KEY POINTS:
Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Yangon's residents hear their neighbours being taken away.
This is the stuff of harrowing accounts being smuggled out of Myanmar which reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in the uprising.
The accounts describe a hidden campaign even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime's soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching.
The hidden crackdown is as methodical as it is brutal. First the monks were targeted, then the thousands of ordinary Burmese who joined the demonstrations, those who even applauded or watched, or those merely suspected of anti-Government sympathies.
"There were about 400 of us in one room. No toilets, no buckets, no water for washing. No beds, no blankets, no soap. Nothing," said a 24-year-old monk who was held for 10 days at a college in northern Yangon which is now a prison camp for suspected dissidents. Most of the detained monks were eventually freed without charge but suspected ringleaders can expect much harsher treatment. One detained opposition leader has been tortured to death, activist groups said.
It was the russet-robed Buddhist clergy, not political groups, who had formed the backbone of demonstrations during days of euphoric defiance and previously undreamed-of hope that Myanmar's military regime could be brought down by peaceful revolution. That hope has been crushed under the boots of Government soldiers and intelligence agents and replaced by fear.
A young woman, a domestic worker in Yangon, described how one woman bystander who applauded the monks was rounded up. "My friend was taken away for clapping during the demonstrations. She had not marched. She came out of her house as the marchers went by and, for perhaps 30 seconds, smiled and clapped as the monks chanted. Her face was recorded on a military intelligence camera. She was taken and beaten. Now she is so scared she won't even leave her room."
Another resident said: "We all hear screams at night as they [the police] arrive to drag off a neighbour. We are torn between going to help them and hiding behind our doors. We hide behind our doors. We are ashamed. We are frightened."
Intelligence agents are scrutinising photographs and video footage to identify demonstrators and bystanders. They have also arrested the owners of computers which they suspect were used to transmit images and testimonies out of the country. For each story smuggled out, someone has risked arrest.
The scale of the crackdown remains undocumented. The regime has barred journalists and has blocked internet access and phone lines.
At the weekend the Government said it had released more than half of the 2171 people arrested, but exile groups estimate the number of detentions at between 6000 and 10,000.
In Yangon, people say they are more frightened now than when soldiers were shooting on the streets.
"When there were demonstrations and soldiers on the streets, the world was watching," said a professional woman.
"But now the soldiers only come at night. They take anyone they can identify from their videos. People who clapped, who offered water to the monks, who knelt and prayed as they passed. People who happened to watch as they passed by and their faces were caught on film. It is now we are most fearful. It is now we need the world to help us."
- Independent
