Oct 06, 2007 04:30 AM
RANGOON–He is just a teenager, with his head shaved and his body draped in the red-saffron tunic that has given its name to the revolution. The monk gets up from the floor in a cloud of tear gas and picks up his glasses, broken by the impact of a rifle to his head. Disoriented, he asks me: "Who is going to help us?
"Do they know in your country what's happening here? Why is nobody coming to help?"
The rooms at monasteries around the main city are empty, a reminder of a lost fight. I go to visit the Chaukhtatgyi reclining Buddha in Rangoon. A military commander has come to visit the temple. He gives his pistol to one of his men, falls to his knees and starts praying to the big Buddha.
Is he feeling guilty for ordering the shooting of his sons? His expression gives nothing away. He gives some money as an offering and leaves with his soldiers, poised for another raid in the city.
When night falls over Rangoon, the darkness rolls in. From my hotel window on Sule Pagoda Ave. I can see trucks full of armed troops crossing the city for a new raid. They comb through a city under curfew, knocking on doors at midnight and carrying away people who dared to confront one of the world's most brutal regimes.
Now, the Burmese have accepted that their revolution was not meant to be. With no help from outside, and no escape possible, they have begun to pay the price for believing – for a moment – that there were possibilities.
Bravery and defiance have turned into fear. Hope into despair. Dreams of democracy into old nightmares of tyranny.
It was only a week ago that people were cheering those few journalists who sneaked into the country. Shopkeepers and housewives would give us food and water on the streets, asking us not to leave them.
"Please, stay," one lady in her `50s told me during one of the demonstrations. "We need the world to see what is happening."
Now that the end has come, they no longer look foreigners in the eye, haunted by the fear of being tainted, detained and made to disappear.
The fear is in their eyes.
How could it all go wrong so rapidly? The sight of the monks marching had given people, paralyzed by decades of repression, the strength to join a movement marching against all odds. For a time, their biggest fear was missing the opportunity of a lifetime – and the chance to change their lives and the lives of their children.
Then came the darkness.
The monks were corralled into their monasteries at gunpoint. And the people lost the inspiration of the monks' moral authority in a country where they represent the forces of purity against venality. The military regime knew that once it took control of the monasteries it had only to demonstrate its willingness to kill unarmed civilians – and prove it with bodies on the streets – to bring back the fear of the past.
It worked.
I was in front of the Sule pagoda the day of the biggest massacre by the junta. Soldiers had surrounded the temple and a few people showed them their indignation for the killing of five people the day before. "How could you shoot at our monks?" they asked. "Where is your compassion?" A few people soon mushroomed into hundreds. Then there were thousands.
I had to remind myself that I had come to Burma to report on a story and that I should distance myself from what I was seeing, so strong was the urge to join the Burmese in their march to democracy. They were mostly young people who had not lived under any other system than this harsh dictatorship but knew there had to be something better on the horizon. They decided to risk not only what they had lived so far, but for all that they still had to live.
A few monks came from nowhere and walked through the crowd, people opening up for them and getting on their knees with tears in their eyes. The monks got into the first line and ordered everyone to sit down and pray. So they did.
Then came the formidable enemy again: darkness.
The military from the 77th Battalion, one of the most ruthless in the country, arrived in trucks along the same path taken minutes earlier by the monks. No matter what they had done before and how much they had repressed their people over the years, I never thought they would shoot at those unarmed civilians confronting them just with their prayers. I heard a first round of shots and I still thought they had to be warning shots. Then I saw an injured demonstrator carried away by his colleagues. His chest was covered in blood.
I ran. People around me ran. The Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagai ran. But he was delayed by the crowd running in front of him and the soldiers confronted him. One of them pointed a gun at his chest. Kenji Nagai opened his arms to show his camera, as if to say: "I am unarmed, see?"
He was executed at point blank range.
The soldier who killed him, and the generals who gave the orders, were treating Kenji Nagai as armed and dangerous. After all, no foreign TV crews had been able to enter the country and networks such as the BBC and CNN had been forced to report from neighbouring Thailand. But the junta could not stop the transfer of images from their crackdown.
Hundreds of Burmese had replaced the journalists who could not make it into the country using cellphones and the Internet to tell the world what was happening. In the eyes of the junta, a camera was, at that moment, a deadly weapon.
Nobody knows how many people were killed that day. I have no doubt there were dozens, but if it had been necessary to slaughter hundreds or thousands, the military wouldn't have hesitated. Forced to choose between shooting their own people or relinquishing power, the generals had decided in predictable fashion. But winning was never going to be enough.
A new crackdown was underway as soon as the soldiers had retaken control of the streets. Twenty thousand soldiers descended into Rangoon with orders to make sure there would be no more uprisings. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
Gun-toting soldiers were posted on almost every street corner, Internet links were cut and tourist visas were denied. They came looking for the few journalists reporting the story.
I saw soldiers trawl Rangoon street by street, throwing suspects into trucks and driving them away. Some were just teenagers.
People who lost their identification papers during the demonstrations, or were identified by spies who infiltrated the protests, were the first to be detained. Now anyone can join them in jails, which are beyond the reach of human rights groups. Some families do not dare call attention to the disappearances of their sons and daughters because they fear being taken away themselves. Burma's people are in a state of terror.
I can't help thinking of the lady in her `50s, and others like her, asking me to "please stay."
In a few days there will be no journalists in Rangoon and the eyes of the world will no longer be on Burma. The future of a whole generation could be thrown away without witnesses. The lives of thousands of people destroyed. The last time the regime confronted revolt in 1988 it responded by killing 3,000 on the streets.
But the worst was yet to come. Universities were closed, thousands were sent to jail and the country closed its doors for years. Now it seems the Burmese are about to be left alone once again to confront the darkness. Without the world bearing witness, the darkness will be all-enveloping.
Still, there are pockets of defiance. I watch a group of young Burmese tracking the troops from a rooftop: "There's a lot of them," says one, pointing to truckloads of soldiers. "Yes, too many," replies his friend, seemingly daunted. They make a quick calculation, opting to relocate their protest with another small band of protesters, none more than a couple of dozen, proclaiming: "Free our monks ... Down with the murderers of our people."
But two dozen seems a weak echo of the tens of thousands I saw at the start.
A monk sitting at the entrance to a pagoda tells me he cannot accept such a defeat for his people. The injustice cannot last forever, he insists, because the people will one day rise again. But will it be another two decades before the darkness lifts?
David Jimenez is Asia correspondent for El Mundo of Spain.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
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