Inside Myanmar's violent crackdown

"We will fight until we have achieved democracy," representatives of the All Burma Monks Alliance, an organization established in September, announced. Despite their initial defeat, the Buddhist monks remain resolute.

This week, however, there were no signs of further protests in Yangon. Thousands of heavily armed soldiers patrolled the streets, stopping young men on foot and in cars, searching for cameras that could be used to get photographs and footage to the international media. Barbed wire barricades blocked off Shwedagon Pagoda, with soldiers stationed at the four entrances.

Witnesses in Mandalay told the Associated Press that security forces had arrested dozens of students who had staged a street protest on Sunday. The Democratic Voice of Burma, a Norway-based opposition news organization, estimated that 138 had been killed in the violence and around 6,000 detained.

Burma is a deeply Buddhist country where more than 600,000 monks and tens of thousands of nuns live in monasteries and temples. Every morning they walk from house to house, barefoot and carrying empty rice bowls, begging for alms.

The regime's thugs made their biggest mistake at the beginning of the protests, on Sept. 5. In an effort to prevent the protests from spreading, they began beating a group of demonstrating monks in the central Burmese city of Pakokku. Shots were fired, and the police arrested the monks, tore off their robes and threw them in jail.

The All Burma Monks Alliance, a previously unknown group, made its voice heard only a few days later, demanding an apology from the police and the release of their fellow monks. What began as a small protest soon spread like wildfire.

Besides the country's 400,000-strong military, the clergy is the only well-organized force in the country. At first tens of thousands of monks took to the streets in Mandalay, chanting Buddhist sutras and carrying statues of the Buddha and religious pennants. The demonstrations soon shut down the city of Sittwe in western Burma and later the surrounding Rakhine state.

By the time the protests reached Yangon, the Saffron Revolution had turned into a massive protest against Burma's grim and repressive military junta. By this stage, the monks had expanded on their initial demands of reversing hikes in fuel prices and releasing political prisoners -- they began calling for a national dialogue with the opposition pro-democracy movement.

Local residents who lined the monks' protest routes are accustomed to seeing the clergy play a role in shaping Burmese politics. In the days of the monarchy, in the 19th century, they performed a mediating function between the government and the people, taking up positions on both sides. They would typically defend the king when he reached decisions they saw as necessary but unpopular, such as tax increases, but they would obstruct him if they felt that he was abusing his power. Buddhist monks have consistently been a powerful force in the Burmese state.

But the generals refused to give in. On the day before the bloodbaths began, Religious Affairs Minister Thura Myint Maung knelt before the monks' leaders and lowered his head to the ground, a gesture of respect for the clergy. But then he declared war on the monks, making it clear that the regime would show no mercy.

Ironically, the monks were not the ones who had begun the protests. Dissidents from an underground group known as the 88 Generation Students, led by men like Ko Ko Gyi, 45, and Min Ko Naing, 44, were behind the initial demonstrations.

As students they led mass protests in 1988 against the military regime, which, with its "Burmese Way to Socialism," had driven the Southeast Asian country into international isolation and economic chaos since 1962. The generals quashed protest marches on Sept. 18, 1988, in a massacre that claimed at least 3,000 lives, then robbed the opposition leader and later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) of their election victory. The student leaders were thrown into prison. "It was 16 years of hell," Gyi said last summer in Yangon. And yet the military never managed to break the two men's will.

After being released from prison last year, the dissidents established the 88 Generation Students as an informal network and began organizing events such as peaceful prayer meetings in Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda and readings and gatherings in other cities.

When the junta raised gasoline prices by 100 percent without warning on Aug. 15, it became a rallying cry for the opposition. Four days later, veterans of the 1988 student protests took to the streets once again in various cities and towns throughout the country, often alone or in groups of only two or three people. Most were arrested immediately. But the Burmese people soon followed suit.

"It was the straw that broke the camel's back," says Bertil Lintner, a Swedish expert on Asia and Burma. "The people simply have nothing left to lose. They are hungry, and they have been bled dry." What makes their hatred of the regime even stronger is constant talk of the junta living in the lap of luxury, squandering public revenue on weapons and senseless prestige projects.

The monks and the pro-democracy activists had long coordinated their activities behind the scenes. The monks would stage the protests while the people would form human chains.

By Saturday, Sept. 15, the military leaders must have realized how serious the situation had become for them. Monks were marching along University Avenue in Yangon. There, in a house with a view of Inya Lake, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, 62, has been under house arrest for more than 11 years.

Suu Kyi had returned to Burma from abroad in 1988, and as the daughter of national hero Aung San, she was soon at the head of the protest movement. In 1990, Suu Kyi led the National League for Democracy in free elections, winning more than 80 percent of the vote. But the junta, which had ordered the massacre in the streets of Yangon in 1988, declared the results invalid.

As the demonstrators marched toward Suu Kyi's house two weeks ago, it set off a panic in the new jungle capital, Naypyidaw. Would the monks liberate the Nobel Prize winner? On Sunday the junta's leader, Than Shwe, ordered his family to pack their bags, and early in the week they took a charter flight to Bangkok. That was when the regime began the "extreme action" it had earlier threatened.

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