Protesters defy threats and snipers
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.
The 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 19year-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 16-year-old boy. On Saturday evening, a member of a neighborhood watch corps in Yangon was shot dead. The day before, a 20-year-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 bubble 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.
In Mandalay, Htay Shwe, a restaurant owner, said she had written her will before joining the rally at the train station.
“I will protect our country’s democracy with my life,” she said.
In Yangon, marchers stomped on posters of a sniper who is believed to have targeted the protesters in Mandalay on Saturday.
“I cannot live under a military dictatorship,” said Myint Myint, a homemaker in Yangon, who was out in the hot afternoon sun. “Our leaders, whom we elected, trusted and respected, are arrested. I am here to express my opinion that I want them to be freed.”
The coup ousted the civilian government of the National League for Democracy, which had shared power with the military for five years. Top elected leaders were dragged off by soldiers, including Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of the National League for Democracy, who was charged with obscure crimes that could land her in prison for six years.
Before the brief experiment with hybrid military-civilian governance, the military had imposed its direct rule on Myanmar for nearly half a century.
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, Antony Blinken, the United States secretary of state, posted a tweet in support of the protesters in Myanmar, which was 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.