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| Southeast Asia |
| Tear gas fired at protesting Myanmar monks |
| 2007-09-19 |
| Authorities in military-ruled Myanmar fired tear gas on Tuesday to break up a protest of around 1,000 Buddhist monks and civilian demonstrators in the northwestern city of Sittwe, a witness said. Three or four monks were arrested as the crowd scattered and were hit and slapped, the witness told Reuters. The march, one of several in response to a call for a nationwide religious boycott of the ruling military, started with 500 Buddhist monks but grew quickly as ordinary men and women - some of them Muslims - joined in. There were no further details immediately available. In Yangon, authorities closed the famed Shwedagon Pagoda, the Southeast Asian nation’s holiest shrine, minutes before hundreds of monks arrived for the launch of a campaign to refuse to accept alms from anyone connected to the regime. “We could not hold the formal ceremony to impose the religious boycott because we could not enter the Shwedagon compound,” a 25-year-old monk told Reuters. |
| Posted by:Fred |