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The day Burma was silenced
The junta showed a subtle and malignant cunning, and then moved against the monksthe link includes photos that show the death of a Japanese journalist. Over at BelmontClub Wretchard has a few words about this. 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. Posted by: 3dc 2007-09-28 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=200449 |