Myanmar government warns monk protesters The Associated Press / September 24, 2007
Myanmar‘s military government issued an ominous warning on Monday to monks leading the strongest protest movement in two decades, telling senior Buddhist clerics that unless they restrained their juniors, the government would take action on its own.
Afterward, Brig. Gen. Thura Myint Maung, Myanmar‘s religious affairs minister, was shown on state television delivering the warning during a meeting at the Kaba Aye pagoda in Yangon, the country‘s biggest city. He accused the protesting monks of being instigated by the regime‘s domestic and foreign enemies, but did not say how they might be punished.
As many as 100,000 protesters led by a phalanx of barefoot monks marched Monday through Yangon, the most powerful show of strength yet from a movement that has grown in a week from faltering demonstrations to one rivaling the failed 1988 pro-democracy uprising.
Making no effort to push past, the marchers chanted a Buddhist prayer with the words "May there be peace," and then dispersed. About 500 onlookers cheered the act of defiance, as 100 riot police with helmets and shield stared stonily ahead.
It was the latest in a series of protests that began Aug. 19 as a movement against economic hardship in the Southeast Asian country after the government sharply raised fuel prices. But arrests and intimidation kept demonstrations small and scattered until the monks joined and managed to bring people into the streets in numbers not seen since 1988.
The junta called elections in 1990 but refused to recognize the landslide victory of Suu Kyi‘s party. Suu Kyi, who won the 1991 Nobel peace prize while under house arrest, was last detained in May 2003 after her motorcade was attacked in northern Myanmar by a pro-junta mob.
U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Monday that the people of Myanmar "deserve better than they‘re getting." He urged the regime to listen to the protesters‘ complaints and allow political freedoms.
He expected discussions at the United Nations meeting this week about Myanmar but had no other details. He said the U.S. is interested in keeping U.N. Security Council attention focused on Myanmar.
In the central city of Mandalay, meanwhile, 500 to 600 monks set off shortly after noon on their own protest march.
A Southeast Asian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity as a matter of protocol, said the regime is under pressure from China to avoid a crackdown just as its larger neighbor has pressured it to speed up other democratic changes.
"The Myanmar government is tolerating the protesters and not taking any action against the monks because of pressure from China," the diplomat told The Associated Press. "Beijing is to host the next summer‘s Olympic Games. Everyone knows that China is the major supporter of the junta so if government takes any action it will affect the image of China."
China, which is counting on Myanmar‘s vast oil and gas reserves to help fuel its booming economy, earlier this year blocked a U.N. Security Council criticizing Myanmar‘s rights record saying it was not the right forum.
But at the same time, it has employed quiet diplomacy and subtle public pressure on the regime, urging it to move toward inclusive democracy and speed up the process of dialogue and reform.
Josef Silverstein, a political scientist and author of several books on Myanmar, said it would not be in China‘s interest to have civil unrest in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
"China is very eager to have a peaceful Burma in order to complete roads and railroads, to develop mines and finish assimilating the country under its economic control," Silverstein said.
The movement seemed to gain momentum Saturday, when more than 500 monks and sympathizers went past barricades to walk to the house where Suu Kyi is under house arrest. She greeted them from her gate in her first public appearance in more than four years. Access to her home was barred Sunday and Monday.
The meeting symbolically linked the current protests to Nobel laureate‘s Suu Kyi‘s struggle for democracy, which has seen her detained for about 12 of the last 18 years.
