Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Myanmar for a ninth day of protests against the coup on Sunday, as the new army rulers fought to contain a strike by government workers that could cripple their ability to rule the country.
As evening fell, armored vehicles were seen in the commercial capital of Yangon for the first time since the February 1 coup. The US embassy in the country urged US citizens to “take refuge in place,” citing reports of the military movements.
Trains in some parts of the country stopped running after staff refused to go to work, local media reported, while the military deployed soldiers to power plants where they faced angry crowds.
A civil disobedience movement has emerged to protest the coup that toppled the civil government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. It started with doctors, but now it affects a swath of government departments. The board ordered officials to go back to work, threatening to take action.
The army has been carrying out mass arrests overnight and on Saturday it was given wide powers to detain people and search private property.
But hundreds of railway workers joined the demonstrations in Yangon on Sunday, even as police went to their housing complex on the outskirts of the city to order them to return to work.
Police were forced to leave after angry crowds gathered, according to a Myanmar Now live stream.
The soldiers were deployed to power plants in the northern state of Kachin, sparking a clash with protesters who said they believed they intended to cut power to make nightly arrests.
“The military tried to control the electrical power sources since yesterday,” said Awng Kham, a local politician. “They may be able to control the power at night while doing their business at night.
As night fell, soldiers fired water cannons to disperse protesters outside a plant in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin state, showed a Facebook live broadcast, filmed by a local media outlet and viewed by Reuters. A soldier yelled “arrest them all” before the broadcast ended.
Several energy departments in Yangon said in Facebook posts that they would refuse to cut off the power and expressed their support for the protesters. “Our duty is to provide electricity, not to cut off,” said a staff member, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, adding that some colleagues were participating in the strike. The government and military could not be reached for comment.
Richard Horsey, a Myanmar-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, said that the work of many government departments had effectively stopped.
“This has the potential to affect vital functions as well: the military can replace engineers and doctors, but not power grid controllers or central bankers,” he said.
PROTESTS ACROSS THE NATION
Hundreds of thousands of people protested across the country after a terrifying night in which residents formed patrols and the army struck down laws protecting freedoms.
Engineering students marched through the center of Yangon, the largest city, dressed in white and carrying banners demanding the release of the ousted leader Suu Kyi, who has been detained since the coup and accused of importing walkie talkies.
A fleet of highway buses slowly paced the city with their horns blasting, part of the largest street protests in more than a decade. A convoy of motorcycles and cars crossed the capital, Naypyitaw.
In the southeastern coastal city of Dawei, a band played drums as the crowd marched in the blazing sun. In Waimaw, Kachin State, crowds carried flags and sang revolutionary songs. Many of the protesters across the country displayed images of Suu Kyi. His detention will expire on Monday.
His lawyer, Khin Maung Zaw, could not be reached for comment on what was planned to happen.
More than 384 people have been detained since the coup, the monitoring group Association for Assistance for Political Prisoners said, in a wave of mostly nightly arrests. “As the international community condemns the coup, Min Aung Hlaing uses all the tools he has to instigate fear and instability,” activist Wai Hnin Pwint Thon of the human rights group Burma Campaign UK said on Twitter, referring to the military ruler. .
‘STOP KIDNAPPING PEOPLE’
Residents joined together late on Saturday to patrol the streets in Yangon and the country’s second-largest city, Mandalay, fearing arrest raids and common crime. Concerns about crime increased after the junta announced on Friday that it would release 23,000 prisoners, saying the measure was consistent with “establishing a new democratic state with peace, development and discipline.”
Tin Myint, a Yangon resident, was among the crowd that detained a group of four people suspected of carrying out an attack in the neighborhood.
“We believe that the army intends to cause violence with these criminals by infiltrating them in peaceful protests,” he said.
He cited pro-democracy demonstrations in 1988, when the military was widely accused of releasing criminals into the population to organize attacks, and later cited the unrest as a justification for extending its own power.
Also late on Saturday, the military reinstated a law requiring people to report overnight visitors to their homes, allowed security forces to detain suspects and search private property without court approval, and ordered the arrest of known supporters of mass protests.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in the November elections that the military said were tainted with fraud, a charge dismissed by the electoral commission.
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She is a freelance blogger, writer, and speaker, and writes for various entertainment magazines.