Burma's ghosts rise to confront the generals
By Pascal Koo-Thwe
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 28/09/2007
"They are killing the monks again," a Burmese friend of mine greeted me unceremoniously as soon as I arrived at her flat in south London. "What can we do?" It seemed she had been crying her eyes out – they were as red as the monks' robes.
She and her husband had recently returned from a short visit to Rangoon, just before the demonstrations started, and they didn't like what was happening there. "Rangoon nowadays is full of beggars, soldiers, thugs and sad faces. Our country is in the hand of alien powers," they said sorrowfully.
When reports of marches, shootings and crackdowns on protesters in the streets of Rangoon reached me via the internet and by phone, I knew that the ghosts of monks, students and civilians killed by the army during the past 40 years had risen again to haunt the generals. My hair stood on end as I relived the terrifying trauma of being on the receiving end of violence.
The faces of the protesting monks are exactly like those who were killed in Mandalay during the 1988 uprising, in which I was one of the participants and a witness to the massacres.
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