Citizens Wait, Worry in Junta's Climate of Fear

Hundreds of people, including monks, remain missing. Dissident groups say as many as 200 people were killed.

One 60-year-old man, who was a bystander during the protests but has not been arrested, said he spoke with a friend who spent five days in a detention center. The man estimated there were 3,000 people in the building, once a technical college in Insein Township, near the notorious Insein Prison. People were put in former lecture halls, hundreds in a room without toilets. Drinking water was scarce. "He said it was like a life in hell for five days," he said.

A Rangoon taxi driver told of a friend detained for 10 days. "He was given one egg to share with eight people, one bottle of water. No one was allowed to sleep. They had to sit, and if they lay down, they were hit."

Foreign journalists have been denied visas to enter the country, which the ruling generals call Myanmar. Those who do get in travel surreptitiously on a tourist visa. And they are watched. A foreigner eating lunch at an otherwise empty Thai restaurant soon found that she had company -- a man sat at a nearby table, ordering nothing and staring at the same page of a newspaper for the entire time it took to eat lunch. As she waited to pay her bill, he left.

The junta uses its newspaper, the New Light of Myanmar, to blame foreign governments and media for inciting the protests, which erupted after the government doubled the price of fuel in August.

But instead of indignation at foreign governments, Burmese interviewed over the past week voiced anger only at the military junta. "All they know is stealing," seethed one taxi driver as he took a passenger on a circuitous route to the airport, slowing in front of the house of Tay Za, the owner of a local airline who is close to Senior Gen. Than Shwe, leader of the junta. The villa had an open garage, with two Ferraris inside, one red and one yellow. "They want money, money, money. And we have nothing," he said.

The driver keeps a notebook hidden under newspapers on his dashboard. In it he writes, in Japanese characters, how the government controls gasoline sales to siphon money for themselves. He wants to smuggle the notebook out of the country so foreign media can report on the system. The government limits official gas sales to two gallons a day. To buy more, drivers must purchase black-market gasoline -- obtained by sellers who pay kickbacks to government-appointed filling station managers -- at nearly double the official rate.

Another driver is even more pointed: "This government will never listen to the U.N. They don't care. We must fight back. One bomb and they [the military] would all run away."

Resistance continues, but for now it is subtle. At Shwedagon Pagoda, beneath a gleaming gold spire decorated with diamonds provided by the military government, a man guided a visitor to one of the many Buddha images, this one covered with strings of fresh flowers and offerings of fruit.

"This is where the people know to pray for the safety of our lady," he said quietly, referring to Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader who has been under house arrest or in prison for 12 of the past 18 years. The road to her home is now barricaded, with passersby blocked from walking or driving on it by rows of barbed wire, sandbags and several soldiers.

At a Rangoon art gallery, a saleswoman pulls out a painting from a back room. Called "Nine Novices," it shows nine young boys, their heads shaved and bodies clothed in the robes of novice monks. They are crawling on top of a statue of a lion, the symbol of the government.

"The artist wanted to paint nine monks, but he was scared," she explained. "So he painted novices. But they're still on the lion."