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Myanmar junta arrests more activists

SINGAPORE: A high-ranking leader of the “88 Students Generation,” Htay Kywe, and a prominent woman activist of the same group, Mie Mie, were among the four arrested by the Myanmar junta in Yangon on Friday night in its continuing crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.

This was announced by Amnesty International on Saturday, and Soe Aung, spokesman of the National Council of the Union of Burma, told The Hindu from Bangkok that 11 students from Bassein University were also arrested. These present-day students are not linked to the “88 Students Generation,” which consists of the surviving activists of the 1988 pro-democracy uprising.

In yet another development, Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) said in a statement that 216 members of the party were arrested since the beginning of the latest anti-junta protest movement in mid-August. Buddhist monks and other civilians, numbering over 6,000 were arrested, according to various dissident groups and Western diplomats. The junta placed the overall number of detained persons at over 2,000, and claimed that nearly 1,000 among them were already released.

Mr. Htay Kywe had eluded arrest, when Min Ko Naing, the prime leader of the “88 Students Generation” was detained shortly after the present wave of anti-junta demonstrations began in mid-August in the wake of a steep hike in fuel prices. Both Mr. Min Ko Naing, widely regarded as an emerging leader of stature in the opposition camp, and Mr. Htay Kywe had begun their political activism under this new banner in 2005, through the “White Expression” campaign of exhorting people to sport clothes of that colour to demand probity in public life.

The “88 Students Generation” represents, in some ways, a continuation of the All-Burma Federation of Students Unions, according to the dissident camp.

The latest arrests follow the announcement by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that he had asked Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari to visit Myanmar again in November after holding talks with regional neighbours such as Thailand, Malyasia, Indonesia, India, China and Japan.

In a separate development, the Myanmar junta organised a huge rally in its support in Yangon on Saturday, drawing people from the front organisation called the Union Solidarity and Development Association.

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