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7 OF MARCH: Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Myanmar on Sunday to demonstrate against last month’s coup despite nightly raids by security forces in the main city of Yangon to crack down on protest leaders.
The biggest protest was in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second largest city, local media said. Protests also took place in Yangon, in Kale, near the Indian border, and in Dawei, a coastal city in the south. There were no reports of violence.
The Southeast Asian country has been in turmoil since the military overthrew and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi on February 1. Daily demonstrations and strikes have stifled business and paralyzed the administration, and the United Nations says security forces have killed more than 50 people.
In the early hours of Sunday, residents said soldiers and police moved to various districts of Yangon, firing shots. At least three were arrested in Kyauktada Township, residents said. They did not know the reason for the arrests.
“They are asking to take out my father and my brother. No one will help us? Don’t even touch my father and my brother. Take us too if you want to take them away ”, shouted a woman as they took two of them, an actor and his son.
Soldiers also came looking for a lawyer working for Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, but could not find him, a now-disbanded member of parliament, Sithu Maung, said in a Facebook post.
Reuters was unable to reach police for comment. A spokesperson for the board did not respond to calls seeking comment.
“Punching and kicking”
As of Saturday, more than 1,700 people had been detained under the junta, according to figures from the advocacy group the Association for Assistance for Political Prisoners. He did not give a figure for overnight arrests.
“The detainees were beaten and kicked with military boots, beaten with police batons and then dragged into police vehicles,” the AAPP said in a statement. “The security forces entered residential areas and tried to arrest more protesters and fired at houses, destroying many.”
Myanmar authorities said on Saturday they had exhumed the body of 19-year-old Kyal Sin, who has become an icon of the protest movement after she was shot and killed in Mandalay on Wednesday wearing a T-shirt that read “All will be good”. .
State-run MRTV said a surgical investigation showed police could not have killed her because the wrong type of projectile was found in her head and she had been shot from behind, while police were in front.
Photographs of the day showed that her head was not looking at the security forces moments before they killed her. Opponents of the coup accused the authorities of attempted cover-up.
The killings have sparked anger in the West and have been condemned by most democracies in Asia. The United States and some other Western countries have imposed limited sanctions on the junta. Meanwhile, China has said that the priority should be stability and that other countries should not interfere.
The protesters are demanding the release of Suu Kyi and respect for the November elections, which her party overwhelmingly won but rejected by the army. The army has said it will hold democratic elections on an unspecified date.
Israeli-Canadian lobbyist Ari Ben-Menashe, hired by the Myanmar junta, told Reuters the generals are eager to leave politics and seek to improve relations with the United States and distance themselves from China.
He said that Suu Kyi had gotten too close to China for the generals’ liking.
Ben-Menashe said he had also been tasked with seeking Arab support for a plan to repatriate Rohingya refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom were expelled from Myanmar in 2017 in an army crackdown after rebel attacks. . Reuters
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