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Sporadic rallies in Myanmar

SINGAPORE: As the military regime took strong steps to reassert its writ over Myanmar, protesters continued to brave the might of the soldiers in Yangon on Friday. Hundreds of protesters held sporadic rallies in a tense stand-off with the junta.

Their numbers fell dramatically from a high of many thousands who protested on previous days. But there was no sign of any abatement of the groundswell of popular demand for economic and political justice.

Western diplomats in Yangon said shots were fired by the troops and tear-gas was unleashed at the protesters. The dissident groups in exile in neighbouring Thailand and Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) did not confirm any killings on Friday.

Several Buddhist monasteries in Yangon and elsewhere in Myanmar were barricaded, and there was no noticeable participation by monks in the anti-junta rallies for the second straight day.

Maung Maung, General Secretary of the Thailand-based dissident National Council of the Union of Burma, told The Hindu over the telephone that the protest leadership was now passing from the newly-formed All-Burma Monks Alliance to the youth wing of the NLD. But it proved difficult to reach NLD sources by phone to ascertain their version. At one stage during the day, rumours surfaced that soldiers had swung into action against anti-junta activists at a place near the Indian embassy in Yangon. When contacted over telephone, India’s Ambassador to Myanmar Baskar K. Mitra said “nothing happened in our line of sight”.

With the junta moving in to shut down or at least slow down the Internet access to the rest of the world, a blackout of the protest seemed a possibility in due course.

Disputing the unofficial versions that scores of protesters were killed by soldiers on Thursday, the junta informed foreign diplomats that only nine had been killed and that the Japanese photo-journalist, who lost his life, had come on a tourist visa and not an assignment permit.

The junta portrayed the uprising as the work of some foreign-inspired agitators who wanted to bring about a revolution by clerics if not the NLD. On the diplomatic front, United Nations Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari is passing through Singapore on his way to Myanmar.

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