Nine people have reportedly been killed after Myanmar's security forces opened fired with machine guns on protesters gathering on the streets of Yangon... A Japanese video journalist was among those found dead after protests... Soldiers told residents they had 10 minutes to clear the city centre streets or risk getting shot.... International condemnation of the government crackdown also grew, with the US demanding the military rulers "stop this violence against peaceful protesters now."... Late on Thursday, Myanmar agreed that Nyan Win, the country's foreign minister, would meet Ibrahim Gambari, the special envoy that the UN secretary-general has dispatched to the country....
Showing posts with label Burma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Burma. Show all posts
Friday, September 28, 2007
Shots fired on Myanmar protest
Reports from Myanmar say government troops have opened fire on a crowd of about 1,000 protesters in the city of Yangon... The move has led to speculation that the government may be trying to isolate Buddhist monks who have led the recent wave of protests while it focuses on hunting down other dissidents.... activists on the ground in Myanmar...are reporting a death toll of nearly 200 since the government crackdown began on Wednesday, with several hundred more wounded...."Some people have been trying to provoke the army, but older protesters have been trying to calm them down and not provoke soldiers."...The correspondent also says that the authorities have been photgraphing and filming protesters. This has "raised speculation that the authorities wanted the protests to go on for four to five days, let all the protesters come out, be identified and then move in to round them up."... Among those confirmed killed on Thursday was Kenji Nagai, a Japanese news photographer who some witnesses say was shot at point-blank range as he raised his camera.... One monk, Uppekha, speaking to Al Jazeera from a monastery in the northern city of Mandalay, said he planned to join fresh demonstrations on Friday afternoon. "We will ask the entire people and monks to join our demonstration," he said, adding that several protests had been planned around the city....
Article Reference:
Myanmar soldiers fire weapons, tear gas into crowds of protesters
Soldiers fired automatic weapons into a crowd of anti-government protesters Thursday as tens of thousands defied the ruling military junta's crackdown with a 10th straight day of demonstrations....Some reports said the dead included monks, who are widely revered in Myanmar, and the emergence of such martyr figures could stoke public anger against the regime and escalate the violence....Shots were fired after several thousand protesters on the west side of the river ignored orders to disband.... A monk at Ngwe Kyar Yan monastery pointed to bloodstains on the concrete floor and said a number of monks were beaten and at least 100 of its 150 monks taken away in vehicles. Shots were fired in the air during the chaotic raid, he said on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. "Soldiers slammed the monastery gate with the car, breaking the lock and forcing it into the monastery," the monk said. "They smashed the doors down, broke windows and furniture. When monks resisted, they shot at the monks and used tear gas and beat up the monks and dragged into trucks."
Burmese Junta Warns Monks of Crackdown as Protests Widen
...Speaking on state television, the junta’s minister of religious affairs told senior Buddhist clerics to rein in the tens of thousands of monks who have marched through several cities in recent days....the monks who have led the protests for the past week were outnumbered by civilians, including prominent political dissidents and well-known cultural figures....Setting out in the morning from the gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda, a crowd estimated by The Associated Press to be as large as 100,000 marched unopposed in separate columns through the city.... Until now, the government remained silent and mostly out of sight, giving over the streets to the protesters with virtually no uniformed security presence in evidence....
Police Clash With Monks in Myanmar
The government of Myanmar began a violent crackdown today after tolerating more than a month of ever-larger protests in cities around the country, clubbing and tear-gassing protesters, firing shots into the air and arresting hundreds of the monks who are at the heart of the demonstrations....But it appeared that an attempt by the military to halt the protests through warnings, troop deployments and initial bursts of violence had not succeeded. Analysts said that the next steps in the crackdown might be yet more aggressive and widespread.... Yangon, police officers with riot shields dispersed up to 100 monks who were trying to enter the temple, firing tear gas and warning shots and knocking some monks to the ground. As many as 200 monks were reported to have been arrested at the pagoda.... That earlier peaceful uprising [in 1988] was crushed by the military, which shot into crowds, killing an estimated 3,000 people. It was during the turmoil a decade ago that the current military junta took power in Myanmar, and it has maintained its grip by arresting dissidents, quashing political opposition and using force and intimidation to control the population....
Burmese Junta Sets Curfew to Combat Protests
The government in Myanmar imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the two major cities of Yangon and Mandalay...and said they would be placed under the control of local military commanders, after tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and supporters defied a warning by the authorities and held an eighth day of peaceful antigovernment protests.... The protests have swelled into a huge outpouring that has filled the streets of several cities... Official vehicles were on patrol calling on monks to return to their temples... “People are not to follow, encourage or take part in these marches,” the announcements said. “Action will be taken against those who violate this order.”... “The government has ordered the 22nd Division troops to pull out of Karen state and return to Yangon,”... The 22nd division has been fighting a decades-long guerilla war in the remote province of Karen, and... “We believe the troops will be used as in 1988.”
The Burma Campaign UK
Description:
We campaign for human rights and democracy in Burma. We work for the freedom of all the peoples of Burma regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or age. We provide analysis to the media and government, and we lobby and campaign to improve government and commercial policy on Burma.
The Burma Campaign UK is the only national organisation in the UK dedicated to campaigning for human rights and democracy in Burma.
U.N. urges calm amid Myanmar clashes
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is to send a special envoy to Myanmar...Unconfirmed opposition reports put the death toll at five..."[U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon] calls on the senior leadership of the country to cooperate fully with this mission in order to take advantage of the willingness of the United Nations to assist in the process of a national reconciliation through dialogue," said a U.N. statement....any violence used against monks could draw more of the population into the protests...
Article Reference:
Myanmar abbots tread fine line
Buddhist monks have been at the forefront of the recent anti-government protests in Myanmar...some commentators believe the presence of the abbots, or Sayadaw, on the streets could provide the tipping point for the overthrow of the military government.... In just a few days, as the monks took up the vanguard of protests, their silent marches turned into chanting and eventually to three key political demands: that the government lower commodity prices, free political prisoners and open dialogue with the opposition.... Zawana, a Myanmar monk who has been in Malaysia for two years, said senior monks cannot join the protests because they are kept under tight surveillance. "It is impossible for the senior monks to join demonstrations," Zawana said. ...The military government meanwhile has been quick to seize on the fact that many of the country's 600,000 monks have not joined in the protests, with state media painting a picture of disunity among the monkhood....But the abbots appear to be treading a fine line between detachment from temporal affairs and compassion for people - both core tenets of Buddhist teachings....
Article Reference:
Myanmar forces swoop on protests in two cities, Internet cut
Security forces moved to crush protests in Myanmar's two biggest cities...Up to 10,000 demonstrators surged onto the streets of the main city of Yangon... In ...Mandalay... young people on motorbikes rode down a major thoroughfare towards a blockade set up by security forces who unleashed a volley that witnesses believed could have been rubber bullets....Monks... helped transform what began as a scattershot series of protests over a hike in fuel prices into the stiffest challenge to the junta's military rule since 1988....at least three monks have been killed and hundreds arrested...about 100 Buddhist monks were arrested and eight people shot dead after protesting the action...."We heard that some soldiers have refused to obey orders and that others were even willing to stand alongside the demonstrators,"...
Junta Shuts Down A Saffron Revolution
The military leaders of Myanmar have shut protesting monks in their monasteries and tried to seal the country's information frontiers by cutting public Internet access...Participation of the saffron-robed monks has lent some immunity... Buddhism is the dominant religion in Burma (Myanmar) and the mililtary leadership has in the past given deference to the Buddhists. However by separating the Buddhist Monks from the protesters, this frees the military to take tough action. ...soldiers occupied some of the key monasteries and blocked surrounding intersections with barbed wire, and there seemed to be no sign of the monks on the streets...five of the monasteries had been declared no-go zones... soldiers and riot police quickly dispersed one gathering of 300... several multiples" of the 10 fatalities acknowledged by the authorities may have been killed by troops in Yangon...
What's in a Country's Name?
The last week a protests have risen to world attention in Burma / Myanmar. Until 1989 the southeast Asian country of more than 47 million people was known as Burma. Since then, however, the ruling military junta has called the country Myanmar. It even renamed the capital from Rangoon to Yangon....That year the military regime...lost landslide elections to the main opposition party. It refused to hand over power and instead jailed many opposition leaders....
Article Reference:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)