Word: buddhists
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...democracy protesters near the golden-domed Sule Pagoda in downtown Rangoon. Facing us are hundreds of soldiers and riot police, who look on edge as they finger their assault rifles. The protesters, mostly ordinary Burmese clad in sarongs and sandals, appear undaunted, even jubilant. Defiantly, they chant a Buddhist mantra whose melody will haunt me for days...
...Buddhist monks first sang this mantra. For a week now, they had been marching, calling peacefully for change in a country ruled for almost half a century by a corrupt and barbaric junta. Burma's monkhood and military are roughly the same size - both have between 300,000 and 400,000 men - but the similarities end there. With the monks preaching tolerance and peace, and the military demanding obedience at gunpoint, these protests pitted Burma's most beloved institution against its most reviled...
...raids enrage the people. The lives of Burmese Buddhists are intertwined with the lives of the monks. Monks preside over marriages, chant over the dead; they shelter orphans, care for the sick; and they rely upon the people for food, medicine, clothes and shelter. "A devout Buddhist will not even step on the shadow of a monk," says a Rangoon resident. "When a monk approaches, we move aside to let him pass." And so, with soldiers and police still inside Ngwe Kyar Yan, hundreds of local people surround it. "We had no weapons and knew we couldn't compete with...
Later in the rally, a group of Buddhist monks draped in religious saffron robes began chanting to show solidarity with the Burmese people...
...suppressed. Khin Nyunt, the former head of military intelligence who was once hailed as a potential reformer for suggesting dialogue with long-imprisoned democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, now languishes under house arrest himself. Despite scattered reports of soldiers refusing to shoot against Buddhist monk-led demonstrators last week, most of the wide-eyed recruits obeyed orders. "Burma's military is a breed apart, and its biggest accomplishment is the sense of loyalty that it has bred," says Josef Silverstein, a Burma expert and professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "Few forces...