Junta soldiers kill protesting monks in Burma
Posted by Atilla89 on September 27, 2007
This is getting pretty bad. Hopefully the monks in Burma will be able to have a coup, but looking at the military I doubt it. More from The Australian.
The Burmese junta opened fire on protesters in Rangoon last night, reportedly killing as many as five people, as the military moved to crush the country’s biggest protest campaign in 20 years.
The much-feared crackdown came as the UN Security Council convened this morning an emergency session in New York after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned the junta the world was watching Burma.
Reports from exiled Burmese journalists and activists in Thailand said as many as five people were shot dead and 17 wounded by the security forces.
“Shots were fired by the security forces, first in the air, then at the demonstrators,” French diplomat Emmanuel Mouriez told France’s radio RTL.
“We cannot know if many people were injured but we can be sure that blood was spilled.”
Security forces fired warning shots and tear gas into massive crowds of demonstrators in Burma’s biggest city, while hauling away an estimated 300 defiant Buddhist monks and activists into waiting trucks – the first mass arrests since protests against the military dictatorship erupted last month. Despite the crackdown, tens of thousands of people regrouped in a massive anti-government protest in central Rangoon last night.
The junta has banned all public gatherings of more than five people and imposed a night-time curfew, following eight days of anti-government marches led by monks in Rangoon and other areas of the country.
Detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party said yesterday that the military regime had committed “the greatest wrong in history” by beating the monks.
Witnesses said thousands of onlookers cheered as about 1000 monks shrugged off the presence of soldiers and police and kept marching towards the centre of Rangoon.
