Red-shirt-Friday campaign sweeps Phuket
PHUKET: In a global groundswell of support for the people of Burma, SMS messages have been circulating around the island in the past few hours with the message: “In support of our incredibly brave friends in Burma: May all the people around the world wear a red shirt on Friday, September 28.”
This message was brought to the Gazette‘s attention by a Norwegian reader who gave his name as “Wind”.
The Gazette has so far been unable to confirm who started the initiative or when it began, but it appears to be a friend-to-friend text messaging campaign that arose in the aftermath of the Burmese government’s crackdown on protesting monks and civilians yesterday that left five dead and about 100 injured.
A number of bloggers and users of popular social-networking websites, such as Facebook and MySpace, have also been circulating the message.
Thousands of people gathered on Pagoda Rd in downtown Rangoon today to openly defy Burma’s police and military, whose arrests and beatings of members of the revered Buddhist monkhood over the past two days has sparked international controversy.
“There are people willing to shoot and people willing to die,” one Western diplomat said to a reporter from Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
