Raiding monasteries in Burma

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This headline from Reuters tells you a great deal about the brutality of Burma's totalitarian regime:

Myanmar junta raids monasteries

Here's the latest:

[Burma]'s generals launched pre-dawn raids on activist monasteries on Thursday, ignoring increasingly desperate international calls for restraint in their crackdown on the biggest anti-junta protests in 20 years.

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Some witnesses said as many as 100,000 people packed downtown Yangon, the former Burma's main city, on Wednesday and the streets echoed with a deafening roar of anger at the use of violence against the maroon-robed monks.

But the raids suggested the generals, who have lived with Western sanctions for years and frustrate their co-members of a Southeast Asian grouping with their refusals to heed calls for change, were not listening to the diplomatic clamor.

They dispatched military trucks to two monasteries in Yangon and arrested up to 200 of the monks accused of coordinating the demonstrations, witnesses said. Other sources said they also raided monasteries in the northeast.

We will continue to monitor this developing story, but, for now, see my longer post on the situation in Burma from earlier this evening.