Myanmar turns cameras on
dissidents By Richard Ehrlich
BANGKOK - Myanmar is apparently using
photos sent to websites, television stations and
other media to arrest protesters, while at the
same time praising China's 1989 Tiananmen Square
crackdown which turned foreign news videos into
virtual wanted posters to capture dissidents.
Myanmar security forces have detained over
2,000 people in the wake of last week's popular
unrest and military crackdown. The authorities
claim to have already released over 680 of those
detained, but there are new
reports of continued arrests. "Residents say
military trucks patrol neighborhood streets during
the night with loudspeakers broadcasting warnings:
'We have photographs. We are going to make
arrests'," the Thailand-based, Irrawaddy magazine
and other news organizations reported on
Wednesday.
Myanmar's junta employed
camera-wielding security forces during September's
pro-democracy marches while harassing and
assaulting independent journalists who tried to
cover the unrest. The regime appears to be also
gleaning the faces and identities of protesters
from countless video and still photos shot in
Yangon by journalists, bloggers and local
residents who used cell phones, e-mail and
websites to transmit pictures to the outside world
during more than two weeks of public marches.
Bold, shouting and angry faces of Myanmar
citizen protesters appeared on television screens,
websites and news publications worldwide,
attracting emotional international support and a
seemingly insatiable demand by the outside world
for more and more images. The Internet community,
global media and world leaders gleefully praised
the stunning use of cyberspace as a powerful way
of showing the outside world Myanmar citizens
demanding for democracy in their closed and
repressed country. Now these images are being used
against the protesters.
The Myanmar
authorities' use of photos to hunt people echoes
China's June 1989 crackdown on a student-led mass
protest in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, when
Chinese security forces killed hundreds of people.
China quickly captured and punished several
fugitive protestors, thanks partly to foreign
broadcasters who beamed unedited video news feeds
through Beijing's government-run satellite
transmitters to editors in newsrooms overseas.
For example, televised pictures of a
Chinese man on the American Broadcasting
Corporation (ABC)news network who complained about
China's military killing civilians at Tiananmen
Square, soon appeared on Chinese
government-controlled television broadcasts
alongside warnings that he needed to be caught.
Within days, Xiao Bin, a factory sales
chief from Dalian city, was seized and shown on
Chinese state television saying his ABC interview
was a criminal activity and apologizing in fear.
ABC's staff condemned China for turning their news
footage into incriminating evidence against Xiao
Bin, but it was too late.
Without
explicitly mentioning Tiananmen Square, or China,
the Myanmar regime indicated it wanted to copy the
1989 crackdown because Beijing became rich by
enforcing stability. "A civil commotion in a big
Asian nation in 1989," was the euphemistic phrase
used by the Myanmar government's New Light of
Myanmar newspaper on Tuesday, apparently
indicating Tiananmen Square.
"As the big
Asian nation was able to solve the problem at its
initial stage, to prevent it from spreading, the
nation has now become an economic power. If the
[Chinese] nation failed to solve the problem at
its initial stage, its peace, stability and
progress will not reach the present stage," the
paper said, apparently supportive of the way
Beijing's brutal suppression created enough
stability to attract the Olympic Summer Games next
year.
US president George W Bush,
meanwhile, is a "hypocrite" to complain about
Myanmar's crackdown, the paper said. "About
100,000 people staged a protest in Washington
calling for an end to the Iraq War. Of them, about
200 were arrested" on September 15," the paper
said on Wednesday. "The [Washington] police also
beat those who led the protest," the New Light of
Myanmar said.
Washington's police, some
wearing riot gear, arrested at least 189 people
among the several thousand who marched to the
Capitol in Washington DC, where a handful of
protesters and police were injured, according to
US news reports.
"If American President
Bush accepts that the arrest and beating of his
people who got involved in the protest is a matter
of enforcing the law, why can't he accept that
Myanmar should take such action against saboteurs
who created unrest in the nation with the
intention of harming peace and development - at
the instigation of certain foreign countries - as
a matter of enforcing the law?"
Bush's
wife, meanwhile, trumped Myanmar's editorial
rhetoric when she called for Myanmar troops to
turn traitor against the regime, disobey the
military's chain of command and join the
pro-democracy movement.
"I want to say to
the armed guards and to the soldiers [in Myanmar]:
'Don't fire on your people. Don't fire on your
neighbors. Join this movement'," First Lady Laura
Bush said in a September 26 radio interview
broadcast into Myanmar by the Voice of America
(VOA), which is financed by the US government.
The head of VOA's Burmese language
service, Than Lwin Htun, told a Congressional
Human Rights Caucus in Washington on October 3 his
"personal views" were that the crackdown "reminds
me of my days in 1988, when I was a student
activist in Burma [Myanmar], and the government
was saying only 200 or so so-called 'looters' had
been killed, but my colleagues and I knew for sure
that over 3,000 peaceful demonstrators had died."
Than Lwin Htun said his sources in Yangon
"have already published the names of 138 people
who have perished at the hands of the army last
week". Myanmar's junta has said that only 10
people died in the clashes. After crushing the
1988 insurrection for democracy, the military
regime later changed the country's name to
Myanmar, which the United Nations has recognized,
but the United States has not and still refers to
the country as Burma.
Richard S
Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist from San
Francisco, California. He has reported news from
Asia since 1978 and is co-author of the
non-fiction book of investigative journalism,
Hello My Big Big Honey! Love Letters to Bangkok
Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews. His
website is
www.geocities.com/asia_correspondent.
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