By Marwaan Macan-Markar
RANGOON, Sep 28 2007 (IPS)

After turning its guns on the country’s protesting Buddhist monks and at least three monasteries in this city, Burma’s heavily armed soldiers had no hesitation firing at a group of civilian protesters chanting angry slogans near a high school in the Tamwe Township.

A monk surveys mayhem in a monastery following an army raid Credit: US Campaign for Burma

There were other people walking by the school on this Thursday afternoon, among them a 48-year-old Burmese man who became an eyewitness to the brutality. Suddenly, with no warning, soldiers who arrived in trucks blocked one end of Tamwe Road and launched an assault on the protesters, the eyewitness told IPS. ‘’People began to scream and there was a lot of panic. We were ordered to lie on the ground.’’

Another witness – a 16 year-old female student – had the presence of mind to ‘’record the sounds of bullets’’ on her MP3 player, a modern gadget, the size of a cigarette lighter, that is in demand for its ability to record and store high quality digital sound. ‘’There were a lot of people, parents, who were lying on the ground,’’ she told IPS. ‘’All of us were later arrested. There must have been about 300 people.’’

But what also became clear to the eyewitness, as the smoke cleared, was that at least eight people had died in the assault. ‘’There were eight people killed, including one high school student. The soldiers took away the bodies,’’ the male eyewitness said.

Such wanton disregard for the lives of unarmed civilians -both those protesting and bystanders – has raised questions about the actual death toll in Burma’s commercial capital as the first week of the ruling junta’s bloody crackdown drew to a close. While some western news agencies estimate the number of dead to be 13, by mid-day on Friday, diplomats based in this city told journalists that the number could be much higher. Among the victims identified so far is Kenji Nagai, a 50-year-old Japanese photographer.

‘’We call for international help urgently. We are being brutally abused by the soldiers,’’ one of the monks from the Ngwe Kyar Yan Monastery, who was a victim of that attack, told IPS.

Thousands of saffron-robed Buddhist monks led the Burmese public in a wave of protests that took the form of a popular uprising this week. Initially, the monks echoed the pain of the populace following a sudden 500 percent hike in oil prices in mid-August. Yet the rage on the streets of Rangoon and 25 other towns and cities took on a political edge and turned into a direct challenge to the junta’s legitimacy after the generals responded to the criticism with violence.

The protests seen this week are the largest since 1988, when a pro-democracy uprising was crushed with brutal force, resulting in some 3,000 civilians being killed by the army. Burma has been ruled by successive military regimes since a 1962 coup, during which time little dissent has been tolerated.

By the week’s end, the cry for concrete international pressure, echoed by many people in this bloodied city, appeared to be heard at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The international community responded with its first substantial step, when a U.N. special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, was dispatched to visit Burma for a ‘’constructive dialogue’’ with the South-east Asian nation’s military leaders. The Nigerian diplomat was reportedly given a visa by the junta to begin his mission on Sep. 29.

‘’Mr. Gambari’s visit is an entry point to begin this dialogue. He can tell the military generals that their approach to the current crisis is a disaster,’’ Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Burma, said during a telephone interview from New York. ‘’Attacking monks and civilians is a breach of the country’s international commitments.’’

‘’It is time to express our indignation to the Myanmar government; this is a scandal,’’ he told IPS correspondent Marwaan Macan-Markar in Bangkok, using the name of the country that the junta chose to replace the name Burma. ‘’By its actions, the Myanmar government is creating the conditions for this crisis to be seen as a threat to regional security.’’

By Friday, the city where Gambari is expected to spend some time, was desolate and empty of civilian life in some sections, such as central Rangoon and the areas near city hall, which were alive to the passions of angry marchers chanting slogans against the junta. Armed soldiers, in small groups, patrolled these areas.

But if that was a mark of achievement for the ‘Tatmadaw,’ the Burmese name for the armed forces, then the presence of an estimated 10,000 protesters in another part of Rangoon told another story. Clearly, not all the streets had been taken back by a force described by a correspondent who slipped into Burma this week as, ‘’Totally expressionless, like machines, with finger on trigger, and treating unarmed civilians like cattle.’’

Public anger at the brutal measures enforced by the junta poured forth in the slogans protesters continued to chant in the streets, in full view of armed troops. ‘’Soldiers who killed monks will be struck down by lightening,’’ went one.

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