Plumes of smoke yesterday rose above a part of Myanmar’s biggest city that has turned into a battle zone, with burning barricades and security forces firing at unarmed protesters to enforce martial law.
Traumatized residents have fled the industrial neighborhood in Yangon that has become one of the flashpoint sites in a nationwide uprising against the Burmese military’s coup nearly seven weeks ago.
The junta has increasingly deployed heavier force to quell the demonstrations, with more than 200 protesters reported to have been killed in the crackdown.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Sunday was the deadliest day since the coup, with a monitoring group documenting more than 70 people killed — the bulk of them in Yangon’s Hlaingthaya Township.
The junta imposed martial law on Hlaingthaya and later on other protest hotspots — effectively placing nearly 2 million people under complete control of military commanders.
Residents — many of them migrant workers — have since fled to their home states, piling their belongings and families onto flat-bed trucks and the backs of motorcycles.
Photo: AFP
Those who stayed reported scenes akin to war.
“There was constant gunshots the entire night, and we didn’t get to sleep,” one resident said, adding that people were worried about even walking on the streets for fear of getting targeted by security forces.
“Currently there are very few people out on the streets,” the resident added.
Protesters on Tuesday evening camped on a bridge leading to the township’s main roads, wearing hard hats and gas masks, and carrying shields. They had also erected barricades made of tires, wood, sandbags and bamboo poles.
Some of those barricades were burnt, causing heavy black smoke to rise above the mostly deserted streets.
Some protesters threw Molotov cocktails at security forces, but otherwise appeared defenseless as they hid behind makeshift shields.
In a residential area of a neighboring township, video footage verified by Agence France-Presse showed volleys of gunfire going non-stop for about 15 seconds.
Information on arrests and violence have been trickling out of the conflict areas on social media — the flow slowed due to the junta’s throttling of mobile Internet data.
Residents in much of Myanmar have not been able to use their mobile Internet since the early hours of Monday. The country is also placed under a nightly Internet shutdown for eight hours.
More than 200 people have died in the unrest, local monitoring group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said.
The UN on Tuesday again condemned the deaths in Myanmar, adding that it was worried about reports of torture and deaths of those in custody.
“The death toll has soared over the past week in Myanmar, where security forces have been using lethal force increasingly aggressively against peaceful protesters,” UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told reporters. “Deeply distressing reports of torture in custody have also emerged.”
The office had determined that “at least five deaths in custody have occurred in recent weeks,” she said, adding that “at least two victims’ bodies have shown signs of severe physical abuse indicating that they were tortured.”
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