Behind the Comic: Any More Shootings Over in Burma…

Only Now, The Full Horror of Burmese Junta’s Repression of Monks Emerges

Published on Thursday, October 11, 2007 by The Independent/UK

by Rosalind Russell

Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatized to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon’s residents hear their neighbors being taken away.

Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month’s pro-democracy uprising.

The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime’s soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching.

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