Online newspaper Irrawaddy reports:
A resident of Shwegondine, Bahan Township, told The Irrawaddy on Friday that she saw a group of four dogs with pictures of the regime’s top generals around their necks.
Sightings were also reported in four other Rangoon townships—Tharkayta, Dawbon, Hlaing Tharyar and South Okkalapa.
Some sources said the canine protest had started at least a week ago, and was keeping the authorities busy trying to catch the offending dogs. “They seem quite good at avoiding arrest,” laughed one resident.
Associating anybody with a dog is a very serious insult in Burma.
Spray-painters are also at work, daubing trains with the words “Killer Than Shwe” and other slogans.
The image came from Ko Htike, while the link to the Irrawaddy story came from Agam’s Gecko, who writes:
Excellent. A good number of Burmese people seem to have taken on Daw Suu’s teaching regarding freedom from fear.
Global Voices points us to recent photos of the crackdown in Burma, via Rambling Spoon, a Bangkok-based journalist, who writes:
Is it over? Unlikely. By all accounts, the crackdown left a bitter and angry population; a population that knows death is the possible price of protest. These issues will rise again somehow, someday.
GV’s post about the reaction to the Burmese protests among Chinese netizens stirs up considerable comment. GV author Jacky traces the ins and outs of a “cat and mouse game” between Chinese commentators and the domestic censorship system, including a supremely ironic call for “the supporters of authoritarianism and flunkeyism” to join in condemning U.S. President George W. Bush’s statement on Burma. Jacky concludes:
From this cat and mouse game, we can see that the monks’ protest in Myanmar is not only a foreign issue but also an internal issue to the Chinese government.
Not all commentators to this GV post agree with prevalent attempts to link the Burma uprising to China’s human rights reputation, and consequently, the Beijing 2008 Olympics, with some saying that India and the United States are just as influential, and that China shouldn’t have to carry the can. Personally, I was quite surprised that China signed the UN Security Council statement at all, although the foreign ministry in Beijing was considerably more muted in tone when it spoke independently. Burma has rejected the UN statement.
Filed under: 2008_olympics, China, East Asia, Southeast Asia, bloggers, blogging, buddhism, burma, burmese, citizenjournalism, commentary, east_asia, freespeech, governance, human_rights, mandalay, myanmar, rangoon, religion, yangon | Tagged: burma, china_burma, china_humanrights, june_4_1989, monks protest, myanmar, pyinmana, radio_free_asia, rangoon, shan state, yangon
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