Violence flares amid strike in Burma
3 people protesting military coup killed; licenses of 5 media outlets canceled
Workplaces across Burma were shuttered Monday, part of a general strike aimed at strangling the power of military rulers who toppled an elected government last month. But if manufacturing and commerce were idled, anger at the brutality of the military flared further, despite the increased presence of security forces in urban centers and a tougher clampdown on the news media.
At least two participants in a mass protest movement were shot dead Monday in Myitkyina, a city in northern Burma, where Roman Catholic nuns dropped to their knees to plead for soldiers to stop the killing. Another protester was fatally shot in the abdomen in Pyapon, a town not far from Rangoon, Burma’s commercial capital. The deaths were reported by medical workers and relatives.
And in Rangoon itself, hundreds of people were trapped in a security force cordon Monday night, fearing arrest or worse.
“Help,” wrote one of the people who said he was stuck. “The military troops have blocked every single way out.”
More than 60 people have been killed since a Feb. 1 coup ousted Burma’s civilian leaders, returning the country to full military rule. About 1,800 others have been detained, according to a local group that monitors political prisoners.
Burma is often called Myanmar, a name that military authorities adopted in 1989. Some nations, such as the United States and Britain, have refused to adopt the name change.
The military government also placed a major curb on media coverage of the crisis. It announced that the licenses of five local media outlets — Mizzima, DVB, Khit Thit Media, Myanmar Now and 7Day News — have been canceled.
“These media companies are no longer allowed to broadcast or write or give information by using any kind of media platform or using any media technology,” it said on state broadcaster MRTV.
All five had been offering extensive coverage of the protests, often with livestreaming video online.
Dozens of reporters have been detained since the putsch. The stripping of the media licenses could now make their very act of reporting illegal.
Back when a military junta fully ruled Burma for nearly five decades, censorship committees regularly excised news from the country’s newspapers, leaving rumors to flourish amid the information blackout.
On Sunday, security forces descended on universities, hospital compounds and Buddhist pagoda complexes, where they established makeshift operations centers.
“It’s totally unacceptable to allow the military to base itself in the hospital,” said Dr. Kyaw Swar, a medical officer at Rangoon General Hospital, where soldiers set up camp. “Hospitals are not the place for them. They have been insolent. But they have guns.”
In the city of Mandalay, in central Burma, military trucks stormed university campuses, including Mandalay Technological University, where a convoy of four vehicles arrived amid tear-gas and rubber bullets, according to witnesses.
At the Mahamuni Buddha Temple in Mandalay, Kesara Viwunsa, the abbot, said soldiers had taken over the pagoda’s grounds for a month.
“No one comes to worship here anymore because people are afraid of them,” he said.
The Global New Light of Myanmar, a state-run newspaper that acts as a loudspeaker for the military rulers, said Monday that such spaces were being occupied because members of the public had requested that the Tatmadaw, as Burma’s military is known, “control the public universities and hospitals and to take action effectively for the benefit of the people.”
The publication also warned that even working “indirectly” with a group of lawmakers who have set themselves up as a kind of government in exile would be considered a crime.
For days now, people in Burma have been discussing “R2P,” shorthand for the United Nations’ “responsibility to protect” policy, which allows for intervention by the international community “should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
The principle was used to help justify foreign military intervention in Libya in 2011 and came into being after the United Nations admitted it had failed to stop atrocities from being committed in the Balkans and Rwanda. In Burma, the hashtag #R2P has trended on Twitter, and people have written giant signs on streets asking for foreign militaries to please invade.
The international community has verbally condemned the Tatmadaw’s takeover of power, with some countries tightening targeted sanctions on military officers and military companies. But Burma’s most significant foreign investors, such as Singapore and China, have not taken significant steps to financially punish the military.