David's World

Things are heating up and changing fast.

Yesterday, I hope you've heard, soldiers + police beat and shot some people to death. Details are still murky, despite what the international media is reporting, and I'm not sure four is an accurate number. They say those deaths happened at the Shwedagon temple, which is about 15 minutes drive out of downtown. The other main focus point for protesters has been the Sule temple, which is downtown, a couple of blocks from my work and down the road from a friend's apartment.

I was chatting with my boss yesterday at about 1:30pm when he said, "They just can't go shooting people this time, it's not 1988." Then there was a crackle of gunfire and then a few more bursts. I ran outside just as The Myanmar Times was pulling down its steel doors over the main entrance. I headed down to Sule. The streets were pandemonium. People had raced into the closest shop they could when the shooting started and were reemerging onto the street as all the stores closed. Down at Sule the main roads around the temple had been closed by riot police with batons and shields lined up across the street in a one-block radius. But all around them on the other side of the intersections were thousands of people. It was significantly different from previous days as there was only about one monk per thousand people there.

A group of guys told me three people had been shot there - one monk, maybe dead; one man who was shot in the side; and one woman who had been shot through the cheek and was definitely dead. I asked them to show me where this happened and they said it was by a traffic light on the northwest corner of the Sule Pagoda Road- Anawratha Road intersection. They said there was blood on the ground, but I couldn't find any so I was sceptical. People were clapping and chanting things like "Aung San (the deceased independence leader and father of Aung San Suu Kyi) wouldn't let this happen" and "This is our country". Smallish groups of monks were also marching towards Sule from different parts of town, but I headed back to the office after an hour or two.

There's also a curfew in place. It was supposed to be from 9pm to 5am, but at about 5:45pm yesterday they changed it from 6pm to 6am. It is so tough for working people who have to spend about an hour on buses each day to get to and from work (sucks for my plans to see some World Cup rugby matches too). It was really strange watching the city from our balcony at about 9 last night -- I didn't see a single car or person on the streets downtown for about the 15 minutes I was out there.