Fear reigns in Burma’s city under siege

October 14, The Sunday Times
Our staff correspondent, Mandalay

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.