Myanmar Monks Link Cause to Democracy Icon

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Hundreds of demonstrating Buddhist monks marched past barricades to the home of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, raising pressure on the junta by symbolically uniting their growing protest movement with the icon of Myanmar’s long struggle for democracy.

The two strands of the escalating opposition to Myanmar’s military government came together on a tree-lined Yangon street after police unexpectedly let more than 500 monks and other protesters through a roadblock.

Suu Kyi has been seen only by a handful of guards, servants and her doctors for more than four years.

Monks have been marching for the past five days in Myanmar’s biggest city and around the country as a month of protests against economic problems under the junta have ballooned into the biggest grass-roots challenge to its rule in two decades.

By linking their cause to Suu Kyi’s activism, which has seen her detained for about 12 of the last 18 years, the monks increase the pressure on the junta to decide whether to crack down or to compromise with the demonstrators.

The government has been handling the well-respected monks’ disciplined but defiant protests gingerly, aware that forcibly breaking them up in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar would likely cause public outrage.

“The key is the monks and Aung San Suu Kyi have one thing in common: peaceful protest,” said Larry Jagan, a Bangkok-based journalist specializing in Myanmar. “They want to see change through peaceful means. What we’re seeing is a coming together of the main political force in the country and the main religious leaders.”

The monks stopped briefly in front of Suu Kyi’s house and said some prayers before leaving at the other end of the street, said witnesses, who asked not to be named for fear of being harassed by the authorities.

The part of University Avenue where Suu Kyi’s house is located has been closed to traffic since Sept. 17. After the monks passed, the road was closed again.

“Today is extraordinary. We walked past lay disciple Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s house today. We are pleased and glad to see her looking fit and well,” a 45-year old monk told about 200 people at Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city. “Daw” is an honorific used in referring to older women.

“She came out to the gate and paid obeisance to us and later waved at the crowd when we left,” said the monk, who did not give his name.

Photos posted on the Web site of Mizzima News, run by Myanmar exile journalists in India, shows a crowd gathered outside the gate of Suu Kyi’s home, with uniformed security men standing immediately in front of it. Suu Kyi cannot be distinguished, though reports posted on Mizzima and other Myanmar overseas news sites said she was wearing yellow and broke into tears at one point.

Jagan said the current protests could mean Myanmar is on the verge of change.

“The fact that the monks are coming out is going to give people confidence. We’re going to see the marches escalating,” he said.

He said he expected that by the middle of next week students and others would join the marches and “the numbers are going to be astronomical. It’s clear that we’ve got to the tipping point, that this is the beginning of the end” for the military government.

Suu Kyi, 62, has been under detention continuously since May 2003, when a convoy carrying her on a political trip through northern Myanmar was ambushed by pro-junta thugs. She is the leader of the National League for Democracy party, which won a 1990 general election but was not allowed to take power by the military.

The latest protest movement began Aug. 19 after the government raised fuel prices, but has its basis in long pent-up dissatisfaction with the repressive military regime. Using arrests and intimidation, the government had managed to keep demonstrations limited in size and impact — but they gained new life when the monks joined.

In the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, a crowd of 10,000 people, including at least 4,000 Buddhist monks, marched Saturday in one of the largest demonstrations since the 1988 democracy uprising, witnesses said.

At the same time, about 1,000 monks– led by one holding his begging bowl upturned as a sign of protest — marched in Yangon starting from the Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s most revered shrine and a historic center for protest movements.

In the Myanmar language, the word for boycott comes from the words for holding the bowl inverted.

On Friday, about 1,500 barefoot Buddhist monks marched more than 10 miles through Yangon’s flooded streets, sometimes in knee-deep water, in a raging tropical downpour. More than 1,000 sympathizers marched with them.

A monks’ organization for the first time urged the public to join in protesting “evil military despotism” in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

“In order to banish the common enemy evil regime from Burmese soil forever, united masses of people need to join hands with the united clergy forces,” the All Burma Monks Alliance said in a statement received Saturday by The Associated Press.

Little is known of the group or its membership, but its communiques have spread widely by word of mouth and through opposition media in exile.

(c) 2007 Deseret News (Salt Lake City). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.