crowd of panic-stricken demonstrators, shoved violently to the ground by a soldier and shot dead at point-blank range.

The crowd flees, leaving behind a visibly agonised figure believed to be Nagai -- dressed casually in shorts and flip-flops -- on his back in the street. In his right hand is a video camera, held above the ground to protect it from the fall.

A loud crack is audible as a soldier points his rifle at the prone figure before launching himself at the dispersing crowd of protesters.

A doctor at the Japanese embassy in Burma confirmed a bullet entered Nagai’s body from the lower right side of his chest, pierced his heart and exited from his back.

The footage, say Japanese experts, squarely contradicts the official Burmese explanation of Nagai’s death -- that he was killed by a “stray bullet”.

In the few seconds before he was killed, Nagai appeared to being filming the Burmese military as it faced down the crowd. One of the soldiers seems to spot him doing so, and launches his deadly response.

Masahiko Komura, Japan’s Foreign Minister, said that the footage appeared to show that Nagai was slain deliberately by Burmese troops as they charged on a crowd of civilians. The Government is to dispatch the deputy foreign minister to Burma to establish the truth behind Nagai’s death.

Japanese media are hailing Nagai as a heroic crusader for the truth. His elderly mother, who made a brief, tearful statement this afternoon, said that she begged her son not to go to Burma, but Nagai had simply told her that it was his job to go to places nobody else wanted to. “I wept through the night as I thought about my son,” she said, “his job always made me prepared for the worst, but every time he went away my heart would beat fast.”

Nagai’s father said that if his son had indeed been shot dead at point blank range, it was the cruelest way to die.

Japanese television stations today showed a montage of Nagai’s work -- mostly video taken during conflicts in the Middle East. His photo-journalism focused heavily on the victims of any conflict he covered.

The largest foreign donor of overseas development aid to Burma, Japan has officially said it will not cut off aid to the military-run nation. But foreign ministry sources today told The Times that its multi-million dollar donations to the country were now under review.

In Rangoon today several thousand protesters took to the streets once more in defiance of the soldiers and riot police, who sealed off much of the city centre with barbed wire barricades.

Soldiers were stationed inside and outside five large monasteries whose monks had previously led the protests, and today none were allowed to emerge.

The protesters tried to make the best of the absence of much revered monks from the protests. "The monks have done their job and now we must carry on with the movement," one told a crowd.

About 20 truckloads of soldiers broke up a demonstration of 2,000 civilians near the Sule Pagoda, beating them with clubs and firing into the air. Smaller protests in other areas turned into a dangerous cat-and-mouse game in the side streets.

One Western diplomat said: "There have been massive arrests, certainly in the hundreds. The death toll is certainly higher now."

Bob Davis, the Australian Ambassador to Burma, said that the number of dead was probably "several multiples" more than the ten officially acknowledged by the Burmese authorities.

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, called for an end to the violence and said he too was speaking to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime Minister and President Bush about the crisis.

"I condemn the violence that has been used against the unarmed Burmese protesters who have been exercising, with great bravery, their right to peaceful protest," Mr Brown said in a statement.