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YANGON: The US embassy in Myanmar warned Sunday night (February 14) of military troop movements and possible “telecommunications disruptions” in Yangon.
“There are signs of military movements in Yangon and the possibility of telecommunications outages during the night between 1 am and 9 am” On Monday morning local time, the US embassy tweeted on its official US Citizen Services account Sunday night.
The warning came after armored vehicles appeared in Yangon’s commercial capital Myitkyina and Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state, live images broadcast online by local media showed, the first large-scale launch of such vehicles. across the country since the February 1 coup. .
Security forces have stepped up arrests targeting a civil disobedience movement that has seen huge crowds crowd the streets of large urban centers and isolated border villages alike.
The police are now hunting down seven people who have provided vocal support for the protests, including some of the country’s most famous democracy activists.
“If you find the fugitives mentioned above or if you have information about them, report to the nearest police station,” a notice in state media said Sunday.
“Those who receive them (will face) the action in accordance with the law.”
Among the list of fugitives was Min Ko Naing, who spent more than a decade in prison for helping lead protests against a previous dictatorship in 1988 while he was a university student.
“They are arresting people at night and you have to be careful,” he said in a video posted on Facebook on Saturday, circumventing a military ban on the platform, hours before his arrest warrant was issued.
“They could crack down and we will have to be prepared.”
Anti-coup protesters hold up posters with an image of deposed Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi as they gather in front of the UN Information Office in Yangon, Myanmar, on February 14, 2021. (Photo: AP)
The 1988 protests brought Aung San Suu Kyi to the top of Myanmar’s democracy movement, and the Nobel laureate spent years under house arrest as a prisoner of the generals.
She has not been seen in public since she was arrested on February 1 along with her main aides.
Almost 400 other people have been arrested in the days since, including many of Aung San Suu Kyi’s top political allies, according to the monitoring group for the Political Prisoner Assistance Association.
Military leader Min Aung Hlaing suspended laws requiring house search warrants as part of several legal maneuvers announced on Saturday.
The news did not deter thousands of people in Yangon from returning to the city’s key intersections on a ninth consecutive day of street protests.
Some armored vehicles were briefly seen moving around the mall into the night. Later, one was parked inside the city zoo.
An armored vehicle drives past Sule Pagoda, after days of massive protests against the military coup, in Yangon on February 14, 2021. (Photo: AFP / Thet Htoo)
But seven policemen broke ranks to join anti-coup protesters in the southern city of Dawei, mirroring local media reports of isolated desertions from the force in recent days.
SURVEILLANCE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD
In Yangon, many areas have started forming neighborhood watch brigades to monitor their communities at night, defying the military government’s curfew, and to prevent arrests of residents who join the civil disobedience movement.
Some have also expressed fear that a massive prisoner amnesty was orchestrated this week to release inmates into the public and cause trouble, while freeing up space in overcrowded prisons for political detainees.
“We don’t trust anyone at this time, especially those in uniforms,” said Myo Ko Ko, a member of a street patrol in Yangon.
Near the city’s central train station, residents rolled tree trunks onto a road to block police vehicles and escorted officers trying to return striking railway employees to work.
A day earlier, Buddhist monks gathered in front of the city’s embassy in the United States and chanted the Metta Sutta, a prayer that urges protection from harm.
“We wanted you to know that the majority of Myanmar citizens are against the military,” said Vicittalankara, one of the participants.
‘MEDIA ETHICS’
The country’s new military leadership has so far not been shaken by a torrent of international condemnation.
Myanmar people living in Japan and their supporters march through the Shibuya crosswalks during a protest on February 14, 2021 in Tokyo. (Photo: AP / Eugene Hoshiko)
An emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council on Friday called for the new regime to release all “arbitrarily detained” people and for the military to return power to the Aung San Suu Kyi administration.
Solidarity protests have been held in neighboring Thailand, home to a large community of migrant workers from Myanmar, as well as in the United States, Japan and Australia.
READ: Myanmar citizens in Japan march in protest of military coup
READ: 3 men are being investigated by the police for allegedly protesting in front of the Myanmar embassy in Singapore
But the traditional allies of the country’s armed forces, including Russia and China, have disassociated themselves from what they have described as interference in Myanmar’s “internal affairs.”
The military government insists that it assumed power legally and has instructed the country’s journalists not to refer to itself as a government that seized power in a coup.
“We inform … journalists and the media not to write to cause public discomfort,” read a notice sent by the Ministry of Information to the country’s club of foreign correspondents late on Saturday.
He also instructed reporters to follow “media ethics” when reporting on events in the country.
