The Return of Burma’s Monks
The Return of Burma’s Monks
By A TIME CORRESPONDENT IN BURMA Sun May 18
Rangoon travel agent Chin Chin used to take tourists to a nearby Irrawaddy delta town famous for its pottery. But the vast waterworld of rivers and rice fields that stretched beyond it was a foreign land to her until Cyclone Nargis and its horrific aftermath. On Thursday, Chin Chin and her friends bought rice and water, loaded it on a truck, and drove deep into the delta. She was shocked by what she saw: roads lined with hundreds of cold and hungry villagers, disregarded by their own government, who had walked for an hour from their broken villages to beg from passing motorists.
“They were mostly housewives,” recalls Chin Chin, who goes by the nickname. “They told me, ‘Rice is a must, so it’s worth standing in the rain for three or four hours to get some.’ They didn’t even have a change of clothes.” Fighting back her tears, Chin Chin gave out rice and listened to stories of families torn apart and villages destroyed. “It was piteous,” she says. “I really sympathized with them. We didn’t see any aid from government or foreign groups.”
Chin Chin belongs to a burgeoning homegrown relief effort which is capturing Burmese from all walks of life. Students and shopkeepers, medics and models – thousands of people have now donated money, food or services to Nargis victims. Hundreds like Chin Chin are delivering aid themselves, while privately run local charities are reorienting their operations around cyclone relief.
While they continue to make it difficult for foreigners to offer aid, Burma’s generals welcome the help of their own people – at least officially. “Myanmar people’s generosity is amazing,” marvels a recent article in The New Light of Myanmar, a state-run newspaper.* Privately, however, they must be getting nervous. Ordinary Burmese are horrified by the suffering of their compatriots and angry at the junta’s inadequate attempts to alleviate it. Their humanitarian efforts could well spark a political one, especially as it also involves Buddhist monks, who last September led the biggest anti-government protests Burma had seen for nearly 20 years.
Private donors have faced some government restrictions. Those who arrive in the towns have been asked to hand over their relief supplies to local authorities for distribution. Instead, many are reportedly storing the goods with sympathetic locals and secretly distributing them by themselves. The junta doesn’t want foreigners distributing aid in the delta, but neither does it feel comfortable with Burmese distributing it. “The government is scared that relief workers will get involved in politics,” says a co-founder of one Burmese relief group.
Some are involved already. Celebrated actor Kyaw Thu, who was jailed for a month for joining last September’s demonstrations, runs the Free Funeral Services Society, a private charity offering free cremations for the poor. It is now operating its own relief effort, with volunteers at its Rangoon headquarters loading up delta-bound trucks with donated goods.
Another anti-junta stalwart is comedian Zaganar (the name means “Tweezers”), also briefly jailed for his role in last year’s protests. Zaganar and his celebrity friends have bought food and medical supplies for Nargis victims and are using their names to raise more funds. Both the disaster and the grassroots response to it are unprecedented in Burma. “I think there will be political consequences,” he says. “People are very angry with the government.”
The monks are also on the move again. Buddhist temples and monasteries have always played a central role in helping the needy in Burma (as, in this religiously and ethnically diverse country, have churches, mosques and Hindu temples). After the cyclone, monks led small-scale relief efforts into the delta, the distinctive multicolored flags of their faith fluttering from cars and small trucks. Monks from well-known monasteries in Mandalay and elsewhere in Burma are either in the delta or heading there, while in Pakkoku – the Irrawaddy town near Mandalay where last year’s protests originated – their brethren are reportedly soliciting donations for cyclone victims. Shwe Pyi Hein Monastery, which already runs a free clinic in Rangoon, has dispatched five volunteer doctors to the disaster area, who are treating more than 100 people every day.
Despite the participation of thousands of Burmese, the impact of this homegrown relief effort will always limited, admits Zaganar. “We deliver our supplies by road because we cannot afford a boat,” he says. “But most victims live close to the water. We cannot get through to them.” He says Burma desperately needs more boats and helicopters from abroad. Not even the nation’s richest private donors – who include junta cronies like tycoon Tay Za, who was put on a U.S. sanctions list last year – have the means or expertise to meet even a fraction of the needs in far-flung delta areas.
*The junta that rules the country unilaterally decreed changes in place names, including Myanmar for Burma and Yangon for the former capital Rangoon. The U.S. State Department has not recognized these changes. TIME has chosen to retain the name Burma. – Time.com
Where Are Burma’s Monks?
By KEVIN DOYLE Fri Oct 12
For much of late September, the road to the eastern gateway of Rangoon’s revered Shwedagon pagoda was a sea of maroon and saffron robes, as hundreds of Buddhist monks gathered to march in protest against Burma’s military government.
Now, two weeks after the junta brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy demonstrations, the small monasteries that line both sides of the road are mostly locked and empty, while wooden barricades and bales of rusted barbed wire that police used to seal off Shwedagon are stacked on the pavement. Police and soldiers armed with automatic weapons sit on stools outside the mostly silent monasteries. More are stationed at the entrance of the hilltop temple, the spiritual center of Burmese Buddhism. As many as a thousand monks lived and studied at these small monasteries in the shadow of Shwedagon. But troops now far outnumber the handful of monks that are still seen at Shwedagon and the downtown Sule pagoda, another focal point of the pro-democracy protests.
When the military and police moved to crush the demonstrators, they first went after the monks. Under cover of darkness, say several sources who did not want their names used, doors of monasteries were kicked in and the monks around Shwedagon, including some nuns, were bundled onto trucks and taken away. When asked where the monks had gone, one 30-year-old man who was at Shwedagon in the early days of the protests puts his wrists together in the sign of locked handcuffs. According to Burma’s state-run paper, The New Light of Myanmar, raids on 18 monasteries netted the authorities some 513 monks, one novice, 167 men and 30 women. The monks were summarily defrocked and interrogated and those found to be innocent were re-ordained and sent back to their monasteries. While the paper said that only 118 monks and laymen were still in custody, Rangoon’s pagodas remain empty and quiet; many say the figures are much higher than the state has reported. One Rangoon resident told me that the remaining prisoners will probably be released once the situation calms down, which he believed would be at least a couple of months.
Many who eluded the authorities have fled the city for the relative safety of their home villages, where they remain, still fearful of arrest for their roles in the protests. One man who helped shelter a young monk who had suffered a deep gash on the head while escaping from a monastery raid told me the monk had later fled for the provinces. He believes the attack on the clergy of this devoted Buddhist nation and the imprisonment of monks will come back to haunt the junta. “We believe that if you do good, you receive good,” he says. “If you do bad things you receive bad things. This will be the same for the military.”
To head off such an outcome, the generals are waging a propaganda war to win back Burmese hearts and minds. Burma’s state-run television broadcast footage over the weekend of military officers and their wives presenting gifts of rice and cash to an assembly of forlorn-looking, elderly Buddhist patriarchs in Rangoon. On Sunday, The New Light of Myanmar assured readers that the military was only targeting “bogus” monks and demonstration leaders with its purges. “Although authorities and security members pay respects to the real monks, they had to take action against those bogus monks trying to tarnish the image of the Sasana [religion],” the paper announced.
But many, even some members of Burma’s own oppressive security forces, remain unconvinced. On Monday evening, a 26-year-old member of the plainclothes security apparatus knelt to pay a final homage to the Buddha at Shwedagon before fleeing for the Thai border. The officer had taken part in the nighttime roundup of monks, and it still weighed heavily on his conscience. “I have had enough. I have to leave,” he said as he rose from his knees and started his journey to the border. Still, the nightly roundup of suspects continues under the darkness of a 10 p.m. curfew. One source with friends in the security forces says police are still trying to put names to faces on video footage of those who took part in the demonstrations. Police apparently carried out a nighttime arrest on Monday night near the guesthouse where I stayed, according to the manager, who whispered that to me after watching a story about Burma on the BBC the following morning.
As I traveled to the airport on Tuesday I noticed two elderly Buddhist nuns accepting alms at a large house on the outskirts of the city, the first adult clergy members I had seen doing this all week. But my line of sight was momentarily blocked by an image that better sums up a week in Rangoon in the aftermath of the pro-democracy protests. A fast-moving police wagon passed the two nuns; the arms of the detainees inside protruded through gaps in two iron grills along the vehicle’s side.
For just a moment I could see the frightened faces of the prisoners inside: Dozens of young teenagers, boys and girls wearing brightly-colored T-shirts, packed cheek-to-cheek, their outstretched arms and hands grasping at the world passing by outside.
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