EVERY night the curfew falls like a cloak across Mandalay, Burma’s second city
and the heartland of its monkhood, hiding a reign of terror unseen by the
outside world.
The trishaws vanish from the streets. The lamps of temples and mosques dim.
People lurk in pools of light on their doorsteps, some brazenly cradling
radios to their ears, but soon retreat indoors. Then come the sounds of
dread.
Sitting on the roof of a deserted $15-a-night hotel, you can hear the growl of
engines carried by an easterly breeze that sighs out of the Shan hills.
Doors slam in the distance. There are shouts as motors rev up and recede. A
hush descends.
Thousands of people are incarcerated in four detention centres around Mandalay
controlled by the 33rd division of the Burmese army. Its commanders have
broken the political power of the 200 monasteries here and shattered the
Buddhist clergy as an organised force.
They have instituted the severest repression inflicted upon this city for two
decades.
These are the conclusions of a covert visit to Mandalay in which students,
intellectuals, monks and local business people took the risk of speaking to
a foreign reporter, sometimes in whispers, to tell of their ordeal.
They did so because almost no details of what is happening in the city have
yet become known to the international community.
“Three organisations are looking for journalists: the special branch, military
intelligence and the USDA,” said the first informant, referring to the Union
Solidarity and Development Association, a violent militia group which is
employed to intimidate the junta’s opponents.
“If you are caught by the last one, that’s the worst for you and for anybody
you are talking to,” he added.
The nightly sweeps of raids and arrests are reinforced by daytime roadblocks
and identity checks. Troops drag dozens of people, most of them young, off
the streets at gunpoint.
Using counter-terrorist technology supplied by China, the security forces
check the registrations of motorcycles against numbers captured from digital
images of the huge protests that unfolded from September 23 for five
tumultuous days.
In front of a foreign witness, they hustled a youthful couple and half a dozen
teenagers into an olive green truck with smacks and prods from the barrels
of their automatic rifles. “I wish there were hundreds of foreign tourists
here to see this,” said a Burmese man watching.
The greatest monasteries in Burma, clustered in the southwest of the city, lie
under siege. They appear to be all but devoid of monks.
To find out why, it was necessary to get past approximately 50 troops of the
33rd Division who occupied a key bridge linking the city centre to the
monastery district.
Barbed wire and wooden barricades blocked off roads to pagodas right and left.
Sentries poked their rifles into the windows of cars crawling past the
checkpoint. They looked hard at a foreign passenger but let the car pass.
Down a muddy road running west stood the Mahamuni Paya, the shrine of a
gigantic Buddha image covered in gold leaf by the devout. It is one of the
most revered places in Burma.
Instead of the normal bustle of pilgrims and hawkers, the area was an armed
camp. Soldiers lolled under the bodhi trees. A scattering of children played
around the gilded pavilions. One or two monks in robes averted their eyes
from the foreigner and scurried away.
Fortunately, a courageous Burmese guide sought out answers to the obvious
questions. He persuaded monks and traders to explain how the army had
arrived in force on Friday, September 28.
The military had ordered everybody, from venerable abbots to adolescent
novices and nuns, into trucks. They were taken off to one of the four
detention centres.
One is a grim prison built by the British colonial administration west of
Mandalay hill. Another is a barracks inside the walled palace which was the
home of Burma’s last king and later the occupation headquarters of the
Japanese army from 1942 to 1945.
“The young monks were told to strip off their robes, they were hit and kicked
and then sent home to their villages,” said a witness.
“The older monks are kept in captivity. They are forcing the sayadaws [elders]
to write confessions and promises to obey the government. Just a few monks
have been allowed back to Mahamuni Paya. Most of the other monasteries are
empty.”
Within days the monastic movement was decimated. Thus did the Burmese military
defeat the only institution in this land of 51m that had dared to pose as an
alternative to its authority.
More than 60% of Burma’s 400,000 monks were thought to reside in the Mandalay
area. It became the fulcrum of protests against fuel price rises and poverty
that brought the holy men out onto the streets in gradually increasing
numbers from August through September.
According to informants in Mandalay, the critical juncture came on Sunday,
September 23. The monastic leadership assembled at Sagaing, a fairy-tale
landscape of whitewashed stupas and religious houses arising on the banks of
the Irrawaddy River west of Mandalay.
“The leaders rejected pleas and offerings from the local military commanders.
They were planning a boycott of Chinese businesses. The next day I saw
thousands and thousands of monks come out of the monasteries and process
around Mandalay,” said a witness.
Ordinary folk prostrated themselves, stood on their balconies to clap their
hands and gave drinking water to the monks as they passed.
Then came two ominous signs, for the military, that the Buddhist protest was
spreading. First the monks were applauded when they walked through Muslim
districts, prompting some of Mandalay’s young Muslims to join the protests.
Then students at Mandalay University and other academic institutions started
their own demonstrations; scattered, small and ineffective, but all captured
on video by the security forces.
Only the Chinese community, merchants whose families have prospered for
generations, plus newly arrived traders from China, stayed aloof.
The crackdown, when it came on the 27th and 28th, was swift and efficient.
Soldiers shot in the air and riot squads fired teargas and made baton
charges, dispersing the monks and chasing them back to the temples.
“I saw them shooting guns in the air but not at the people,” said a trishaw
driver. It is generally agreed that nobody was killed at this stage.
“There are other ways of death in beatings and shooting that we fear took
place after the raids,” explained an intellectual.
“Our deepest worry is for the fate of people in detention who are definitely
abused and get no treatment.”
There is desperate concern about five students from Mandalay’s medical
university. The five, two girls and three boys, were arrested by soldiers
after demonstrations at the campus. All are from well known, respectable
families and several are popular figures among their peers.
“Their families are fearful because they have heard these kids will be charged
with narcotics offences,” said an informant who has spoken to the youths’
relatives.
This will mean that instead of serving 40 days in detention for public order
offences, the students could be sent to a notorious penal labour camp in the
Hsu Kuang valley, northern Burma.
“It is hard to come out of there alive,” said the informant.
“We are appealing to the international community to raise these cases to see
if we can save them from this.”
The Sunday Times subsequently passed on that appeal to officials from the
British embassy and the United Nations in Rangoon.
There are no reasons to expect clemency from the military in Mandalay. The
33rd division was transferred from Burma’s eastern border area where it
campaigned against rebels from a minority ethnic group called the Karen. It
has gained a reputation for rape, murder, looting and other unlawful
violence against civilians.
The division is on a list of Burmese army units whose conduct is being
investigated by several foreign governments. They have agreed to cooperate
informally to document crimes against the population with a view to eventual
prosecutions under international law.
For the foreseeable future, the 33rd’s commanders are free to run amok among
the citizens of Mandalay. Their soldiers look seasoned, hatchet-faced and
unemotional. Their uniforms are smart and their weapons are polished. They
deploy in new Chinese military trucks and all-purpose vehicles.
Last Sunday night, local people heard shots ring out around the Chinese
consulate, setting off speculation that simmering resentment against the
Chinese had turned into action.
The next night, said residents, soldiers swooped on curfew breakers on 78th
Street, which runs from north to south past the railway station and a
district of Chinese shops.
They arrested about 65 people. All were given six-month prison sentences at a
military hearing the next morning. “It was a warning,” said a student.
