Junta faces mass strike
Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Myanmar for a ninth day of anti-coup demonstrations yesterday, as the new army rulers grappled to contain a strike by government workers that could cripple their ability to run the country.
Trains in parts of the country stopped running after staff refused to go to work, local media reported, while the military deployed soldiers to power plants only to be confronted by angry crowds.
As evening fell, armoured vehicles were seen in the commercial capital of Yangon for the first time since the coup, witnesses said.
A civil disobedience movement to protest against the Feb. 1 coup that deposed the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi started with doctors. It now affects a swathe of government departments.
The junta ordered civil servants to go back to work, threatening action. The army has been carrying out nightly mass arrests and on Saturday gave itself sweeping powers to detain people and search private property.
The military regime yesterday warned the public not to harbour fugitive political activists after issuing arrest warrants for veteran democracy campaigners supporting massive nationwide anti-coup protests.
Security forces have stepped up arrests of doctors and others joining a civil disobedience movement that has seen huge crowds throng streets in big urban centres and isolated frontier villages alike.
Richard Horsey, a Myanmar-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, said the work of many government departments had effectively ground to a halt. "This has the potential to also affect vital functions – the military can replace engineers and doctors, but not power grid controllers and central bankers," he said.
Nearly 400 have been arrested in the days since the coup, including many of Suu Kyi's top political allies. The country's new military leadership has so far been unmoved by a torrent of international condemnation.
But traditional allies of the country's armed forces, including Russia and China, have dissociated themselves from what they have described as interference in Myanmar's "internal affairs".
The junta insists it took power lawfully and has instructed journalists in the country not to refer to itself as a government that took power in a coup.
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