Monks, students start hunger strike
LETPADAN: More than 100 monks and student protesters in Myanmar began a hunger strike over education reform yesterday as police blocked their march to the commercial capital Yangon.
Students have been marching from Myanmar’s second-largest city, Mandalay, and two other cities since January, demanding changes to a recently passed education law.
The demonstrators spent the past 10 days in Letpadan, 145km north of Yangon.
They were planning to resume their rally on Monday but more than a dozen police vehicles, including a water cannon truck, arrived outside the monastery where they were staying.
Police said they would not allow the march to enter the Yangon region.
The government warned the students last week that if they continued with the protest, action would be taken “to maintain law and order, security and tranquillity”.
The protesters are demanding independent student and teacher unions, changes to university exam and entrance requirements, the introduction of ethnic minority languages and the modernisation of the national syllabus.
After talks with student negotiators, government representatives agreed to amend sections of the National Education Law in early February, but the changes have yet to be approved by parliament, and the students decided to continue their march.
Hearings on the bill are expected to take place later this week, according to parliamentary officials.
Hundreds of police have formed a human chain around student protesters staging a sit-in.
The demonstrators were outnumbered by police but neither side appears willing to back down.
Security forces formed rows around the students four layers deep.
Myanmar started moving from a halfcentury of military rule toward democracy in 2011, but critics say the reforms that marked President Thein Sein’s early days in office have either stalled or the government has been retreating on them.
The education law, passed by parliament in September, puts all decisions about policy and curriculum in the hands of a body made up largely of government ministers.
It bans students from forming unions and ignores calls for local languages to be used in instruction in ethnic states.
Students say the law undermines the autonomy of universities, which are still struggling to recover after clampdowns on academic independence and freedom during years of dictatorship.
The threat of an expanded protest is sensitive in Myanmar, in part because students were at the forefront of pro-democracy protests in 1988 that were crushed by a bloody military crackdown.