It’s this simple:
It is 9.15 p.m. on Tuesday evening in Yangon, the time of day when the stranglehold of fear settles across the city. The first heavily armed soldiers take position outside the few restaurants that still serve foreigners. Curfew starts at 10 p.m. After that, anyone who is still out on the streets is risking their lives.
The foreigners can’t find a car to take them from the restaurant. Someone goes out to find some sort of transport. Outside, a young man in shabby clothes emerges from the shadows to speak to the foreigners.
“The repression is continuing every night. When there are no more witnesses, they drive through the suburbs at night and kill the people.”
He wants to get his story out, and he does so quickly. If he’s caught, he’ll be imprisoned or killed. He’s from South Okalapa, a huge, terribly poor suburb. Most of the rebel monks were from there. The military junta crushed the rebellion in the city, then went to the source.
Around midnight, the military rolled into town. There’s a special unit of gangsters and ex-cons- for special purposes.
They surrounded a monastery on Weiza Yandar Street. All the roughly 200 monks living there were forced to stand in a row and the security forces beat their heads against a brick wall. When they were all covered in blood and lay moaning on the ground, they were thrown into a truck and taken away. “We are crying for our monks,” said the man, and then he was gone.
The huge monastery in the city is empty and quiet. Several thousand monks are gone. Disappeared.
“We are assuming that the number of victims among the monks and protesters last week goes well into the hundreds,” says one diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Some 800 monks are captive at the infamous Insein Prison. They have no contact with the world.
(I)f the authorities don’t provide international organizations with access to the camps soon, it will be a matter of time before there are further deaths.
The British ambassador hopes condemnation from ASEAN will help. He hopes U.N. efforts will help. He hopes the Chinese will help.
The article in Spiegel Online ends with these chilling words:
Editor’s Note: For security reasons we are not naming our correspondents in Burma.
The blogosphere is frequently full of cries about the creeping fascism of the Bush Administration. There are claims that we are all in imminent danger. There are comparisons to the world’s most brutal regimes. The Bush Administration is a viper’s den of war criminals, imperialists, and End Times theocrats.
You want to talk fascism?
