Thousands Disappear Into Burma’s Gulag
The Times of London is reporting that thousands of people, monks and civilians alike, are thought to be incarcerated in what they term a "secret gulag" in Burma. It isn't all that secret, however. The Times knows exactly where it is:
With its rusty barbed wire fence, dense tropical foliage and acreage of decaying buildings, the former Government Technology Institute in Rangoon would be a spooky place at the best of times. In the past week, however, if reports circulating in Rangoon are correct, it has been transformed from an abandoned ruin to a place of mass suffering and repression.
According to Western diplomats and at least one Burmese government official, the technical institute has become a temporary concentration camp for 1,700 of the victims of last week’s brutal suppression of the democracy uprising. It provides a partial answer to one of the lingering questions about the Burmese junta’s crackdown: where are the monks, democracy activists and journalists who have been rounded up and spirited away over the past six weeks?
Despite the international attention given to the quashing of the anti-Government marches, the crackdown remains undocumented. Apart from admitting that 13 people have died, a figure regarded by most observers as an underestimate, the authorities have given no details of the numbers of those arrested and detained.
Thousands of people have simply disappeared since the crackdown began. There has been no word as to whether those people are dead or imprisoned. There are no neutral observers in place, either. The International Committee of the Red Cross refused to continue prison visits last year after the junta refused to allow them in without government thugs (they were pleased to call them "nominees") accompanying the ICRC.
World news | Gaius Tuesday, 2 October , 2007
By Bleepless, Tuesday, 2 October , 2007 @ 7:27 pm
One interesting thing about that part of the world: around a core of fulltime, lifetime monks is a large number of pious short-termers from all over. Spending a couple of years as a Buddhist monk is quite widespread in Burma. That means that the regime’s mass murders have a greater effect than if they were limited to those who permanently repudiated the world. These people expected to get their kids back. That they did not bodes ill for the ruling vermin — I hope!