By that point, I had given up trying to predict the color of the chick or the shape of the cloud; events had taken an unexpected twist with the involvement of the monks and the regime’s violent response against them. As
New Light
scribes penned their turgid think pieces and various members of the regime knelt on ornamental carpets in monasteries to pose for the cameras with offerings of cooking oil, rice, and hard cash, an uneasy calm descended upon the country.
OVER A WEEK PASSED
, and the regime offered no official apology for its maltreatment of monks at Pakokku. The
thabeik hmauk
was duly set in place. Secret meetings were held at monasteries in Rangoon and Mandalay to conduct the necessary rites for the overturning of the alms bowl.
A recording of one such meeting, held at midday on September 18 at an unnamed monastery in Rangoon, opened with the hypnotic gravelly sound of monks chanting in Pali. One of the monks began to speak, slowly reciting the age-old words that would invoke a religious boycott against the military and their families:
“Reverend clergy, may you listen to my words. The violent, mean, cruel, ruthless, pitiless soldier kings—the great thieves who live by stealing from the national treasury—have murdered a monk at Pakokku, and also apprehended clergymen by trussing them up with rope. They beat and tortured, verbally abused and terrorized them. Clergy replete with the Four Attributes—boycott the violent, mean, cruel, ruthless, pitiless kings.”
The speaker went on to ask of the monks who had gathered for the ritual: “If the reverends consent and are pleased at the boycott and refusal of donations and preaching, please keep silent; if not, please voice objections.”
There were no objections, and the speaker concluded: “The clergy boycotts the violent, mean, cruel, ruthless, pitiless kings—the great thieves who are stealing from the national treasury.”
And so the monks began to march. At 1:00 P.M. that day some three hundred monks gathered beneath the Shwedagon Pagoda and walked through the streets of Rangoon. Traffic stopped as they strode through the busy roundabout next to city hall, where the Sule Pagoda is located, and on to the Botahtaung Pagoda at the riverside, where they knelt and prayed. The march lasted just under two hours, and, afterward, the monks calmly returned to their monasteries.
Over the days that followed, monks continued to gather at the Shwedagon Pagoda to begin their daily marches. Laypeople started to join in; some offered drinking water to the monks, others held hands to form a human cordon on either side of the column of monks to protect them from harm. Each day, the marches grew larger and lasted longer. Soon multiple columns of monks were charting different trails across the city. They had no planned route and seemed to be mapping a spontaneous path from pagoda to pagoda, linking the holy sites of Rangoon and drawing a living mandala through the city’s streets.
A cautious euphoria took hold; I felt it too, even from afar. Onlookers hung out of windows and balconies to clap and cheer. Flags carried by the monks fluttered above the marchers, flying the colors of the Buddha’s aura: blue, yellow, red, white, and pink. The columns of monks moved like unfurling banners that rippled with the shades of the robes they wore: deep maroon, dark rust orange, and blood red. The leading monks often held their glossy black alms bowls above their heads, symbolically turned upside down. Others held up posters bearing the serene face of the Buddha. The marches even continued through monsoon rainstorms. At times, the barefoot monks walked along streets knee-deep in floods and their steady strides churned the water into a choppy sea.
Similar marches were taking place elsewhere in Burma. Monks marched in the coastal city of Sittwe, on the Bay of Bengal. They marched down from hilltop pagodas at Sagaing, the center for the country’s renowned Buddhist universities. They marched in the thousands in Mandalay. And, as they marched, they chanted in unison, reciting verses from the
Metta Sutta
, the Buddhist discourse on loving-kindness. The words of the
Metta Sutta
are intended to spread peace to all sentient beings in all directions across the universe, and to quell the forces of evil.
May all be well and secure,
May all beings be happy!
Whatever living creatures there be,
Without exception, weak or strong,
Long, huge, or middle-sized,
Or short, minute, or bulky,
Whether visible or invisible,
And those living far or near,
The born and those seeking birth,
May all beings be happy!
In Rangoon one day, a column of monks went to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house and chanted the
Metta Sutta
. To everyone’s surprise, a door in the gate opened and Aung San Suu Kyi appeared at the entrance with her hands folded in prayer. A photograph taken at the time shows her standing behind a row of police with riot shields. She looks tiny and out of focus in the picture, half obscured by one of the aluminum shields, but it was a moving image, especially since she had not been seen in public for so many years. Aung San Suu Kyi herself had tears in her eyes as she stood at her gate praying.
The crowds became bigger and bolder. Some said there were as many as a hundred thousand people on the streets of Rangoon each day. Members of the NLD joined the marches. Prominent movie stars and public figures donated food to the monks. The marchers began to shout demands: “Free all political prisoners! Free Aung San Suu Kyi!” Some protesters defiantly held up a bright red flag emblazoned with a yellow fighting peacock—the flag of the student movement, banned since the 1988 uprising.
When thousands of monks knelt around the Shwedagon Pagoda to pray, there were so many of them that the black-and-white tiles were completely obscured from view. All that could be seen were the shaved heads of the monks and the varied maroon shades of their robes. Buddhist nuns in their pastel pink gowns sat around the outer edges of the circle, wrapping a final ring of pale color around the band of monks. When I gazed at photographs of the scene long enough, I began to see a hazy aura around the gold of the pagoda that faded from blood red to a pale, almost translucent pink. There, at the pagoda, the
Metta Sutta
was chanted again.
Let none deceive or decry
His fellow anywhere;
Let none wish others harm
In resentment or in hate.
I was incredulous that the regime had stood aside and allowed the marches to grow so big. The ever-present surveillance and iron-fisted tactics normally used by the authorities could easily have stifled the marches. Why, I wondered, was the regime not doing anything? Or, more ominously, what was it waiting for?
By then the marches were making headlines around the world. The fact that up-to-the-minute news was getting out of the country so rapidly was also incredible. Due to the regime’s restrictions on foreign journalists, news organizations such as the BBC or CNN cannot easily send a camera crew to Burma, and reporters who are able to sneak in must operate under the constant threat of deportation. During the events of September, news was mostly sent out via the Internet. Though the Internet had been available in Burma for only a few years, and access was limited by government firewalls, users were able to get around the constraints. Burmese journalists e-mailed information and photographs to news organizations abroad, while pseudonymous Burmese bloggers broadcast events on their Web sites almost as soon as they happened on the ground.
In media terms it was a compelling story. An epic clash was taking place between the two strongest elements in Burmese society. On one side: the morality, wisdom, and nonviolent principles of over 2,500 years of Buddhist tradition. On the other: the heavily armed might of the military honed over forty-five years of authoritarian rule and jungle warfare. In terms of numbers, it was an even match; with some four hundred thousand monks in Burma and an estimated minimum of four hundred thousand soldiers, there was at least one monk for every soldier. Would the forces of good triumph over evil? Would the monks be able to pacify the armed men with their call for loving-kindness? Or would the military fall back on its brute instinct to pull the trigger?
The answer came on the evening of September 24, almost a week after the marches had begun. The minister of religious affairs appeared on state television to say that the protests were instigated by “internal and external destructionists, who are jealous of national development and stability” and who want to “harm all the government’s endeavors.” He also blamed the international media for fanning the flames of unrest. The ruling council of monks, known as the Sangha Maha Nayaka—a government-appointed body—was ordered to bring the clergy in line and curtail their involvement in nonreligious affairs.
That evening and the following evening, trucks rigged with loudspeakers drove through the city announcing a nighttime curfew. People were told not to march with the monks and were reminded of relevant articles in the Penal Code, which state that joining unlawful assemblies can result in a prison sentence and that gatherings of more than five people are illegal. In the middle of the night, residents who lived near the main roads were woken by convoys of army trucks driving into the city. Light Infantry Division 66 and Light Infantry Division 77 had been deployed to Rangoon.
The crackdown began in earnest the next day. Photographs and footage of excited and joyous people supporting the peaceful marchers were suddenly replaced by images of soldiers and riot police beating up monks and herding protesters into trucks. When monks tried to gather at the daily rallying point of the Shwedagon Pagoda, they found the holy site ringed with soldiers and barbed-wire barricades. The monks tried to negotiate with the authorities, but soldiers responded to their entreaties by hitting them with truncheons. Witnesses saw monks being beaten unconscious and tossed into trucks.
The demonstrators and their supporters were immediately whipped into a fearful chaos. As people tried to regroup at various points around the city, the
Swan Ah Shin
roamed the streets carrying bamboo sticks and metal rods. Soldiers fired their guns above the crowds but then received orders to shoot directly at people; first with rubber bullets and then with real bullets.
In downtown Rangoon, a Japanese photographer was shot and killed. The point-blank shooting was captured both on film and by still camera. A photograph taken of the scene by Reuters photographer Adrees Latif, who was positioned above the street on a pedestrian overpass, won the Pulitzer Prize. The photo shows the Japanese man, who was later identified as Kenji Nagai, falling onto his back in front of the soldier who shot him. To one side of the dying man, frantic people are scrambling over one another as they try to get away. Behind them, a riot policeman has his truncheon poised midair, ready to strike. The road is littered with discarded sandals and plastic water bottles. The moment after the picture was taken, the soldier leveled his gun and continued to run after the retreating crowd.
Zaw Thu, a Burmese artist in his twenties who had taken part in the protests, later gave me his impressions of the crackdown. He spoke in a breathless manner, confusing the chronology of events and jumping back and forth between days in his haste to cover all the details. This is how he told his story:
At around one o’clock on Wednesday, I think it was Wednesday, we were at the Sule Pagoda. The soldiers stood in a row. The monks and nuns sat in front of them and meditated. The soldiers came toward them and grabbed the monks sitting in the first row and started beating them with sticks and the butts of their guns. And the nuns, too, they tore their tops off and beat them as well. People began to run away—we had to.
Then there was the day when the soldiers shot protesters. They used rubber bullets first, and, when the crowd still wouldn’t go away, they used real bullets. And they had snipers to pick off the leaders. I saw a flag holder get shot, and a student holding up a portrait of Aung San. I saw at least ten people get shot that day. I think they are dead. There is no way to know. We had to keep running.
And they kept beating people. They herded them into trucks. They went into the tea shops and picked up people who were just drinking tea and they beat them. They grabbed people at the bus stops who were not involved, who were just trying to get home, and they beat them. And I saw them beat a young girl. She was really young. Too young. And the nuns, they beat them, too. They tore off their tops and they beat them.
I heard plenty of descriptions like this, their incoherence indicative of the panic and mayhem that had been unleashed. A magazine editor vaulted over a wall that was ten feet high while running away from the
Swan Ah Shin
; when he looked at the wall some days later he had no idea how he had been able to jump that high. A terrified teenage girl lay facedown on a rough tarmac road and waited her turn as soldiers searched protesters one by one, confiscating cameras and randomly kicking people. Others ran down the city’s narrow alleyways, clambering up the dark, steep stairwells that lead into colonial-era shop-houses or ducking behind the buildings and sinking into the sewage-choked gutters. Zaw Thu, the young artist, had peered down from the upper floor of one of the shop-houses and watched as soldiers locked down the streets in the same way they would secure a battlefield. After the soldiers took control of each block, fire engines drove along the streets to hose down the tarmac and wash away the blood.
It took three days for the military to put an end to the protests. At night soldiers raided monasteries. In some cases they used trucks to batter down the gates, storming the sacrosanct premises with tear gas and gunshots, as if they were entering an enemy encampment. Hundreds of monks were arrested and soldiers were placed on guard at the emptied monastic compounds. Along with the monks, hundreds of laypeople were also arrested and taken to impromptu detention centers set up in the buildings of a technical college and at Kyaikkasan, an old British racecourse.