Reuters
(Asiannewshub) – Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Myanmar’s cities on Saturday to denounce this week’s coup and demand the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi despite a blockade on the internet by the junta.
In an upwelling of anger in the country’s largest city, Yangon, protesters chanted, “Military dictator, fail, fail; Democracy, win, win” and held banners reading “Against military dictatorship”. Bystanders offered them food and water.
Many in the crowds wore red, the colour of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) which won Nov. 8 elections in a landslide, a result the generals have refused to recognise, claiming fraud.
Thousands marched on Yangon’s City Hall. Drivers honked horns and leaned out of their cars and raised the three-finger salute, a gesture returned by protesters. Some of them held up NLD flags or pictures of Suu Kyi and clapped and danced.
By evening, the protesters had mostly dispersed. But for a fifth night, a cacophony rose in the darkness as people banged on pots, pans and drums in a show of resistance even as power cuts affected many districts of the city.
Thousands more took to the streets in Myanmar’s second city Mandalay and its military-built capital Naypyidaw, home to the nation’s government servants, where demonstrators chanted anti-coup slogans and called for Suu Kyi’s release.
The protests built despite a blockade of the internet imposed after demonstrators first began to gather. All day, the state-run broadcaster MRTV showed scenes praising the military.
Monitoring group NetBlocks Internet Observatory reported a “national-scale internet blackout”, saying on Twitter that connectivity had fallen to 16% of usual levels.
The junta did not respond to requests for comment. It extended a social media crackdown to Twitter and Instagram after seeking to silence dissent by blocking Facebook, which counts half of the population as users.
