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| Southeast Asia |
| Dozens arrested in Myanmar as junta tightens grip |
| 2007-10-05 |
| Security forces combed through Yangon rounding up activists as Myanmar’s regime tightened its grip on power Thursday, while a UN envoy prepared a key report on last week’s bloody crackdown on protesters. Dozens of people were arrested overnight as security forces raided homes near Yangon’s Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s holiest Buddhist shrine and a key rallying point for the mass protests, residents said. Soldiers enforced an overnight curfew and swept into homes to make targeted arrests from a blacklist of campaigners following the largest anti-regime demonstrations in almost 20 years, the residents said. “They have a curfew in place and every night they arrest people,” said Shari Villarosa, US head of mission in the military-ruled country. While a semblance of normality had returned, long-simmering discontent had been “heightened by anger by what has been done against the demonstrators, the atrocities that have been committed against the monks,” she said. One resident, asking not to be named, told AFP: “Many people were arrested during the night, but it is really hard to say exactly how many. But none of the usual vendors around Shwedagon Pagoda can be found.” Some detainees have been released, but the empty streets, where thousands of monks usually collect alms at dawn, are evidence of the scale of the crackdown. Most Yangon monasteries seem empty, leaving neighbours to wonder if the monks have been arrested, injured or worse. |
| Posted by:Fred |