YANGON, Oct 7: Myanmar soldiers arrived at the Buddhist monastery before dawn, telling the wary monks inside that they were being brought to a breakfast sponsored by the military.

Instead, they were hauled into an windowless building on the campus of a government school where they were disrobed, beaten and interrogated by troops.

Scores of monks were released after six days of suffering in the torpid heat and squalor of a building where 1,000 detainees were forced to use the concrete floor as a toilet and where they were allowed only one small meal of rice and vegetables each day.One 18-year-old monk among those freed told his story to AFP, explaining how even as the soldiers kicked and beat him, he held to his religious ideals and prayed for the soldiers to find peace.

“We were forced to sit like prisoners in the building, kneeling with our heads down. We sat like this for two days before we were disrobed,” he said.

Monks from sects aligned with the military government performed the disrobing, stripping them of their maroon cloth and forcing them to wear T-shirts and traditional sarong-like longyis like ordinary men, he said.

“After being disrobed, we were beaten again -- punched, hit with sticks, and kicked,” he said. “We were divided into groups of 10, and then questioned one by one. They asked us if we had joined the protests, and who was the leader in our monastery.”When the interrogations ended, they were taken in groups of 60 and locked into classrooms, where they were again forced to kneel and to squat in a corner instead of using a toilet.

Similarly brutal treatment of monks during a protest in early September helped fuel the peaceful street demonstrations in the main city Yangon, which two weeks ago swelled to 100,000 people led by monks.

The military cracked down hard, using baton charges, teargas and live weapons fire to break up the crowds, leaving at least 13 dead.

This young survivor said that even some of the soldiers were horrified at the treatment of the monks.

“The Buddhist soldiers came to apologise and ask forgiveness. They said they only treated the monks this way because they were ordered by high-ranking officials,” he said.

“Some of the monks told the Buddhist soldiers that they would go to hell one day, and the soldiers cried, because they knew that this was true,” he added.

In hopes of making peace, some of the soldiers would bring water to the monks as they knelt in captivity.

He said he was among the lucky ones. Monks from the Ngwekyaryan monastery were held in the same compound. The raid on that monastery shocked neighbours who saw pools of blood, shattered windows and spent bullet casings on the floor.

The reason for the violence was that the monks from Ngwekyaryan had tried to fight back against the soldiers, the young monk said.

He was released along with dozens of others from his monastery after he convinced the authorities that he had never joined the protests.—AFP