DM Monitoring
Naypyitaw: Myanmar security forces opened fire on protests against military rule on Wednesday, killing nine people, witnesses and media reported, a day after neighbouring countries called for restraint and offered to help Myanmar resolve the crisis.
The security forces resorted to live fire with little warning in several towns and cities, witnesses said, as the junta appeared more determined than ever to stamp out protests against the Feb. 1 coup that ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. “It’s horrific, it’s a massacre. No words can describe the situation and our feelings,” youth activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi told Reuters via a messaging app.
A spokesman for the ruling military council did not answer telephone calls seeking comment. In the central town of Myingyan, where one teenaged boy was killed, protest leader Si Thu Maung, told Reuters police initially fired tear gas and stun grenades but quickly opened fire.
“They didn’t spray us with water cannon, no warning to disperse, they just fired their guns,” he said. The heaviest toll was in another central town, Monywa, where five people four men and one woman were killed, said Ko Thit Sar, editor of the Monywa Gazette.
“We’ve confirmed with family members and doctors, five people have been killed,” he told Reuters. “At least 30 people are wounded, some still unconscious.”
Two people were killed in the country’s second-biggest city Mandalay, a witness and media reports said, and one person was killed when police opened fire in the main city of Yangon, a witness there said. At least 31 people have been killed since the coup.
The violence took place a day after foreign ministers from Southeast Asian neighbours urged restraint but failed to unite behind a call for the release Suu Kyi and the restoration of democracy.
“The country is like the Tiananmen Square in most of its major cities,” the Archbishop of Yangon, Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, said on Twitter, referring to the suppression of student-led protests in Beijing in 1989.
Security forces also detained about 300 protesters as they broke up protests in Yangon, the Myanmar Now news agency reported. Video posted on social media showed lines of young men, hands on heads, filing into army trucks as police and soldiers stood guard. Reuters was unable to verify the footage.
Images of a 19-year-old woman, one of the two shot dead in Mandalay, showed her wearing a T-shirt that read “Everything will be OK”. Police in Yangon ordered three medics out of an ambulance, shot up the windscreen and then kicked and beat the workers with gun butts and batons, video broadcast by U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia showed. Reuters was unable to verify the video independently.
Democracy activist Esther Ze Naw told Reuters that the sacrifices of those who died would not be in vain. “We will continue this fight and win. We shall overcome this and win,” she said. On Tuesday, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) failed to make a breakthrough in a virtual foreign ministers’ meeting on Myanmar. While united in a call for restraint, only four members, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, called for the release of Suu Kyi.
