Burmese Whispers, By Emma Larkin:

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Following are some headlines from the English-language New Light of Myanmar, a newspaper that functions as the regime’s mouthpiece (the headlines describe September’s peaceful protests after which thousands of people were arrested and hundreds are feared dead at the hands of government soldiers):

"Internal, External Destructionists Applying Various Means to Cause Unrest, Instability"

"People and Security Forces Grapple with Violent Protestors who Attack them with Weapons in Yangon"

"11 Violent Protestors Arrested Together with their Weapons"

"Inquiry Under Way to Expose Manipulators from Behind the Scenes"

The “inquiry” is in fact a manhunt on a massive scale. Each night, when the streets fell silent after the military-imposed curfew, I sat at the window of my hotel room and watched police cars and army trucks drive past on their way to track down and arrest anyone who had been involved in the protests.

In an environment where reality is malleable and the local media is distorted by propaganda and censorship, rumours offer an alternative source of information. Among the rumours I heard while I was in Burma are the following:

Some 300 monks escaped to the Thai border and they are now armed with weapons and marching towards Rangoon to fight back against the junta...

The regime’s soldiers wept after they killed monks on the streets, and hundreds were imprisoned for refusing to follow orders and shoot their own clergy...

Monasteries in Mandalay are still holding out against the military, refusing to let soldiers inside their walls and rejecting any food offered by the army...

True or false? It’s hard to say. Perhaps some of these tales were true once but have been exaggerated or falsified as they were passed from person to person, twisted by the heady atmosphere into a representation of people’s collective hopes. I once suggested to a Burmese friend that this process was like the game of Chinese whispers. No, he corrected me: Burmese whispers.

Getting hard facts and figures out of Burma at the moment is almost impossible. One Burmese journalist I know was fed up of foreign reporters calling him with the same questions: How many monks have been killed? How many detained? How many beaten? Accurate figures are hard to come by while the regime’s soldiers guard monasteries and their spies work overtime to monitor the population and prevent information from being sent out of the country. While musing over this current obsession with numbers, my journalist friend explained how Burmese people have so much respect for the monastic order that they will refrain even from stepping into the shadow cast by a monk’s body. It doesn’t matter whether the figure is ten or a hundred monks, he concluded, to kill even a single monk is already the ultimate crime.

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