"You are no longer monks," Myanmar prisoners told
Thu 11 Oct 2007, 10:36 GMT
By Aung Hla Tun
YANGON (Reuters) - Hundreds of Buddhist monks rounded up by Myanmar's junta were beaten and kept in animal-like conditions without toilets or drinking water during days of interrogation, one of those freed said on Thursday.
"At the beginning it was very, very bad," one recently released monk told Reuters, requesting anonymity because of the threat of repercussions against those who speak out against the regime, the latest face of 45 years of unbroken military rule.
Caged for more than a week at a former Government Technical Institute compound in north Yangon, the monks -- revered figures in the devoutly Buddhist nation -- were stripped of their maroon monastic robes and treated like common criminals.
"When one of us used a pronoun referring to himself as a monk, he was slapped," the monk said. "Then an interrogator said: 'You are no longer a monk. You are just an ordinary man with a shaven head.'"
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