Yangon
More than a week after crushing a peaceful, monk-led rebellion,
Myanmar's junta has continued to arrest and interrogate alleged
participants in the anti-regime revolt, state media acknowledged
Sunday.
On Saturday, authorities rounded up another 78 "abettors" to the
protests, which rocked Yangon Sep 18-25, peaking with 100,000 monks
and laymen taking to the streets of the former capital, said The New
Light of Myanmar, a government mouthpiece.
Of the 78 detainees, six were later released. Of the estimated 2,700
people, including 533 monks, authorities have arrested over the last
10 days about 1,600 have already been released, including some 400
monks, state media claimed.
The numbers cannot be verified because Myanmar's military rulers
have not allowed an independent agency to conduct an investigation
into the atrocities committed last month. The International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been blocked for months from
making prison visits in the country.
The military claims that only 10 people died in the crackdown, but
Myanmar activists claim the total death toll was closer to 200,
citing witness accounts of mass cremations following the mayhem and
a steady flow of corpses from Yangon's notorious Insein prison.
Myanmar's so-called "saffron revolt", named for the saffron robes
worn by Buddhist monks, was crushed Sep 26-27 by Myanmar anti-riot
police and soldiers.
The crackdown has outraged world opinion and strengthened
international pressure on the regime to initiate a dialogue with
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the world's only jailed Nobel
peace laureate.
Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Prize in 1991 for her leadership role in
a courageous anti-military movement, has been under house arrest in
near complete isolation since May 2003 at her Yangon family
compound.
Since her first incarceration in 1989, she has spent nearly 12 of
the last 17 years under house arrest.
In talks on Oct 2 with UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari, Myanmar's
junta head Senior General Than Shwe agreed to personally meet with
Suu Kyi on the preconditions that she drop calls for "confrontation"
with the regime and end her support for Western sanctions, imposed
on the country since 1988 in the aftermath of the military's brutal
crackdown on its own people that left an estimated 3,000 people
dead.
Observers fear the preconditions are a manoeuvre to place blame on
Suu Kyi if the dialogue fails to take place.
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won the 1990
general election by a landslide but ever since has been blocked from
taking power by the military.
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