MYANMAR GENERALS SHUT INTERNET TO CURB PROTESTS
Reports of a ‘national-scale blackout’ after largest anticoup rally yet
Myanmar’s junta shut down the internet in the country on Saturday as thousands of people took to the streets of Yangon for the largest anticoup protest so far to denounce Monday’s military takeover and demand the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Activists chanted, “Military dictator, fail, fail; Democracy, win, win” and held banners reading “Against military dictatorship.” Bystanders offered them food and water.
As many as 1,000 demonstrators marched on a road near Yangon University, most holding up the three-finger salute that has come to symbolize resistance to the army takeover.
Many in the crowd wore red, the color of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy which won the Nov. 8 elections in a landslide, a result the generals have refused to recognize claiming fraud.
As the protest swelled and activists issued calls on social media for people to join the march, the country’s internet crashed.
Monitoring group NetBlocks Internet Observatory reported a “national-scale internet blackout,” saying on Twitter that connectivity had fallen to 54 percent of ordinary levels. Witnesses reported a shutdown of mobile data services and Wi-Fi.
The junta has tried to silence dissent by temporarily blocking Facebook and extended a social media crackdown to Twitter and Instagram on Saturday.
Online calls to protest the army takeover have prompted increasingly bold displays of defiance against the new regime, including the nightly deafening clamor of people around the country banging pots and pans—a practice traditionally associated with driving out evil.
State media in Myanmar reported Saturday that junta figures had spoken with diplomats the previous day to respond to an international outcry and asked them to work with the new leaders.
As protests gathered steam this week, the junta ordered telecom networks to freeze users out of access to Facebook, an extremely popular service in the country and arguably its main mode of communication.
The platform had hosted a rapidly growing “Civil Disobedience Movement” forum that had inspired civil servants, health-care professionals, and teachers to show their dissent by boycotting their jobs in civil service and hospitals.
By Saturday morning, trending hashtags like #WeNeedDemocracy, #HeartheVoiceofMyanmar and “Freedom from fear”—the latter a famed Suu Kyi quote—had millions of mentions.