Burma warning Buddhist leaders
Monks may face unnamed action
BANGKOK - As protesters filled the streets of Burma's cities in greater numbers than ever yesterday, swelling the crowds in the country's largest city to an estimated 100,000, the government issued its first warning that it might take action against protesting Buddhist monks.
The minister of religious affairs for the military junta told religious leaders that if they did not move to restrain the monks who are at the heart of the protests, the government would take unspecified action against them.
The warning came as protesters pushed their month-old confrontation with the military government toward an unpredictable and possibly dangerous outcome.
In the main city, Rangoon, the Buddhist monks who have led the protests for the past week were outnumbered by civilians, including prominent political dissidents and well-known cultural figures.
Also yesterday, the White House weighed in with the threat of additional sanctions against the military regime and those who provide it with financial aid, the Associated Press reported. President Bush is expected to announce the sanctions today at the UN General Assembly.
The United States restricts imports and exports and financial transactions with Burma, which the junta renamed Myanmar.
A crowd estimated by the Associated Press to be as large as 100,000 set out in the morning from the gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda and marched unopposed in separate columns through the city.
Other protests were reported in Mandalay, Sittwe, and Bago. Monks and their supporters have marched in other cities as well in recent days.
The government continued to remain silent and mostly out of sight, giving the streets over to the protesters with virtually no uniformed security presence in evidence.
For all the energy and jubilation of the crowds, the country seemed to be holding its breath. As the demonstrations expanded from political dissidents a month ago to Buddhist monks last week to the broad cross-section of the public that filled the streets today, the government's options seemed to be narrowing.
The demonstrations proceeded under the shadow of the last major nationwide convulsion, in 1988, when even larger prodemocracy protests were crushed by the military at the cost of some 3,000 lives.
"We are in uncharted territory," said Mark Canning, the British ambassador to Burma, speaking by telephone from Rangoon after observing the crowds yesterday.
"These demonstrations seem to be steadily picking up momentum," he said. "They are widely spread geographically. They are quite well organized, they are stimulated by genuine economic hardship, and they are being done in a peaceful but very effective fashion."
One possible outcome is that the demonstrations could run out of steam.
But their rapid growth and the pent-up grievances driving them make that seem unlikely. With each day, the size of the crowds seems to attract even more participants.
Another possibility is the opening of some form of compromise or dialogue between the government and its opponents. But that is an option the country's military rulers have never embraced.
Instead, they have jailed their political opponents, held the prodemocracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, and rejected the demands of the country's marginalized ethnic minorities.
And when the challenges against them have seemed threatening, they have used force, as in 1988 or in 2003, when the government unleashed a band of thugs to attack Suu Kyi when her popularity seemed to be getting out of hand.
Along with the heady energy of mass demonstrations, Burma was alive with rumors of an impending military crackdown. Exile groups with contacts inside the country have been reporting possible troop movements and warnings to hospitals to prepare for large numbers of casualties.
But analysts said a number of factors that were not present in 1988 may be constraining the government today.
The first is that the world is watching. Since 1988, Burma has become the focus of international condemnation for its abuses of human and political rights and its treatment of Suu Kyi, who has been held under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years.
The country has become an embarrassment to its nine partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, some of whose meetings have been boycotted by the United States because of the inclusion of Burma. 