Twenty thousand people, including nuns, monks and ordinary Burmese, marched through the streets of Rangoon yesterday demanding freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate, in a dramatic escalation of the country’s Buddhist-led “Saffron Revolution”.

Ten thousand monks, joined by about the same number of ordinary supporters, marched from the gold-covered Shwedagon Pagoda through the centre of Burma’s largest city in the biggest anti-government demonstration since the bloody suppression of the first democracy movement in 1988.

After heavy-handed efforts to put down demonstrations earlier in the month, the junta has recently been more restrained, even allowing a large group of monks to march past the house of the detained Ms Suu Kyi and pray with her on Saturday.

But the rapidly growing scale of the demonstrations — from a few thousand a week ago to tens of thousands over the weekend — inevitably raises fears of another crackdown by a dictatorship that usually tolerates no challenge whatsoever to its authority. Bystanders cheered the monks as they walked by yesterday, and presented them with flowers and drinking water and balm for their bare feet.

Expert View

Lives of the monks and supporters depend on whether the regime can remain deaf to the rest of the world

Richard Lloyd Parry

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For the first time, they were joined by about a hundred Buddhist nuns in pale pink robes.

Men who appeared to be plainclothes police, some of them armed with shotguns, followed the marchers or watched them pass by.

“We want the people to join us,” the monks chanted. One leader shouted through a megaphone: “We want national reconciliation, we want dialogue with the military, we want freedom for Aung San Sun Kyi and other political prisoners.”

The marchers responded by raising their hands in the air, and shouting: “Our God!” The All Burma Monks Alliance, based in the country’s second city, the monastic centre of Mandalay, issued a statement urging ordinary people “to struggle peace-fully against the evil military dictatorship till its complete downfall and to banish the common enemy evil regime from Burmese soil forever”.

During yesterday’s march, one chanted through a megaphone: “Our uprising must succeed.”

Foreign human rights activists supporting the Burmese democracy movement have begun tentatively referring to the prospect of a “Saffron Revolution”, after the “colour revolutions” of the former Soviet republics.

Saffron is the traditional colour of monastic robes in South-East Asia although in Burma monks wear a much darker, ox-blood colour.

The brief public emergence on Saturday of the 62-year-old Ms Suu Kyi was a remarkable and unexpected development that imparts intense symbolism to an already emotional situation. Since taking on the leadership of the democracy movement during the 1988 demonstrations, she has spent 12 years in detention.

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