Sun, Oct 28, 2007 page9

• A monk's tale of protest and escape from Yangon

  • By Thomas Fuller / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  A 24-year-old Buddhist monk, who says he was one of the leaders of the recent protests in Myanmar and escaped last week, painted a picture on Thursday of a bare-bones group of young monks planning and organizing what became a nationwide uprising.

  During a six-hour interview Ashin Kovida said he had been elected the leader of a group of 15 monks and led daily protests in Yangon from Sept. 18 through Sept. 27, the day after the authorities began raiding monasteries.

  He said he was inspired by the popular uprisings in Yugoslavia against the government of Slobodan Milosevic, videos of which were circulated by dissident groups in Myanmar.

  Eight members of his organizing committee are missing and the other six are hiding in Yangon, Myanmar's main city, he said.

  He described escaping to Thailand by presenting a false identification card, dyeing his hair blond and wearing a crucifix.

  Many details of Kovida's account could not be independently confirmed, but his role as an organizer was well known among nongovernmental organizations in Myanmar and Western human rights groups.

  Hlaing Moe Than, 37, a leading organizer of students in the September demonstrations who also fled to Thailand, was shown a picture of Kovida on Thursday and confirmed his identity.

  "He is one of the famous leaders among the Buddhist monks during the protests," he said.

  domestic help

  Kovida said his group received financial help from three well-known Burmese dissidents -- an actor, a comedian and a poet -- but did not receive foreign aid during the protests.

  One of his main preoccupations, he said, was providing food for the thousands of monks who went to Yangon to join the protests. He said he also worried about what he called "fake monks," whom he suspected the military government had planted.

  The spark for the demonstrations came on Sept. 5, when the police fired warning shots at protesting monks in Pakokku in central Myanmar, Kovida said.

  He reached out to students he had met during alms collections and began to plan marches in Yangon.

  "We realized that there was no leadership -- a train must have a locomotive," he said.

  He said he helped supervise the printing of hundreds of pamphlets titled "The Monks Will Come Out Onto the Streets," which were delivered to monasteries.

  On Sept. 18, he led the first cordon of monks through the streets in Yangon, he said.

  On Sept. 19, about 2,000 protesters, including 500 monks, sat on the tiled floor in Sule Pagoda, a focal point of the protests.

  "`To continue demonstrations in a peaceful way we must have leadership,'" Kovida said he told them. "`I call on 10 monks to come join me in the front.'"

  Fifteen monks came forward, he said, to form what they called the Sangga Kosahlal Apahwe, the Monks Representative Group.

  "`In this country at present we are facing hardships,'" he said he told the crowd, after he was elected chairman of the group. "`People are starving. Prices are rising. Under this military government there are so many human rights abuses. I call on people to come to join together with us. We will continue these protests peacefully every day until we win.'"

  He said that for a week, he met with his group of organizers and led marches.

  Then, on Sept. 26, the government began a violent crackdown. Security forces clubbed and tear-gassed protesters and arrested hundreds.

  "The police pulled the monks' robes and beat them," Kovida said. "Nuns were stripped of their sarongs."

  escape

  He gave this account of his escape: He climbed over a brick wall and the next day changed out of his robes and fled to a village about 60km away. There, with the help of relatives and friends, he hid in an abandoned and dark wooden hut for two weeks.

  On Oct. 12, his adoptive mother was detained, he learned, and he fled into the night, barefoot.

  He headed back to Yangon, where he dyed his hair blond, bought a crucifix and, several days later, boarded a bus heading toward the Thai border, Kovida said.

  Using a false identity card, he passed about eight checkpoints, and on Oct. 18 he crossed the Moei River to Thailand in a boat.

  An article the same day in the state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper accused him of hiding "48 yellowish high-explosive TNT cartridges" in his monastery.

  Now facing almost certain detention in Myanmar, Kovida said he would request refugee status in Thailand.

  "I have been in the monkhood since I was so young," he said. "My whole life, I have been studying only Buddhism and peaceful things."

  Additional reporting by Pornnapa Wongakanit
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