Millions protest in Myanmar
The strikers poured onto the streets of Myanmar on Monday knowing that they might die. But they gathered by the millions anyway in the largest rallies since a military coup three weeks ago. Their only protection came from hard hats, holy amulets and the collective power of a newly called general strike.
Military generals had tried to halt Monday’s dissent with barricades and fleets of vehicles parked in strategic urban locations. Armored vehicles patrolled, while snipers took their stations on rooftops. An ominous warning had been issued hours before on state television: “Protesters are now inciting people, especially emotional teenagers and youth, toward a path of confrontation where they will suffer a loss of life.”
But the military’s show of force did little to quell Monday’s general strike, which proceeded peacefully in hundreds of cities and towns. Columns of people extended to the horizon near a traffic junction and a pagoda in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, and at the railway station in Mandalay, the second-largest city. They congregated on Martyrs’ Street in Dawei, a seaside city, and by the clock towers in Monywa and Hpa-an, in the country’s center and east.
“I will sacrifice my life for our future generations,” said Ko Bhone Nay Thit, a 19-year-old university student in Mandalay who left home Monday morning armed with his mother’s prayers and the effects of a holy water ritual. “We must win.”
The weekend had brought bloodshed to the anti-coup resistance. On Saturday afternoon, two unarmed protesters were killed by security forces in Mandalay; one of the dead was a 16year-old boy. On Saturday evening, a member of a neighborhood watch corps in Yangon was shot dead. The day before, a 20year-old woman died of injuries suffered when she was shot in the head Feb. 9 by security forces in Naypyidaw, the capital. She is believed to be the first protester in the movement to have been killed by authorities.
The general strike Monday encompassed civil servants, bank workers, doctors, supermarket cashiers, telecom operators and oil rig operators. Pizza deliverers, KFC employees and tea servers joined in, too.
The national boycott expanded
a civil disobedience movement that has paralyzed the banking system and made it difficult for the military, which seized power from the elected government Feb. 1, to get much of anything done.
As of Monday morning, more than 560 people had been detained for dissent against the coup, according to a local group that tracks political imprisonments. By the afternoon, at least 150 protesters were arrested in the logging town of Pyinmana, not far from Naypyidaw, where mass detentions were reported, too.
On Monday morning Myanmar time, Secretary of State Antony Blinken posted a tweet in support of the protesters in the country formerly known as Burma.
“The United States will continue to take firm action against
those who perpetrate violence against the people of Burma as they demand the restoration of their democratically elected government,” the tweet said. “We stand with the people of Burma.”
The U.S. government has imposed financial sanctions on some of the coup-makers and their associates. Other sanctions were already in place because of the military’s persecution of ethnic minorities, most notably Rohingya Muslims, who fled slaughter in 2017 for safety in neighboring Bangladesh.
On Monday, the U.N. refugee agency warned in a statement that a boat filled with Rohingya trying to reach Malaysia was in distress. Hundreds of Rohingya have died at sea in recent years, trying to leave Myanmar or Bangladesh, where they are confined to vast refugee settlements.