Burma concentration camps

Times:

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.

Most people have vanished without trace, many of them the Buddhist monks who formed the backbone of the tens of thousands of people who turned out last week in Rangoon and Mandalay. “We think that at least 30 have been killed, about 1,400 people have been arrested,” Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister said. “This is a brutal regime and we’ve seen it at work over the last few days.”

One international organisation based in Rangoon has made a provisional reckoning of 40 dead, based on reports from hospitals, 1,000 monks arrested and 3,000 secular detainees. The only thing of which one can be sure is that somewhere in the country large numbers of people are being held in an invisible prison camp, without charge, without legal recourse and without the ability to communicate.

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The media has a lot of different estimates of dead and imprisoned participants in the general uprising, but they all appear to be based on someones speculation. We have seen reports of thousands killed and over 6000 prisoners but no verification is available because the bad guys want let anyone in. We will probably have more speculation before we get an accurate count of the regimes latest crimes against its people.

Sylvester Stallone, who is filming a new Rambo movie on the Burma Thai border witnessed some horrific scenes coming out of Burma.