Junta cracks down on monks – again

 

Photo from Kate

According to CNN, the Myanmar junta is manufacturing evidence against the revered Buddist monks;

Myanmar’s military leaders said weapons had been seized from Buddhist monasteries and announced dozens of new arrests Sunday, defying global outrage over its violent repression of protesters who sought an end to 45 years of dictatorship.

Recent raids on monasteries turned up guns, knives and ammunition, though it was not yet clear to whom they belonged, according to The New Light of Myanmar, a mouthpiece of the junta. The government threatened to punish any monks that violate the law, stepping up pressure on clerics who led the protests.

“Monks must adhere to the laws of God and the government,” the paper wrote. “If they violate those laws, action could be taken against them.”

Security eased in the largest city of Yangon more than a week after soldiers and police opened fire on demonstrators. Some roadblocks were removed and visitors began trickling back to the heavily guarded Shwedagon and Sule pagodas, the starting and finishing points of protests that began in mid-August over a sharp fuel price increase.

I can’t imagine where monks would get weapons – or what good they figured knives would do to help them against armed soldiers. Since the monks have traditionally only used civil disobediance and have shunned violence in their protests, it seems unlikely they were hording weapons.

The UN in the meantime is still shuffling it’s feet towards any real action;

Faced with mounting world outrage over violence in Myanmar, the UN Security Council was to meet Monday under pressure to quickly condemn the military regime for crushing pro-democracy protests.
 
The 15-member body was to weigh a draft statement that would condemn “the violent repression of peaceful demonstrations” by Myanmar’s rulers, urge them to “cease repressive measures” and release detainees as well as all political prisoners, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The non-binding text, drafted by the United States, Britain and France, was submitted Friday to the full council after members heard a report from UN emissary Ibrahim Gambari on his recent mission to defuse the crisis.

Of course, China and Russia are still blocking any UN action against the junta declaring that it’s strictly an internal matter. Probably because both have a poor record of human rights and don’t want to start a precedent of the UN supporting democracy movements.

The Sunday Times (h/t Aftermath News) is circulating rumors of mass cremations. I guess the junta needed even more Nazi imagery, I suppose;

THE Burmese army has burnt an undetermined number of bodies at a crematorium sealed off by armed guards northeast of Rangoon over the past seven days, ensuring that the exact death toll in the recent pro-democracy protests will never be known.

The secret cremations have been reported by local people who have seen olive green trucks covered with tarpaulins rumbling through the area at night and watched smoke rising continuously from the furnace chimneys.

They say they have watched soldiers in steel helmets blocking off roads to the municipal crematorium and threatening people who poke their heads out of windows overlooking the roads after the 10pm curfew.

Blue Crab Boulevard quotes from the Times Online that the junta has stormed UN offices and demanded their hard drives to hunt down dissidents. I wonder how the UN will react to this;

Burma’s ruling junta is attempting to seize United Nations computers containing information on opposition activists in the latest stage of its brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, The Times has learnt.

UN staff were thrown into panic over the weekend after Burmese police and diplomats entered its offices in Rangoon and demanded hard drives from its computers.

The discs contain information that could help the dictatorship to identify key members of the opposition movement, many of whom have gone underground. UN staff spent much of the weekend deleting information.

What the junta really needs is Jimmy Carter to come over and certify that there are no mass deaths in Burma, like he’s just done for Darfur (h/t Gateway Pundit and Sweetness and Light);

The United States is exaggerating when it described the Darfur conflict as “genocide,” former US president Jimmy Carter has said, warning that the use of the term was legally inaccurate and “unhelpful,” The Christian Science Monitor reported Friday.

Talk about “unhelpful”, I think that’s the term we can use to describe Jimmy Carter for the last 41 years when we need a one-word adjective to understate his foreign policy dalliances.

Spanish Pundit has a report on the protests against the junta in Asia and Europe. Kate at A Columbo-Americana’s Perspective has pictures of the protest yesterday in DC and  New York City. She also has a list of upcoming protests worldwide.

There was also a protest in Hong Kong today for their own democracy – that’s fairly significant since, Hong Kong is in, ya know, China – one of the Security Council members blocking UN action in Burma. Oddly, the story has disappeared, so I stole the picture while I still could (found it again at WebIndia);

 

 The Bristol Blogger recommends a Nobel prize for the Monks – I’ll go along especially if it squeezes Al Gore out of the running.

Category: Foreign Policy, Jimmy Carter, Society