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Some armed with knives and clubs, others firing slingshot and throwing stones, supporters of Myanmar’s military attacked opponents of the coup in downtown Yangon on Thursday, while southeast Asian governments groped for ways to end the crisis.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the army seized power on February 1st and detained civilian government leader Aung San Suu Kyi and much of her party leadership after the military complained of fraud in a November election.
There have been about three weeks of daily protests and strikes and students planned to come out again in the commercial hub of Yangon on Thursday.
But before many opponents of the coup gathered, about 1,000 supporters of the military turned up for a rally in central Yangon.
Some of them threatened news photographers, media workers and witnesses said, and scuffles soon escalated into more serious violence in several parts of the city centre.
Some military supporters were photographed with clubs and knives. Some threw stones and fired catapults, witnesses said, and several people were beaten by groups of men.
Video footage showed several apparent supporters of the military, one wielding a knife, attacking a man outside a city-centre hotel.
Emergency workers helped the man as he lay on the pavement after his attackers moved off but his condition was not known.
“Today’s events show who the terrorists are. They’re afraid of the people’s action for democracy,” activist Thin Zar Shun Lei Yi told Reuters.
“We’ll continue our peaceful protests against dictatorship.”
The violence will compound worries about a country largely paralysed by protests and a civil disobedience campaign of strikes against the military.
Earlier, police blocked the gates of Yangon’s main university campus, stopping hundreds of students inside from coming out to demonstrate.
Doctors were also due to hold a protest as part of a so-called white coat revolution.
Facebook ban
Meanwhile, Facebook said that due to the risks evident from the “deadly violence” seen since the coup it had banned the Myanmar military from using its Facebook and Instagram platforms with immediate effect.
“Events since the February 1 coup, including deadly violence, have precipitated a need for this ban,” Facebook said in a blog post. “We believe the risks of allowing the Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) on Facebook and Instagram are too great.”
The army seized power this month after alleging fraud in a November 8th election swept by Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), detaining her and much of the party leadership. At least three protesters and one policeman have been killed in violence at rallies.
The US tech giant said it would also ban all “Tatmadaw-linked commercial entities” from advertising on its platforms.
It said the decision to ban the Myanmar army came due to “exceptionally severe human rights abuses and the clear risk of future military-initiated violence in Myanmar”, as well as the army’s repeated history of violating Facebook’s rules, including since the coup.
The military government could not immediately be reached for comment.
Facebook is widely used in Myanmar and has been one of the ways the junta has communicated with people, despite an official move to ban on the platform in the early days of the coup.
The platform in recent years has engaged with civil rights activists and democratic political parties in Myanmar and pushed back against the military after facing international criticism for failing to contain online hate campaigns. – Reuters