Burma Dialogue

Hundreds of monks marched to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's home giving her the opportunity to step out of confines and greet to electrified crowd. She spoke for about 15 minutes and is reported to have, at one point, broke out in tears.

Over the last four days, the peaceful marches by thousands of monks have been gaining more and more support, from other monks as well as the public.

An alms boycott, "pata nikkujjana kamma" - withholding recognition from members of the military has even gained the support from the wife of Than Shwe!

There has long been the traditional belief that monks do not get involved in politics. But the debate of action vs. inaction is as old as Buddhism itself. This clash of ideas continues as early on the current wave of peaceful protest, more conservative monks pleaded for the others not to march. But instead their numbers continue to increase.

This article (pdf), The Idea of Freedom in Burma and Thought of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, wonderfully illustrates how there is no condriction between Buddhism and peaceful protest in the fight for freedom and democracy.

This was all done with prefect timing. The junta threaten, and prepared to stop the marches before they began, even establishing a wanted list - with face photo's - of those known to be willing to march despite the threat of years of dark prisons.

But for now, the advantage seems to be with the people. The monks are too respected for an outright penetration of the protest by the military and would likely lead to a more grand uprising. In 1996 the junta was doing everything they could think of to try to buy their support after student demonstrations which led to the junta shutting down universities.

This is the largest uprising since 8-8-88. Email chatter indicated something was set to happen, as Sept 18 marked the 19th anniversary of the SLORC coup. Reports of marches across Burma the last week have varied from a few hundred to a few thousand, and a few times I read in numbers up to 10,000. But those kind of numbers have been difficult to confirm from others reports.