A monk's tale of protest and escape from Myanmar

October 26, New York Times

A 24-year-old Buddhist monk who says he was one of the leaders of the
recent protests in Myanmar and escaped last week painted a picture on
Thursday of a bare-bones group of young monks planning and organizing what
became a nationwide uprising.

During a six-hour interview in this border town, the monk, Ashin Kovida,
said he had been elected the leader of a group of 15 of his fellows and
led daily protests in Yangon from Sept. 18 through Sept. 27, the day after
the authorities began raiding monasteries.

He said he was inspired by the popular uprisings in Yugoslavia against the
government of Slobodan Milosevic, videos of which were circulated by
dissident groups in Myanmar.

Eight members of his organizing committee are ''missing'' and six others
are hiding in Yangon, he said. He described escaping to Thailand by using
a false identification card, dyeing his hair blond and wearing a crucifix.

Many details of Mr. Kovida's account could not be independently confirmed,
but his role as an organizer was well known among nongovernmental
organizations in Myanmar, formerly Burma, and Western human rights groups.

Hlaing Moe Than, 37, a leading organizer of students in the September
demonstrations who also fled to Thailand, was shown a picture of Mr.
Kovida on Thursday and confirmed his identity.

''He is one of the famous leaders among the Buddhist monks during the
protests,'' Hlaing Moe Than said.

Mr. Kovida's group received financial help from three well-known Burmese
dissidents -- an actor, a comedian and a poet -- but it did not receive
foreign aid during the protests, he said.

One of his main preoccupations, he said, was providing food for the
thousands of monks who came to Yangon, Myanmar's main city, to join the
protests. He said he also worried about what he called ''fake monks,''
whom he suspected the military government had planted.

The spark for the demonstrations came on Sept. 5, when the police fired
warning shots at protesting monks in Pakokku, in central Myanmar, Mr.
Kovida said.

''The first time I heard the information, I was speechless,'' he said.
''It was an unbelievable thing.''

Older monks and abbots urged the monks to protest in the monasteries, but
the younger monks thought protesting in their cloistered world would do no
good, he said.

He reached out to students he had met during alms collections and began to
plan marches in Yangon.

''We realized that there was no leadership -- a train must have a
locomotive,'' he said.

He said he helped supervise the printing of hundreds of pamphlets, titled,
''The Monks Will Come Out Onto the Streets.''

''We delivered to all the monasteries.'' in Yangon, he said. ''We tried to
distribute to other regions as much as possible.''

On Sept. 18, he led the first column of monks through the streets in
Yangon, he said.

On Sept. 19, about 2,000 protesters, including 500 monks, sat on the tiled
floor in Sule Pagoda, a focal point of the protests. ''To continue
demonstrations in a peaceful way we must have leadership,'' Mr. Kovida
said he told them. ''I call on 10 monks to come join me in the front.''

Fifteen monks came forward, he said, to form what they called the Sangga
Kosahlal Apahwe, the Monks Representative Group.

''In this country at present we are facing hardships,'' he said he told
the crowd, after he was elected chairman of the group. ''People are
starving; prices are rising. Under this military government there are so
many human rights abuses. I call on people to come to join together with
us. We will continue these protests peacefully every day until we win. If
there are no human rights, there is no value of a human.''

He said that, for a week, he met with his group of organizers in the
morning and led marches at noon. He said he heard reports on the
Burmese-language service of the BBC about other monks who had organized
themselves but he had never met them.

Then, on Sept. 26, the government began a violent crackdown. Security
forces clubbed and tear-gassed protesters, blocked their path and arrested
hundreds.

''The police pulled the monks' robes and beat them,'' Mr. Kovida said.
''Nuns were stripped of their sarongs.''

He said he escaped by climbing over a brick wall.

The next day, as the crackdown intensified, he said he changed out of his
robes and fled to a village about 40 miles away where, with the help of
relatives and friends, he hid in an abandoned wooden hut.

He was so afraid of attracting the attention of neighbors that he
suppressed his coughs and never left the dark hut for two weeks, he said.
He relieved himself using a plastic bucket, he said, and friends
occasionally dropped off food.

On Oct. 12, his adoptive mother, whom he called Daw Thin Thin Khaing, was
detained, news that was immediately relayed to him. He fled into the
night, barefoot.

''I ran down a large road,'' he said. ''Whenever a car came I hid in the
bushes.''

He headed back to Yangon, he said, where he dyed his hair blond. He bought
a crucifix in a local market and, several days later, boarded a bus
heading toward the Thai border.

Using a false identity card, he passed about eight checkpoints and reached
Myawadi, a border town, on Oct. 17. The next morning, he said, he crossed
the Moei River to Thailand in a boat, bypassing the official border post.

An Oct. 18 article in The New Light of Myanmar, the state-run newspaper,
accused him of hiding ''48 yellowish high-explosive TNT cartridges'' in
his monastery.

Now, facing almost certain detention in Myanmar, Mr. Kovida said he would
request refugee status in Thailand.

''I have been in the monkhood since I was so young,'' he said. ''My whole
life, I have been studying only Buddhism and peaceful things.''