NYT : Myanmar Attacks Protesters, Arresting Monks

Myanmar Attacks Protesters, Arresting Monks

By SETH MYDANS | September 27, 2007

BANGKOK, Sept. 26 — The government of Myanmar began a violent crackdown on Wednesday after tolerating more than a month of ever larger protests in cities around the country. Security forces clubbed and tear-gassed protesters, fired shots into the air and arrested hundreds of the monks who are at the heart of the demonstrations.

A government announcement said security forces in Yangon, the country’s main city, fired at demonstrators who failed to disperse, killing one man. Foreign news agencies and exile groups reported death tolls ranging from two to eight people.

Despite threats and warnings by the authorities, and despite the beginnings of a violent response, tens of thousands of chanting, cheering protesters flooded the streets, witnesses reported. Monks were in the lead, like religious storm troopers, as one foreign diplomat described the scene.

In response to the violence, the United Nations Security Council called an emergency meeting on Wednesday to discuss the crisis, but China blocked a Council resolution, backed by the United States and European nations, to condemn the government crackdown.

However, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that the United Nations was “urgently dispatching” a special envoy to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

A spokesman for President Bush, in New York City for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, denounced the crackdown and urged restraint. A day before, White House officials had expressed hope that Mr. Bush’s announcement of new sanctions directed against the military government’s leaders would intensify pressure on them not to use violence against the protesters.

“The United States is very troubled by the action of the junta against the Burmese people,” the spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, said Wednesday afternoon. “We call on them to show restraint and to move to a peaceful transition to democracy.”

Though the crowds in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, were large and energetic on Wednesday, they were smaller than on previous days, apparently in part because of the deployment of armed soldiers to prevent monks from leaving some of the main temples.

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. Political analysts said the next steps in the crackdown might be yet more aggressive and widespread.

The foreign diplomat described an amazing scene on Wednesday as a column of 8,000 to 10,000 people flooded past his embassy following a group of about 800 monks.

They were trailed by four truckloads of military men, watching but not taking action. The diplomat, in keeping with his embassy’s policy, spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to news reports and telephone interviews from Myanmar, which is sealed off to foreign reporters, the day’s activities began with a confrontation at the giant gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda, which has been one of the focal points of the demonstrations.

In the first reported violence in nine days of demonstrations by monks in 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.

Several hundred monks then walked through downtown Yangon to the Sule Pagoda, another site of the demonstrations, where truckloads of soldiers were seen arriving Tuesday. A violent confrontation was reported there; more shots were fired and a number of arrests were made.

On a broad avenue near the temple, hundreds of people sat facing a row of soldiers, calling out to them, “The people’s armed forces, our armed forces!” and “The armed forces should not kill their own people!”

In Mandalay, Myanmar’s second largest city, more than 800 monks, nuns and other demonstrators were confronted by some 100 soldiers who tried to stop them from marching from the Mahamuni Paya Pagoda, which they had tried to enter earlier, The Associated Press reported.

The demonstrations in Yangon have grown from several hundred people protesting a fuel price rise in mid-August to as many as 100,000 on Sunday, led by tens of thousands of monks in the largest and most sustained protests since 1988.

That earlier peaceful uprising was crushed by the military, which shot into crowds, killing an estimated 3,000 people. It was during the turmoil 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.

Now, emboldened by the presence of the monks, huge crowds have joined the demonstrations in protests that reflect years of discontent over economic hardship and political repression.

At first, the government held back as the protests grew. It issued its first warning on Monday night, when the religious affairs minister said the government was prepared to take action against the protesting monks.

On Tuesday night, the government announced a dusk-to-dawn curfew, banned gatherings of more than five people and placed the cities of Yangon and Mandalay under what amounts to martial law. Troops began taking up positions at strategic locations around Yangon and tried to seal off five of the largest and most active monasteries.

As the protests grew, public figures began to come forward, and on Tuesday the government arrested the first of them, a popular comedian, Zarganar, who had urged people to join the demonstrations. He had irritated the government in the past with his veiled political gibes.

The crackdown on Wednesday came in the face of warnings and pleas to the junta from around the world to refrain from the kind of violence that had made the country’s ruling generals international pariahs.

At the United Nations, President Bush on Tuesday announced a largely symbolic tightening of American sanctions against Myanmar’s government. The European Union threatened to tighten its own sanctions if violence was used. On Wednesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, said the first step after any meeting of the Security Council should be to send a United Nations envoy to Myanmar.

The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, and Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town and antiapartheid campaigner, have spoken out in support of their fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy leader, who has been held under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.

The junta was also hearing the message directly from diplomats based in Yangon. The British ambassador, Mark Canning, said he met with a government official on Tuesday to urge restraint.

“You need to look very carefully at the underlying political and economic hardships,” he said he told the official. “The government must also understand what this is about — not fuel prices, but decades of dissatisfaction.”

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from New York.