UN envoy warns Myanmar
YANGON: The United Nations special envoy has warned Myanmar’s army of ‘‘severe consequences’’ for any harsh response to protesters demonstrating against this month’s coup, in a call with the military leadership, a UN spokesman said.
Despite the deployment of armoured vehicles and soldiers to some major cities at the weekend, protesters have kept up demonstrations to denounce the February 1 takeover and demand the release of detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi and others.
Protests on Monday were smaller than the hundreds of thousands who had joined earlier demonstrations but broke out in many parts of the Southeast Asian country, where the coup has halted a decade of unsteady transition to democracy.
Yesterday, small crowds gathered in two places in Yangon — at a traditional protest site near the university campus and at the central bank, where protesters hoped to press staff to join a civil disobedience movement.
However, police and military forces fired at peaceful protesters during demonstrations in the northern city of Mandalay yesterday, local media reports said.
News portal Frontier Myanmar cited a journalist who said police and soldiers shot randomly into people’s homes.
Images posted on social media showed people injured by what appeared to be rubber bullets.
It was not clear whether security forces had also used live ammunition and if people had died.
Videos posted on Twitter showed police forces marching through the streets with batons.
The reporter cited by Frontier Myanmar spoke of several arrests.
The army cut off the internet for a second consecutive night in the small hours yesterday, though it was again restored at about 9am (local time).
UN special envoy Christine Schraner Burgener spoke on Monday to the deputy head of the junta in what has become a rare channel of communication between Myanmar’s army and the outside world.
‘‘Ms Schraner Burgener has reinforced that the right of peaceful assembly must fully be respected and that demonstrators are not subjected to reprisals,’’ UN spokesman Farhan Haq said yesterday.
‘‘She has conveyed to the Myanmar military that the world is watching closely, and any form of heavyhanded response is likely to have severe consequences.’’
In an account of the meeting, Myanmar’s army said junta Number Two, Soe Win, had discussed the administration’s plans and information on ‘‘the true situation of what’s happening in Myanmar’’.
Yesterday, the military denied its ouster of the elected government was a coup, saying its action was justified because fraud in a November election was not addressed, and it would hand back power after a new election.
‘‘Our objective is to hold an election and hand power to the winning party,’’ Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun told the military’s first news conference since it seized power on February 1.
The military has not given a date for a new election but it has imposed a state of emergency for one year.
The army said late on Monday protests were harming stability and had left people in fear.
An activist group, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, said it had recorded 426 arrests between the coup and Monday. — Reuters