Yangon (Burma), March 9th (EFE). – Hundreds of protesters managed to leave their hideouts in one of Yangon’s central neighborhoods, which had been besieged by security forces on Tuesday night.
The protesters, many of them women who participated in the rallies marking Women’s Day, were stranded in Sanshong District, southeast Rangoon, after police blocked all access to the area at the last minute of Monday afternoon.
Security forces repeatedly threw stun grenades and fired as protesters shouted for permission to leave.
Many of them hid in nearby homes, waiting for the police and intelligence services, who terrorized residents by knocking on doors from house to house, to lift the siege.
The siege ended at around 4:00 AM (21:30 GMT on Monday) but some of the besiegers told Efe that they were still waiting until sunrise to leave their hideouts for fear that the pullout was a sham from the uniform.
Eyewitnesses said that at least 40 people were arrested during the siege, and indicated that military trucks left the place with the detainees.
Tension and uncertainty about what was happening prompted the embassies of the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada to demand that the military and police allow hundreds of protesters, most of them young men, to leave the area and return home. .
Upon being informed of this extremely tense situation, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, called on the Burmese authorities last night to release the trapped protesters and called for the maximum containment of the security forces.
The United Nations also insisted once again that the right to peaceful protest must be respected and that demonstrators must not be subjected to any form of retaliation.
Burma (Myanmar) has in recent weeks been the scene of mass protests demanding the army to restore democracy, respect the results of the November elections and release all detainees since the uprising, including the ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
The crackdown by the security forces led to the killing of more than fifty people and at least three people on Monday on the day of a general strike in an attempt to put pressure on the army.
The United Nations also warned that the humanitarian situation in the country is critical, given that the coup has affected relief operations that must support more than a million people, including about 350,000 internally displaced people. EFE
bir-nc / raa / fr
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| K: POL: Politics and Conflict |
| Q: DCG: en-ES: 16004000: Troubles and Conflict: Coup d’etat |
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