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The military junta that toppled the Myanmar government wrote that it shut down the internet across the country on Saturday Reuters. The military responded with a march of thousands of people in the streets of the capital, Yangon, on Saturday to protest the military coup.
On Monday, the army arrested the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, and a number of leaders of the National League for Democracy party, which won a stronger majority in the November 2020 parliamentary elections, and imposed a state of emergency in the country.
The first demonstration took place on Saturday after the coup, with demonstrators dressed in red for the “NLP” party chanting “Down with the military dictatorship” and “Victory for democracy”. The anti-military takeover movement was already organized on social media, so the junta demanded restrictions on Facebook and similar sites operating in the country early Thursday. However, by Saturday, that was no longer considered enough, and the internet was shut down as it was.
The military leadership did not respond to the press. Telenor Asa, a Norwegian company that provides services in the country, only told Reuters that authorities had ordered the company to block social sites. Soon, NGOs began to criticize the company for helping the military council suppress critical voices, but the company said it had to heed the authorities ’call, even though Telenor informed the government that the call went against international human rights law.
As we wrote earlier in our article on the coup, Mayan Mart led a different junta from 1962 to 2011 in the 2007 “Saffron Revolution”, and Cyclone Nargis, which destroyed half the country the following year, broke the military’s monopoly. In 2008, the military drafted a new constitution, and two years later it released Suu Kyi, who had been under house arrest until then, and in 2015, the National League for Democracy party, Suu Kyi, called for a relatively free election. However, the army still retains real power. The constitution they wrote stated that 25 percent of the seats always belong to the army, and since the constitution can only be changed by a vote of more than 75 percent of the representatives.
The international community condemned the coup on Monday, the UN Security Council also protested the arrest of Suu Kyi and others, and the US government called for sanctions. There is no news of Aoun San Suu Kyi since her arrest.
