Blood on the monastery floor - Haaretz

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Last update - 22:10 11/10/2007

Blood on the monastery floor

By Yotam Feldman, Haaretz Correspondent in Burma

Haaretz correspondent Yotam Feldman was in Burma at the height of last month's protests against the military junta. He describes the atmosphere in the country, where he remained until he was caught and expelled by the junta's secret service.

"The city is quiet now. Foes of the government say that the monks - the leaders of the protests - were imprisoned, beaten to death, burned while still alive. They pass on secret photographic evidence of the Burmese government's oppressive acts and hope the world will learn."

A few minutes before I boarded the plane to Rangoon, my mobile phone rang. It was 4 A.M. and I was in the Bangkok airport. An English-speaking voice with an Asian accent said, "I am calling from the immigration department. We are outside your house and want to ask you a few questions. Please open up."

I tried to protest. "I'm not even home."

The voice on the other end said, "We just want to ask you some questions, open up already."

I tried to clarify which house they were even talking about. "Where do you think I live?"

"So now you don't know where you live?" replied the man on the other end.

I hung up. For a minute, I debated whether or not to board the flight. The long line of foreigners flying to Burma - or as it was called on the departures board, Myanmar - managed to calm me. Surely everyone there was a human rights worker or a journalist like me, I told myself. At least I was not alone.

As I boarded the flight, it became clear that I had erred. The long line was for a flight to Delhi. On the sole plane leaving for Burma from Bangkok last week sat only seven people, all of them Burmese aside from me. The plane took off.

Disappearing demonstrators

I entered Burma on a tourist visa. I tried to make myself look like a backpacker and took a room in a small hostel in the center of the city, far away from the big hotels where the western journalists were staying.

At the hostel I found two French women sitting on a balcony, drinking coffee and eating a lazy breakfast. Sitting next to them were two tourists, American and Japanese, swapping travel experiences. A bearded Australian man in his 50s with unkempt hair scampered feverishly around the hostel looking for his lost toiletries case. The hostel's decor was like every other guest house in the East.

But the minute I left the hostel, the atmosphere was different: I passed by the breathtaking Shwedagon Pagoda, where some of the largest demonstrations against the military government have emerged over the last month. Inside the adjacent monastery was where, according to anti-government reports, the military junta carried out severe acts of violence. Parked there now were army vehicles and fire trucks; scores of soldiers guarded the entrance.

The military presence stood out in other areas of the city as well. On nearly every street corner soldiers with rifles were positioned on standby. Barricades and serrated wire coils were placed at central intersections, ready for use if needed. The soldiers' presence did not keep the bustling street life of the city from its normal routine, but the government's message to the citizens was clear.

If the display of forces on the street was not enough, rumors of the true outcome of government activities against the demonstrators had spread throughout the city. It was clear that the official numbers reported - of ten people killed during protests - were baseless. Members of the opposition heard different figures. Most of them told me that some 200 people were killed during the protests and in the military raids on the monasteries.

We met in various public places. The fear was perceptible. We were afraid that the person next to us, across the street, in the neighbor's house or in the nearby car was a secret government agent. Members of the opposition asked me not to come back and look for them again.

They told me that the regime has made vested efforts to hide the remains of those they have killed. At first they threw them into the river, and then once pictures of the monks' corpses began circulating on the internet, the soldiers began burning the bodies in two incinerators built in nearby cities. There were also reports of civilians wounded during the demonstrations and buried alive.

The unofficial number of fatalities was sufficient to leave the demonstrators intimidated by the regime, particularly those who are not monks and do not belong to political parties. In the last days of the protests, I heard many government opponents trying to convince people on the streets to join the spontaneous demonstrations, but the number of participants had dwindled.

The time has come to unite

In recent days, the Burmese regime has tried with all its power to prevent the dissemination of photos and reports of what has really been going on. Photographs of the demonstrations are treated as a central enemy, not only because they document the regime's crimes and are likely to intensify international pressure on the state, but also because they illustrate the scope of opposition to the government. The sight of vast numbers of people going out to the streets to demonstrate could spur the regime to organize itself anew.

When the demonstrations began, leaflets were distributed among the protesters instructing how to disseminate videos on the internet through blogs and shared files like youtube.com. Pictures of the uprising abounded, but the regime quickly clamped down on internet access throughout the state.

Nevertheless, I was given hundreds of still photographs and dozens of videos which have not yet left the borders of the state, and appear here for the first time. They document the final protests held in Burma over the last two weeks.

The pictures were taken by photographers whose identities are unknown. All of the photographs were taken under life-threatening conditions. The purpose of the photos is to share with the world information about the consistent blow to human rights being carried out in Burma. I obtained these photos circuitously.

The blind spot in the lens of the opposition activists are the monasteries. What has happened in the monasteries has hardly been documented and there is no evidence. Monks and other government foes told me that the violence used within the monasteries was much worse than the soldiers' activities on the streets. The few photographs that I did receive show the bloodstains on the floors of one monastery and the discarded robes on the floors of another.

More excerpts from Yotam Feldman's exclusive account of the protests in Burma will be featured on Haaretz.com in the coming days.

Click here for a slideshow of photographs taken by Burmese opposition figures and smuggled out of the country by Yotam Feldman.

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