First came the tear gas. The crowd began running — and then came the bullets.
"I didn't know where to run," says Vida, a 48-year-old monk. "I was running for my life."
For a quarter of an hour, as he hid in a side street, he listened to the terrifying sound of gunfire. Myanmar's police and soldiers were shooting into the crowd of monks and protesters.
"We were told that one young student was shot in the head, and his brains were splattered on the ground," Vida remembers. "We didn't dare to go back to the crowd."
Vida, one of the first monks to escape from Myanmar, told his extraordinary story to The Globe and Mail at a safe house in Thailand yesterday, just across the border from Myanmar.
Vida and two other monks survived the military assault on their peaceful protest march in Rangoon last week, then managed to hide in the homes of supporters to evade the police. They made a tortuous four-day journey across Myanmar, taking shelter in the homes of sympathizers, finally reaching Thailand this week.
Myanmar's military regime may have crushed the protests temporarily, but Vida is convinced that the monks will win in the end. Within a few weeks, they will begin planning a new strategy to defeat the regime, he says.
"This is just a pause in our fight," he said, speaking slowly and calmly as he sat in the home of student supporters in the Thai border town of Mae Sot. "This is not the end.
"We have already decided to go to the end. The people are waiting for us. Even if we have to pay with our lives, we will pay."
Sitting cross-legged on mats in a second-floor bedroom of the student headquarters, the monks talked solemnly about the events of the previous two weeks, with Vida doing most of the speaking. A second monk, an older man, was suffering from a medical ailment and hoping for treatment.
Vida's story began on Sept. 17, when the 30 monks at his small monastery in Rangoon decided unanimously to join the protest movement.
Vida, a former taxi driver and television repairman, became a monk seven years ago. He has watched his country falling deeper and deeper into economic misery. When fuel prices were tripled in August, it was the spark that ignited a peaceful revolt.
"We've seen how the majority of people are suffering, and we are very sad about it," he said. "Some people are trying to survive on rice water … prices keep rising and rising, but incomes are fixed. People just cannot bear it any more."
In the past, the monks had avoided politics. But when the street protests grew bigger last month, and when a letter arrived at his monastery to ask the monks to join the marches, Vida had no hesitation.
"We saw how people were getting poorer and poorer, and their troubles were getting bigger and bigger. We felt that the protests were a good thing and we should join them."
At first, the monks took turns at the street protests in a rotation system. Vida collected alms to support those who marched. But at the beginning of last week, all of the monks were called to join the protests, and soon 100,000 people were on the streets of Rangoon, defying the military.
"We felt very happy," Vida recalls. "We felt we were doing the right thing for the people. We were determined to keep doing whatever we had to do. We were praying for peace and asking for lower prices and the release of the political prisoners. When we marched, people were surrounding us, cheering us and protecting us."
They didn't expect the bloodshed that followed. "We were shocked and saddened. …We expected a peaceful ending, but instead they crushed us violently."
