On September 26th 2007, at the height of Burma's monk led Saffron Revolution, Maggin Monastery in Thingangyun township, Rangoon, was raided by soldiers and military intelligence as the military regime commenced its brutal crackdown on the protests. Arriving in trucks and fully armed, the soldiers proceeded to ransack the monastery, destroying buildings, religious artefacts, books and arresting the abbot U Eindaka and the monks by force, manhandling them and tearing their robes from their...
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On September 26th 2007, at the height of Burma's monk led Saffron Revolution, Maggin Monastery in Thingangyun township, Rangoon, was raided by soldiers and military intelligence as the military regime commenced its brutal crackdown on the protests. Arriving in trucks and fully armed, the soldiers proceeded to ransack the monastery, destroying buildings, religious artefacts, books and arresting the abbot U Eindaka and the monks by force, manhandling them and tearing their robes from their bodies. Over the following two weeks the monastery was raided on a further three occasions with numerous more arrests until it was finally locked shut by the authorities on 29th November.
Maggin, whilst also acting as a hospice to HIV patients, has long been renowned as a prominent monastery in the democracy movement. It's abbot U Eindaka, who had been actively involved in organising the Saffron Revolution, was previously arrested in 1990 and sentenced to five years imprisonment for his role in a "patam nikkujjana kamma" the boycott of alms from members of the military regime, which followed the junta's raids on monasteries in Mandalay.
On 13th January 2012 U Eindaka and his fellow monks were released from prison under a presidential amnesty and more than four years since Maggin monastery was raided and locked, they returned to their home and opened the doors once more. Everything they found was exactly as it was left the night the military regime arrested them and ransacked the buildings, destroying everything in their way.
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