Burma Myanmar: The Orange Revolution

September 23, 2007 · Filed Under News, Politics 

It is hard to imagine in the west that a group of people could exist who might galvanise a nation into a peaceful protest which is also dynamic and irresistible. The best we have is halfwit politicians and business people, along with imbecile advertising executives, who can all exhort us to spend, spend, spend, but cannot make anyone feel happy or good about themselves or feel that they have a stake in the world.

In Burma, or Myanmar, they have the Buddhist monks and they are taking on the repressive military government, just by showing their displeasure.

The International Herald Tribune:

The most serious popular challenge to Myanmar’s military junta in nearly two decades gained momentum Sunday as thousands of onlookers cheered huge columns of barefoot monks and shouted support for the detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, witnesses said.

Marching for the sixth day through rainy streets in Yangon, the antigovernment protest swelled to a reported 10,000 monks, one day after several hundred monks paid respects to Aung San Suu Kyi at the gate of her home, the first time the Nobel laureate had been seen in public in four years.

Photographs said to have been taken Sunday showed huge numbers of monks in their dark red robes parading between cordons of civilians, who walked along with them holding hands in protective human chains. Nuns, in robes with their heads shaved, also joined the demonstration.

Monks were reported to be parading through the streets of a number of other cities as well, notably the country’s second city, Mandalay, where wire services said 10,000 people, including 4,000 monks, had marched on Saturday.

The link between the clergy and the leader of Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement, as well as calls by some monks for a wider protest, raised the stakes for the government, which has mostly kept its hands off the monks for fear of a public backlash.

[...]

“The monks are the highest moral authority in the Burmese culture,” said Soe Aung, a spokesman for a coalition of exile groups based in Thailand. “If something happens to the monks, the situation will spread much faster than what happened to the students in 1988.”

This gingerly approach by authorities - and the challenges it poses - were demonstrated on Saturday, when guards removed barriers to let about 500 monks walk down the street past the house where Aung San Suu Kyi has been held under arrest for 12 of the past 17 years.

She met them at the iron gate outside her home. Witnesses told wire services that she was in tears as she greeted the monks, who chanted prayers as they faced security officers with riot shields.

On Sunday, the monks gathered in by far their greatest numbers yet, some of them shouting “Release Suu Kyi!” according to witnesses quoted by The Associated Press.

Uniformed police officers and soldiers have stayed in the background throughout the month of protests. But witnesses Sunday said that plainclothes police officers trailed the marchers and that some, armed with shotguns, were posted along the route.

[...]

On Saturday, an organization of clergy called the All Burma Monks Alliance called for wider protests in a statement that said, “In order to banish the ‘common enemy’ evil regime from Burmese soil forever, united masses of people need to join hands with the united clergy forces.”

It went on, “We pronounce the evil military despotism, which is impoverishing and pauperizing our people of all walks, including the clergy, as the common enemy of all our citizens.”

How must it feel to live in a country where a moral and religious class holds the highest respect, rather than a bunch of morally derelict moneygrubbers and blatant liars?

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