BURMA:Buddhist monks occupy a special place in Burmese society, Rosita Bolandrecalls from an illuminating visit to the country
"A time comes round for everything and our time will come. The people's time." Four years ago, when I spent a month travelling around Burma, a farmer I talked to in the small town of Hsipaw said this to me with conviction. We had been walking through the rice fields - in Burma, the wisest place to conduct conversations about the junta are outdoors - and he had told me of a visit he had from the military that year.
The Shan state, in the hot, dry northeast of the country, where Hsipaw is located, gets so little rain it can only sustain one rice crop a year. The reason why this farmer and every other farmer in the region had been recently visited by armed members of the junta had been to receive instructions to plant a second rice crop. All spare seed was to be used to plant this second crop, which, as both the farmers and the military knew, would die mid-cycle since there was not enough water.
With no surplus seed for the following year, he explained, it would then have to be bought at great expense from China. In addition, the much-needed vegetable crop, which should have been planted in place of the second, doomed crop of rice, would now not be grown at all. Needless agrarian disaster. Why?
"Because the government does not like it when people have enough to eat," he explained grimly. "They like to keep us under control."
All this week, while watching news of the monks' marches in Rangoon, Mandalay, and elsewhere, I have been remembering that conversation and the many others I had with the Burmese people during that unforgettable month. As the numbers marching increased daily - 100,000-strong demonstrations, with the monks behind the fragile protection of a civilian human chain - so too did the conflicting emotions of dread and hope I have felt all week.
I recognise those temples in Rangoon, the famous Shwedagon and Sule payas, where the monks have been assembling before their marches. When I visited them, I also saw the huge hand-painted signs that dominate every street in Rangoon and Mandalay, lest its citizens forget who rules the country. They read: "Oppose all foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the state" and "Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy".
It was inevitable that the people of Burma would once more attempt to rise up against the junta that has controlled their lives since 1962. It was also inevitable the protests would be led by Burma's 500,000-strong population of monks. In a country where the ordinary people have no power, the community of monks still possesses nationwide influence in ungovernable and subtle ways. You can take ownership of the way people are forced to live their lives, but you cannot truly take ownership of their faith, beliefs and minds.
The vast majority of the Burmese people are Buddhist. Its monastic community is revered, and stitched into the consciousness of everyone who lives there. Every Burmese male is expected to take up temporary residence in a monastery twice in his life: once as a novice monk between the ages of 10 and 20, and again at a later stage in life. Thus there is both a fixed community of monks and an ever-shifting one, the latter monks moving between the monastic and lay communities.
Everything possessed by a monk must have been offered by the lay community. The land on which their monastery is built, the materials for the building, and the distinctive maroon-coloured robes all come from the wider community. And, perhaps most importantly, everything they eat is also given by the lay community.
Every morning at dawn, the youngest members of the monastery, usually the 10-year-old boys, go out in single file into the nearest village, town or city in their bare feet, carrying the traditional black lacquer alms bowls.
The lead boy in the line bangs a gong to let people know they are passing. This is the signal for people to emerge from their houses and place food in the bowls. The monks cannot stop and wait, so both parties must be swift during this daily ritual. At every guesthouse I stayed in, the owners ensured each morning that the monks did not pass their gates without adding to their bowls. Usually, one kind of food is gathered in each bowl - rice, bananas, curry, noodles and lentils. The only food the monastic community will eat is what has been collected in this way each morning, and all food must be eaten by noon. There is no more visceral way for one community to support the other.
The majority of the junta are also Buddhists, and they also give food as alms. This week, in some areas, the monks refused to accept food from members of the military. And, as they marched, some monks turned their alms bowls upside-down, in an unprecedented and potent symbol of protest against the regime.
In marching, the monks are representing the wider Burmese community. Ordinary people, fully recognising the risk the monks are taking, have come out in their tens of thousands over the last few days, to stand united alongside them and demand change. The last time the junta were so widely and publicly challenged, in 1998, in a time before mass media and the internet could inform rapidly the wider world, 3,000 people were killed.
The world is now watching Burma. Something has to give, in this brave and uneasy demonstration of defiance. And something will give. What it will be, and whether "the people's time" has really come, we don't yet know.