Thousands Join Monks in Protests

By SETH MYDANS
Published: September 25, 2007
From: The New York Times

BANGKOK, Sept. 24 —Myanmar’s military junta issued its first warning today after a month of widening antigovernment demonstrations, saying it was prepared to crack down on the Buddhist monks who are at the heart of the protests.

Buddhist leaders spoke against Myanmar’s military rulers Sunday in Yangon, the largest city. About 10,000 monks attended.

Speaking on state television, the brigadier general who is the junta’s religious affairs minister told senior Buddhist clerics to rein in the tens of thousands of monks who have marched through several cities in recent days.

If not, said the minister, Brig. Gen. Thura Myint Maung, unspecified action would be taken against the monks “according to the law.”

He said the protesting monks had been instigated by the junta’s domestic and foreign enemies, the same accusation that had been brought previously against members of the political opposition.

Any action against the monks would be extremely risky for the government because of the reverence in which they are held in this devoutly Buddhist nation.

The warning came at the end of a day when protesters filled the streets in greater numbers than ever pushing their confrontation with the military government toward an unpredictable and possibly dangerous outcome.

In the main city, Yangon, the Buddhist monks who have led the protests for the past week were outnumbered by civilians, including prominent political dissidents and well-known cultural figures.

A crowd estimated by the Associated Press as high as 100,000 set out in the morning from the gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda and marched unopposed in separate columns through the city.

Other protests were reported in Mandalay, Sittwe and Bago. Monks and their supporters have marched in other cities as well in recent days.

Until now, the government has remained silent and mostly out of out of sight, giving over the streets to the protesters with virtually no uniformed security presence in evidence.

For all the energy and jubilation of the crowds, the country formerly known as Burma seemed to be holding its breath. As the demonstrations expanded from political dissidents a month ago to Buddhist monks last week to the broad public, the government’s options seemed to be narrowing.

The demonstrations proceeded under the shadow of the last major nationwide convulsion, in 1988, when even larger pro-democracy protests were crushed by the military at the cost of some 3,000 lives.

“We are in uncharted territory,” said the British ambassador to Myanmar, Mark Canning, speaking by telephone from Yangon after observing the crowds today.

These demonstrations seem to be steadily picking up momentum,” he said.

“They are widely spread geographically. They are quite well organized, they are stimulated by genuine economic hardship and they are being done in a peaceful but very effective fashion.”

The government may have been hoping that the demonstrations would simply run out of steam. But their rapid growth and the pent-up grievances that are driving them make that seem unlikely. With each day, the growing size of the crowd seems to attract even more participants.

Another possibility is the opening of some form of compromise or dialogue between the government and its opponents. But that is an option the country’s military rulers have never embraced.

Instead, they have jailed their political opponents, held the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and rejected the demands of the country’s marginalized ethnic minorities.

And when the challenges against them have seemed threatening, they have used force, as in 1988 or in 2003, when the government unleashed a band of thugs to attack Aung San Suu Kyi when her popularity seemed to be getting out of hand.

Along with the heady energy of mass demonstrations, Myanmar was alive with rumors of an impending military crackdown. Exile groups with contacts inside the country have been reporting troop movements and warnings to hospitals to prepare for large numbers of casualties.

But analysts said a number of factors that were not present in 1988 might be constraining the government today.

The first is that the world is watching. Since 1988, Myanmar has become the focus of international condemnation for its abuses of human and political rights and its treatment of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been held under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years.

The country has become an embarrassment to its nine partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a regional political and economic organization, some of whose meetings have been boycotted by the United States because of the inclusion of Myanmar. Using economic and political leverage, that association has been increasingly open in calling for reform in Myanmar.

The most significant constraint on Myanmar’s behavior may be its giant neighbor China, which has supported it with aid and commercial ties, undermining economic sanctions imposed by Western nations.

“China wants stability here, and the way things are going is not really consistent with that,” said a Western diplomat reached by telephone in Myanmar.

Chinese businesses have invested heavily in Myanmar, which is also a major source of raw materials — particulary oil and gas — and a potential link to seaports on the Andaman Sea.

China has said repeatedly that Myanmar’s troubles are its own internal affair and last year it blocked an American move to place Myanmar’s violations of human rights on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. But it has recently taken small public steps to press for democratic reform in Myanmar.

In June it arranged a highly unusual meeting in Beijing between representatives of Myanmar and the United States at which the Americans pressed for the release of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.

Earlier this month, as the demonstrations continued in Myanmar, a senior Chinese diplomat, Tang Jiaxuan, told the visiting Myanmar foreign minister, Nyan Win, that “China wholeheartedly hopes that Myanmar will push forward a democracy procss that is appropriate for the country.”

But with its population rising up against it in the strongest challenge of the past two decades, some analysts said, it might be too late to urge the generals to be calm.

“At this point I think all bets are off and the Chinese will have no real influence on what they do,” said Dave Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with the international rights group Human Rights Watch.