Myanmar protesters adopt Hunger Games salute as thousands take to the streets in anti-coup protests

5

View
comments

Tens of thousands of anti-coup protesters have poured back onto the streets of Myanmar on Sunday, raising their hands in a three-fingered salute during the second day of mass demonstrations against the military takeover. 

The gesture is a symbol of resistance inspired by the Hunger Games film franchise, which takes place in a dystopian world whose characters live under a brutal totalitarian government that severely restricts their rights.

The salute was first taken up by Thai protesters opposing a 2014 military coup and has been a noticeable feature of pro-democracy demonstrations in the country ever since, including mass rallies last year.

Myanmarese protesters have now adopted the symbol of resistance at huge demonstrations against last Monday’s arrest of de-facto civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other top officials. 

Armed police clashed with a crowd in the southeastern town of Myawaddy, as live video published on Facebook showed shots were heard as police tried to break up the protest. 

In the video, uniformed police armed with guns rush at a crowd of a couple of hundred demonstrators. 

Shots can be heard but it is unclear what kind of munitions were used or whether there are any casualties. 

The Myawaddy protest was just one taking place across Myanmar on Sunday following the first mass demonstrations a day earlier condemning the coup that brought a 10-year experiment with partial democracy to a crashing halt.

This weekend’s demonstrations are the biggest protests in the country since the 2007 Saffron Revolution that helped spur a transition to democracy. 

Aside from the Myawaddy incident, the protests have been peaceful. 

Backed by a din of car horns, tens of thousands of changing protesters in Yangon, the largest city, held up banners reading ‘Justice for Myanmar’ and ‘We do not want military dictatorship’, while others waved the signature red flags of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party. 

Many of those present wore red t-shirts and carried red balloons in support of the NLD, chanting: ‘We don’t want military dictatorship! We want democracy!’ 

‘I completely despise the military coup and I am not afraid of a crackdown,’ said Kyi Phyu Kyaw, a 20-year-old university student.

‘I will join every day until Amay Suu (Mother Suu) is freed.’

The Yangon protesters had started gathering at City Hall in the afternoon, after their paths to downtown Yangon were blocked at many points by riot police. 

‘We will fight until the end,’ said Ye Kyaw, an 18-year-old economics student.

‘The next generation can have democracy if we end this military dictatorship.’

‘We don’t want to live under military boots,’ 29-year-old protester Ye Yint said. 

The surge in popular dissent over the weekend overrode a nationwide internet blackout, similar in magnitude to an earlier shutdown that coincided with the arrest of Suu Kyi and other senior leaders on Monday.

Later on Sunday, Reuters news agency reported that the internet had been restored in Yangon, citing residents.

There was no comment from the military in the capital Naypyitaw, more than 350 km (220 miles) north of Yangon. 

Online calls to protest have prompted bold displays of defiance, including the nightly deafening clamour of people banging pots and pans – a practice traditionally associated in the country with driving out evil spirits.

There was a smaller protest in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city while a crowd of hundreds spent the night outside a police station in the town of Payathonzu in Karen state in the southeast, where they believed local NLD lawmakers had been arrested.

There were also protests in other Asian countries, with some 300 people gathering at the United Nations office in Bangkok and Sunday, prompting Thai authorities to deploy riot police though there were no reports of clashes. 

Protests were also held in the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Osaka over the weekend. In Tokyo, a crowd of more than 5,000 gathered outside Myanmar’s embassy on Sunday to protest the coup.

Those gathered in Bangkok and Japan also raised the three-fingered salute. 

‘#Myanmar’s military and police must ensure the right to peaceful assembly is fully respected and demonstrators are not subjected to reprisals,’ the United Nations Human Rights office tweeted after Saturday’s protests.  

Also on Sunday, Pope Francis expressed his ‘solidarity with the people’ of Myanmar and urged leaders of the Buddhist-majority nation to seek ‘democratic’ harmony.

‘I pray that those in positions of responsibility in the country show sincere willingness to serve the common good, promoting social justice and national stability for a harmonious and democratic co-existence,’ Francis, who visited Myanmar in 2017, said in his Sunday address at St. Peter’s Square.

As the protests gathered steam this week, the military junta ordered telecom networks to freeze access to Facebook, an extremely popular service in the country and arguably its main mode of communication.

The platform had hosted a rapidly growing ‘Civil Disobedience Movement’ forum that had inspired civil servants, healthcare professionals and teachers to show their dissent by boycotting their jobs.

On Sunday, live Facebook video feeds showed the Yangon protesters as they marched through the streets. It was not immediately clear how they bypassed the government block.

The military had widened its efforts to quell organised dissent on Friday when it demanded new blocks on other social media services including Twitter.

Speaking on Sunday before reports of internet restrictions being lifted in Yangon, monitoring group Netblocks said that Myanmar ‘remains in the midst of a nation-scale internet blackout’, with connectivity at 14 percent of usual levels.

Tom Anders, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar said: ‘The generals are now attempting to paralyse the citizen movement of resistance – and keep the outside world in the dark – by cutting virtually all internet access.’

Dozens have been detained so far, in addition to Suu Kyi, 75, and her top aides.

The precise number of arrests is not yet known, but monitoring group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said on Saturday that more than 150 people were still in custody. 

Rumours that Suu Kyi had been released triggered brief but raucous street celebrations among her supporters on Saturday, before they were denied by her lawyer who said Suu Kyi remained in detention and he has not been able to see her. 

A Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the daughter of Myanmar’s independence hero, Suu Kyi spent nearly 15 years under house arrest during decades of struggling to end almost half a century of army rule before the start of a troubled transition to democracy in 2011.

She remains an immensely popular figure at home despite a tarnished reputation abroad.

Suu Kyi was sharply criticised for failing to condemn the military’s brutal crackdown on the Rohingya ethnic minority. In 2019 she lost what remaining credibility she had among the international community when she defended the military at an International Criminal Court hearing into atrocities against the Rohingyas in 2017. 

Suu Kyi has not been seen in public since the coup, but a party spokesman said on Friday that she was ‘in good health’.

Two days after the coup, criminal charges were filed against her related to the illegal import of a set of walkie-talkies. 

The military had hinted at its coup intentions days in advance, with army commander Min Aung Hlaing insisting that the NLD’s landslide victory in November elections was the result of voter fraud.

Following the takeover, the junta proclaimed a one-year state of emergency after which it promised to hold fresh elections, without offering any precise timeframe.

The coup has been widely condemned by the international community, with US President Joe Biden leading calls for the generals to relinquish power and release those arrested in the post-coup crackdown.