''You are no longer monks,'' Myanmar prisoners told

YANGON (Reuters) - Hundreds of Buddhist monks rounded up by Myanmar's junta were beaten and kept in animal-like conditions without toilets or drinking water during days of interrogation, one of those freed said on Thursday."At the beginning it was very, very bad," one recently released monk told Reuters, requesting anonymity because of the threat of repercussions against those who speak out against the regime, the latest face of 45 years of unbroken military rule.Caged for more than a week at a former Government Technical Institute compound in north Yangon, the monks -- revered figures in the devoutly Buddhist nation -- were stripped of their maroon monastic robes and treated like common criminals."When one of us used a pronoun referring to himself as a monk, he was slapped," the monk said. "Then an interrogator said: 'You are no longer a monk. You are just an ordinary man with a shaven head.'"The monks, mostly young men whom the army sees as the biggest threat to its iron grip on power because of their moral authority, were packed into rooms so tightly they could not lie down, let alone sleep, in the sweltering monsoon season heat.For days, they had no toilet, nowhere to wash their hands, and were forced to scoop up slops of barely cooked rice with their bare hands."We had no spoons or forks so we had to eat with our fingers," said the monk, who spent 10 days in the makeshift detention centre. "The food was horrible."At times during the relentless barrage of questioning to identify ringleaders of the biggest anti-junta protests in 20 years, the monks were forced to put their hands on their heads and squat while their inquisitors remained seated on chairs

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