Early Thursday morning, police ordered dozens of chanting protesters to disperse from a busy intersection near the essential university in Yangon, the country’s largest city. More demonstrations were planned for Thursday — including by student and employee groups from different ethnic groups in the varied nation of greater than 53 million people.
Some drivers in Yangon blocked roads for a second straight day on Thursday, leaving their cars with their hoods up and pretending they were broken right down to prevent security forces from moving around Myanmar’s largest city.
“Don’t come to the office, get out. Join the civil disobedience movement,” protesters chanted. “We need the US military to save our day,” read an indication held by a monk in saffron robes.
The street marches were, admittedly, more peaceful than the brutally suppressed demonstrations in the course of the previous half-century of army rule, but they and the civil disobedience movement had a paralyzing effect on many official matters.
The army announced Wednesday evening that six high-profile people, including film directors, actors and a singer, were wanted under the anti-incitement law for inciting government officials to affix the protest.
These charges are punishable by as much as two years in prison.
Some of those on the list were defiant. “It’s amazing to see the unity of our people. The power of the people must return to the people,” actor Lu Min wrote on his Facebook page.
Despite the junta’s calls for civil servants to return to work and threats of motion in the event that they don’t, there isn’t a sign of the strikes abating.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s foreign ministry said the city-state’s and Indonesia’s foreign ministers support a proposal to carry an off-the-cuff meeting of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) ministers to debate the situation in Myanmar.
HACKING
Hackers attacked government web sites run by the military on Thursday, sparking a cyberwar after authorities shut down the web for a fourth night in a row.
A bunch calling itself Myanmar Hackers has disrupted quite a few government web sites, including the Central Bank, the Myanmar military’s propaganda website, state television station MRTV, the Port Authority and the Food and Drug Administration.
“We are fighting for justice in Myanmar,” the hacker group wrote on its Facebook page. “It’s like people mass protesting in front of government websites.”
Cybersecurity expert Matt Warren of Australia’s RMIT University said the hack was likely aimed toward generating publicity. “The types of attacks they’ll be doing are denial-of-service attacks or defacement of websites, which is called hacktivism,” he said.
Another web shutdown began in Myanmar at around 1 a.m. Thursday, in response to NetBlocks, a British group that monitors web outages all over the world. It said web connectivity had fallen to only 21 percent of normal levels.
SHOOTING
Residents said rail traffic was severely disrupted and after darkness fell, security forces within the second-largest city of Mandalay descended on striking rail employees late Wednesday, opening fire with rubber bullets and catapults and throwing stones.
One charity employee was hit within the leg by a rubber bullet. Neither the military nor police immediately commented on the incident, but the military’s Facebook page said the force was providing security across the country to “ensure people have peace and quiet.”
The number of individuals known to have been detained for the reason that coup halted an initial transition to democracy had reached 495 by Wednesday, Myanmar’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said in an announcement. It added that 460 people remained detained.
The army took power after the electoral commission rejected allegations of fraud in a November 8 election won by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party, sparking outrage in Western countries in addition to local protests.
Opponents of the coup are very skeptical concerning the junta’s guarantees handy over power after latest elections, the date of which has not yet been set.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi, detained after the coup, now faces charges of violating the Disaster Management Act, in addition to charges of illegally importing six walkie-talkie radios. Her next court hearing is scheduled for March 1.
Suu Kyi, 75, has spent nearly 15 years under house arrest for her efforts to bring democracy.
The army says one policeman has died from injuries sustained in the course of the protest. One protester who was shot in the top during a protest within the capital Naypyidaw is on life support, but doctors say she has no probability of survival.
Additional information: Agence France-Presse
