Troops and riot police took up positions outside at least six big activist monasteries in Yangon on Wednesday as Burma’s junta tried to prevent monks leading new protest marches against military rule, witnesses said.
Hundreds more waited in a park behind the Sule Pagoda, the focus of the biggest protests against the generals in 20 years, apparently prepared to prevent any repetition.
Others closed the eastern gate of the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest shrine in the staunchly Buddhist nation and now the symbolic heart of the protests against 45 years of military rule, through which the monks had begun their marches.
There was no immediate word from the monks on whether they would risk their first major confrontation with the junta by trying to march again despite fears of a repetition of the bloody end to a 1988 uprising, primarily in the Sule Pagoda area.
If the monks did march, they would face hundreds of security personnel who poured into the area after a huge demonstration ended on Tuesday.
”This is a test of wills between the only two institutions in the country that have enough power to mobilise nationally,” said Bradley Babson, a retired World Bank official who worked in the former Burma.
”Between those two institutions, one of them will crack,” he said. ”If they take overt violence against the monks, they risk igniting the population against them.”
The arrival of the soldiers was the first significant action by the junta against protests which grew from handfuls of people marching against sudden huge fuel price rises last month into mass demonstrations against military rule.
Maroon-robed monks, revered in the staunchly Buddhist nation, have led the way, drawing in people first to watch, then to applaud, then to march with them. On Tuesday, they clogged several blocks of a city centre road.
Activists arrested
The junta, which so far appears to be reluctant to risk a repetition of 1988, when an estimated 3 000 people were killed, waited until demonstrators had left on Tuesday to move soldiers and riot police into the area.
It also waited late into the evening, when most people in Yangon, a city of five million, and the second city of Mandalay, home to about 800 000, had gone home to send loudspeaker trucks into the streets to announce a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
It appeared the generals did not use radio and television because they have only national networks and on Wednesday morning few outside the two main cities were aware curfews had been imposed.
But they picked up at least two activists overnight, relatives said.
Prominent comedian Za Ga Na, who had joined the monks on Monday in urging people to support the protests, was arrested at his home in Yangon along with activist Win Naing, relatives said.
In another move against monks, whose leadership on Monday was told to rein them in or face military force, a bus owner said drivers had been ordered not to pick up monks.
The escalating tension in the South-east Asian country gripped the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York, where world leaders — mindful of the 1988 violence — called on the junta to exercise restraint.
US President George Bush, in a speech to the assembly, called on all countries to ”help the Burmese people reclaim their freedom” and announced fresh sanctions against the generals, their supporters and families.
The 27-nation European Union said it would ”reinforce and strengthen” sanctions against Burma’s rulers if the demonstrations were put down by force.
The UN human rights investigator for Burma, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, said he feared ”very severe repression”.
”It is an emergency,” he said, singling out China as a regional power that could play a ”positive role” in defusing it. – Reuters