Word: downtowner
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...along the pavements, keeping low, chased by the sound of gunfire and more explosions. The nearest escape route is 33rd Street, narrow like so many in the downtown area, and it is a seething bottleneck of people - sitting ducks - so I run on and dart up 34th Street. Are they firing over our heads? Not all the time. Not far from where I had been standing lies the body of Japanese cameraman Kenji Nagai, shot dead by a soldier at point-blank range...
...Riot police are marching north up Sule Pagoda Road, banging their truncheons against their shields. An even more menacing sight is behind: hundreds of troops, marching in formation, sealing off downtown Rangoon. Between the riot police and the troops are trucks with loudspeakers making announcements to clear the streets. For more than a week - for most of their lifetimes - Burmese have called peacefully for dialogue. This is the closest the junta gets to it: screaming at its people through loudspeakers from a truck surrounded by men with guns...
Still, the monks march. The demonstrations are so large that downtown Rangoon has a carnival atmosphere. Students have now joined the march, waving red flags bearing their emblem, the fighting peacock. At the rear of the column is a group of shaven-headed Buddhist nuns in their bubble-gum-pink robes...
...should get closer," says the young woman in the crowd behind me. "If foreigners are here, they won't shoot." It's about 1 p.m. on Sept. 27, and I am wedged among thousands of pro-democracy protesters near the gold-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 woman behind me is hoping that they won't want to create an international incident by firing on a scruffy-looking Brit, and that my presence will protect the protesters. She will soon...
They pour out of the Shwedagon, an immense golden pagoda that is Burma's most revered Buddhist monument, two miles north of downtown Rangoon. The monks form an unbroken, mile-long column--barefoot, chanting their haunting mantras, clutching pictures of the Buddha, their robes drenched with the late-monsoon rains. They walk briskly, stopping briefly to pray when they reach Sule Pagoda. Then they're off again, coursing through the city streets in a solid stream of red and orange, like blood vessels giving life to an oxygen-starved body. Their effect on Rangoon's residents is electrifying. At first...