Burma is lying about democracy protest death toll, says rights group

The Burmese junta, according to the US-based campaign group Human Rights Watch, are lying about the death count accumulated over the course of their government crackdown that has been going on since August. This report contains interviews with 100 witnesses who were present for these fatal incidents. One witness said the bullets came "like rain." Another person said that when the tear gas and guns were fired so many people went down. There are accounts of innocent civilians being shot, run over by trucks, and tortured and beaten. The report states that due to the incredible count of unarmed demonstrators who were killed the junta is reluctant to disclose the true death toll. On top of the milieu of actual death counts we still need to account for the number of people who were captured and detained. Nobody know where they are or what has happened to them. According to the Human Rights watch it is time for the UN to act on this and take care of the Burmese junta and this reign of tyranny.

I certainly believe that the junta is lying about the actual death count accumulated under their control. Just from what we read in the paper and hear on the news everyone knows what they are doing over there and know the situation is very bad. They have reason to be scared. They murdered unarmed civilians and who knows what has happened to the numbers of people captured. However, I'm not sure what I think of the witness accounts as truly reliable evidence. By this I don't mean that anybody is lying... and some accounts are very accurate. They saw people die right next to them. I'm more referring to the statements that the bullets were "like rain" and "so many people went down with their shots..." the broader generalizations. I mean, rain has a lot of different consistencies. It can be drizzling, pouring, sprinkling, who knows. Actually that one is kind of a joke. The statement that so many people fell is suspicious if you are looking at this objectively. The junta did fire heavily onto the civilians. There is no doubt about that. I guess if I got shot at I would fall, too, because I was afraid of getting hit. Falling in a shower of bullets does not denote death. But this is all really irrelevant. The junta are probably lying about their numbers. They have every reason to. I suppose what I'm going for in explaining this irrelevant idea is that it is a plausible argument. Even so, the number left bleeding to death after the crowd dissipated would surely prove numbers. We don't need to know there was heavy gun fire to know there was death. That is obvious. Thus, while it is a good description of the events it is not sufficient, to me, to prove how many died. Whatever. So I rant. This is my last post.