Burmese junta's dragnet drags on in Rangoon

On Saturday, authorities rounded up another 78 "abettors" to the protests, which rocked Rangoon from September 18-25, peaking with 100,000 monks and laymen followers in the streets of the former capital, said The New Light of Myanmar, a government mouthpiece.

Of the 78 detainees, six were later released. Of the estimated 2,700 people, including 533 monks, authorities have arrested over the last 10 days about 1,600 have already been released, including some 400 monks, state media claims.

The numbers cannot be verified because Burmese military rulers have not allowed an independent agency to conduct an investigation into the atrocities committed last month. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been blocked for months from making prison visits in the country.

The military claims that only 10 people died in the crackdown, but Burmese activists claim the total death toll was closer to 200, citing witness accounts of mass cremations following the mayhem and a steady flow of corpses from Rangoon's notorious Insein prison.

Burma's so-called "saffron revolt," named for the saffron robes worn by Buddhist monks, was crushed on September 26-27 by Burmese anti-riot police and soldiers.

The crackdown has outraged world opinion and strengthened international pressure on the regime to initiate a dialogue with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the world's only jailed Nobel peace laureate.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Prize in 1991 for her leadership role in a courageous anti-military movement, has been under house arrest in near complete isolation since May 2003 at her Rangoon family compound.

Since her first incarceration in 1989, she has spent nearly 12 of the last 17 years under house arrest.

In talks on October 2 with United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari, Burmese junta head Senior General Than Shwe agreed to personally meet with Suu Kyi on the preconditions that she drop calls for "confrontation" with the regime and end her support for Western sanctions, imposed on the country since 1988 in the aftermath of the military's even more brutal crackdown on its own people that left an estimated 3,000 people dead.

Observers fear the preconditions are a manoeuvre to place blame on Suu Kyi if the dialogue fails to take place.

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won the 1990 general election by a landslide but ever since has been blocked from taking power by the military.

Burma has been under military rule since 1962.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur