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 Squishing Democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Squishing Democracy. 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.”
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:
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Hiding Dissent: Honesty in the Bush II Administration
The shuttering of dissent by the GW Bush administration, as discussed below, has only continued. Basically the attitude they are taking is that anybody who disagrees with them must be shouted down, shunned, rejected, and squashed.
An example today is the latest movie by Michael Moore. The movie is titled Fahrenheit 9/11 and covers an examination of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, and how they were created. It supposedly (I haven't seen it yet) makes a number of very alarming connections that should shake this country's belief and loyalty to GW Bush. These connections have been covered on this web site, particularly here, but to mainstream America that's been spoonfed a pack of lies, these connections are sure to be very alarming.
The movie has been taking a long strange trip to being shown to the public. First there was the funding, and subsequent refusal to release the movie. The movie was made under the direction of a movie studio owned by Disney, however when the movie was finished and ready to release (in the Spring of 2004, smack in the middle of the election campaign) Disney refused to release the movie to the public. The claim they made is that the movie is highly political, and therefore was not appropriate to release during a campaign cycle as it might skew the election. However, Michael Moore being who he is, he went public with this, and raised a ruckus. This is America, land of Free Speech is it not?
Second, Michael Moore went to the Cannes movie festival with his movie. At the festival he won the Palm D'Or, a highly respected prize.
Third, he managed to find a distributor other than Disney to distribute the movie. So much for the attempt at censorship by Disney.
Now there is a cohort of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" types making various attempts to quash this movie, even as it is being released (salon.com article). The article details these smear campaigns
- David Bossie head of Citizens United. Busily making and airing political advertisements smearing not only Michael Moore's film, but Bill Clinton's memoir which is being distributed this week as well.
- Howard Kaloogian, whose Move America Forward launched a letter-writing campaign last week against a select number of theaters that planned to show "Fahrenheit." Kaloogian was part of a cabal that takes credit for recalling Gov. Gray Davis. Now they've set their sights on Moore.
While this may seem like a bit of a tempest in a teapot, it's part of a larger pattern. For example there is the case of Joseph Wilson and his wife. Wilson is a former ambassador, who under the previous Bush administration was co-chief of the Embassy in Iraq just before the first Gulf War, and was highly lauded by the previous Bush administration. He was sent by this Bush administration to do fact checking in Niger about possible sales of Uranium to Iraq, found the claims to be false, and said so to the administration, yet was shocked when the administration went on claiming the allegation to be true, and finally went public saying that he had told the administration this story was false. Ever since going public Wilson has been roundly denounced by the right wingers (whereas he had formerly been highly praised by them), and his wife's identity as a CIA agent was disclosed (this being an act of treason to disclose a secret agents identity). The Bush administrations response to the treason by one of their staff has been to stonewall the investigation. See The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity -- A Diplomat's Memoir
[2003 October 16]
In this year there is a lot to protest in what the Bush Administration is doing. There is a war in Iraq which I and many others didn't agree to, and which now appears to have been launched in a series of outright lies put forward as justification. The government is running a huge deficit, thanks to the tax cuts for the rich, and the costs of this war. The tax cuts were intended to incite "the economy" to recovery, but the recovery is still far away.
In short, times are hard, and the administration is failing its duty to the country.
Yet over and over, there are signs that the administration is ignoring dissent. This goes back to GW Bush's inauguration, under a cloud of controversy. Recall that the election was highly contested, and may well have been stolen (nobody was sure), and many protesters lined the Inaugural Parade route with signs reading "Hail To The Theif" and the like. But, were those signs broadcast on television? Nope.
Rather than face any criticisms, the administration engages in spin meistering to deflect the criticism, attacks on character, and the like. Further, one of the harshest criticisms, that the President (and other officials) were lieing when, to justify the war in Iraq, they claimed Iraq had been seeking Uranium. Somehow, coincidentally maybe, the identity of the critics wife, a CIA agent, was disclosed, along with the fact that she is a high level covert CIA operative. Disclosed and published in the column of a widely read newspaper columnist. Was this an accident, or was it an outright warning to other critics that "this could happen to you"?
In March 2003 I was protesting the imminent war, as is my duty as a citizen to voice my feelings about government policy. During the protest I watched as a group of peaceful protesters, who had been marching down the sidewalk, slightly noisily, were arrested by the police. (here) I followed news of following protests, having to read about them at indymedia.org and other similar non-mainstream web sites. Not only did the mainstream news organizations largely ignore the protests, they were actively shut down by police agencies.
In April 2003 a couple protests happened in Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara CA. This is my neighborhood, in the heart of Silicon Valley. In one case President Bush arrived at Moffett Field and was whisked to a local Defense contractor to give a speech. People were prevented from departing on the light rail train along his route out of Moffett Field, and in the vicinity of the Defense contractor many (peaceful) protestors were arrested. On another day a large force of protestors converged on the Lockheed campus in Sunnyvale. They had cleared the protest, and their plans, with the police department, but on the day of the protest they were brutally rebuffed by a combination of private security and the Sunnyvale Police.
The following are a sampling of news articles
[Oct. 16, 2003; Salon; salon.com/news/feature/2003/10/16/secret_service/] Keeping dissent invisible When Bill Neel learned that President George W. Bush was making a Labor Day campaign visit to Pittsburgh last year to support local congressional candidates, the retired Pittsburgh steelworker decided that he would be on hand to protest the president's economic policies. Neel and his sister made a hand-lettered sign reading "The Bushes must love the poor -- they've made so many of us," and headed for a road where the motorcade would pass on the way from the airport to a Carpenters' Union training center.
He never got to display his sign for President Bush to see, though. As he stood among milling groups of Bush supporters, he was approached by a local police detective, who told him and his sister that because they were protesting, they had to move to a "free speech area," on orders of the U.S. Secret Service.
"He pointed out a relatively remote baseball diamond that was enclosed in a chain-link fence," Neel recalled in an interview with Salon. "I could see these people behind the fence, with their faces up against it, and their hands on the wire." (The ACLU posted photos of the demonstrators and supporters at that event on its Web site.) "It looked more like a concentration camp than a free speech area to me, so I said, 'I'm not going in there. I thought the whole country was a free speech area.'" The detective asked Neel, 66, to go to the area six or eight times, and when he politely refused, he handcuffed and arrested the retired steelworker on a charge of disorderly conduct. When Neel's sister argued against his arrest, she was cuffed and hauled off as well. The two spent the president's visit in a firehouse that was serving as Secret Service and police headquarters for the event.
The article goes on to say this act of fencing protestors off to a separate and distant area is not unique, for this administration, but that they instituted the policy even before the Sep 11, 2001 terror attacks. That the orders enforcing this banishing of protesters are made through the Secret Service. In a country which honors free speech, this policy is troubling, disturbing, and more.
The ACLU is involved and say there are two forms of segregating protestors:
- The protestors are kept far away.
- Anybody expressing any view are kept far away.
"We expect to see a lot more of this heading into a campaign season," says Chris Hansen, senior staff attorney at the ACLU
Hmm, and here I was hoping this is a Democracy I live in, where the Rule of Law is honored, and where elections are free and fair.
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