Protesters defy junta crackdown in Myanmar town

YANGON (Reuters) – Around 50 members of Myanmar’s main opposition party staged a protest march in a provincial town on Monday, witnesses said, as a major junta crackdown failed to stifle rare displays of public anger at soaring fuel prices.

Gangs of men from the army’s feared Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) shadowed the march through Bago, 50 miles north of Yangon, taking pictures and video footage but did not intervene.


The protesters, all from the National League for Democracy (NLD) party of detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, agreed with police and town officials to halt their march after an hour, one of their leaders said. Nobody was arrested.

“We came to realize later that about 200 USDA thugs were waiting for us a couple of hundred yards away from where we were stopped. If we hadn’t stopped, something could have happened,” local NLD secretary Ko Thein Tan told Reuters by telephone.

Reuters