Word: rangoon
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...Rangoon, one of Southeast Asia's more dilapidated capitals, workmen are busily scrubbing years of grime from the curbstones. Newly painted red-and- white pavement glistens, and gardeners are trimming shrubs in Maha Bandoola Park, next to the Sule Pagoda. All that effort by Burma's seven-week-old military government is part of an official campaign to "Keep Rangoon Pleasant." The cleanup is an attempt to polish the military's tarnished image -- and that has doomed it from the start. "They think we will like them if they clean up the city," says a shop clerk on Merchant Street...
...Sule Pagoda as thousands of people fled the onslaught, screaming when the soldiers lowered their rifles and fired bursts directly at bystanders and protesters. Ambulance drivers were shot at as they went to attend the wounded. "The soldiers will not respect even the doctors," said a medic at Rangoon General Hospital. His crew was kept away from Sule Pagoda for several hours as victims writhed in agony from their wounds...
Reported TIME's A. Lin Neumann: "Inside Rangoon General Hospital, patients lay screaming and dying in the corridors as ambulance drivers rushed through the wards with fresh casualties. Supplies were short, the doctors said, and the stock of some anesthetics was running out. One doctor feared he might soon have to perform surgery with only pain-killers. Drivers said they had picked up a very small percentage of the dead. They told of soldiers in many places taking the corpses for cremation...
...chief targets of the crackdown were the students and monks who have formed the backbone of the protests against military rule for the past several weeks. The army methodically sought out students whose names were on its lists. In the Rangoon suburb of North Okkalapa, soldiers went to the home of two students, made them come out and turn their backs, then shot them on the spot. Presumably similar atrocities took place elsewhere. At least 107 student leaders sought temporary asylum in southern Thailand. Others went underground and hinted at a more violent form of opposition. Said Min Ko Naing...
...Haiti's history offers little encouragement, Burma's experience offers at least a glimmer of hope. Rangoon enjoyed 14 years of democracy between the end of British colonial rule in 1948 and Ne Win's seizure of power in 1962. The key to the metamorphosis from angry revolt to ordered self-rule, explains Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, is the acceptance of restraint. "It's not just a matter of going to the barricades," he says. "You must go from being a mob to being a people. From there, you must develop habits of self-organization." In both...