Hundreds of students dressed in shades of red and purple gathered Friday at noon on Lincoln Field to draw the campus' attention to ongoing anti-government protests in the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar.
Attendees at the event - organized by Brown's recently inaugurated chapter of the U.S. Campaign for Burma - were urged to wear red or maroon to show solidarity with Myanmar's monks, whose rust-covered robes have come to symbolize the protests.
The demonstration, which included several speeches followed by a silent march around the Main Green, was likely the largest gathering in support of Myanmar on an American campus, according to the Brown chapter's director, Patrick Cook-Deegan '08.
Over the past week, peaceful crowds of up to 100,000 have taken to the streets in Myanmar - formerly known as Burma - only to be brutally dispersed by the military junta that has ruled the country for decades. Dissident groups have put the death toll as high as 200, the Associated Press reported.
The United States and members of the European Union have condemned the Myanmar regime's actions and have begun freezing finances of leaders associated with the junta. President Bush has called on countries in the region to pressure Myanmar to end its violent crackdown.
A few minutes after noon Friday, Andrew Lim '08 mounted a platform on Lincoln Field to address the crowd. Lim, whose parents emigrated from Myanmar 25 years ago, has been a leader of the Brown chapter of the campaign since its founding earlier this semester.
"The Burmese government is extremely scared," Lim said. "This might be the time that they can finally fall. ... One day maybe we can all say together that we helped to overthrow this terrible regime."
A number of speakers from the Watson Institute for International Studies also addressed the crowd. Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee '75, now a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, spoke first, excoriating the Bush administration for responding insufficiently to the crisis.
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, a visiting professor of Latin American studies and the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar, lamented the intractable nature of the situation.
"Every morning I ask myself: 'How many dead?' " he told the assembled crowd.
Pinheiro will attend a special U.N. session on Myanmar next week in Geneva, and he promised to carry the crowd's message with him.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former president of Brazil who is a professor-at-large at the Watson Institute for International Studies, also criticized the United States' actions in the crisis. "It is not enough to put more sanctions on," Cardoso said, adding that as a former world leader, he would do all he could to aid the people of Myanmar.
Wenli Xu, a famed Chinese pro-democracy advocate who spent 16 years in prison, told the crowd through an interpreter, "I see that we are all wearing red today. ... This represents that there is red in the fire of our hearts. We're here in support of democratic change, and for that I would like to thank all of you."
Xu, who was dressed in a crimson t-shirt and baseball cap, is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute.
Following the brief speeches, Lim and other campaign members led the crowd in a silent march around the Main Green. They circled three times before turning toward the lawn in front of Faunce House.
As the crowd dispersed, a reporter for the NBC Providence affiliate WJAR - dressed in a blindingly red suit - interviewed Lim and several others for Providence NBC affiliate WJAR.
Several elements of the event came together at the last minute, said Adriane Lesser '08, one of the march's organizers. Chafee agreed late Thursday night to attend, and all of the other speakers confirmed the morning of the march. An audio system arrived just 30 minutes before noon.
Joel Tracy '09 heard about the march in an e-mail from his lacrosse coach. "I think the main point was, 'There's going to be this big thing on Friday, just make sure you wear red.' It had an outline of the whole situation, and it was tough to ignore," Tracy said. "You see the sacrifices of the monks out there, and it doesn't seem too hard to come out."
About 300 students took part in the march, and many more on campus wore red or maroon shirts to show their support. An event of that size "doesn't happen very often at Brown," said James Chaukos '09 of Amnesty International.
He added that much of the march's appeal came from its straightforward message. "It's a simple concept," Chaukos said. "All you have to do is wear a red shirt and show up at 12:00."
Cook-Deegan first introduced the idea of a campus march at a meeting Tuesday night, and for the next three days group members worked frantically to spread their message through tableslips, e-mail listservs, Facebook invitations and an information table set up in the center of campus.
