We can bring down the regime: Myanmar’s protesting workers are unbowed

Myanmar’s coup leaders have called on hundreds of thousands of government employees — doctors, garbage collectors, electricity workers — to set their “emotion” aside, abandon their protests against the military, and return to work.

But Monday, even after the army had put armoured vehicles in the street in a nighttime show of power, the workers displayed little interest in returning to their jobs.

The work stoppages, which appear to be growing, are undermining the ruling generals as they try to assert their authority over the population after seizing power two weeks ago.

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The walkouts have been especially notable among government employees.

“There is no way we can work under a dictatorship,” said Dr Kyaw Zin, a surgeon who led one of the nation’s first walkouts at the government-run Mandalay General Hospital. “I am pretty sure we can bring down the regime.”

The civil disobedience movement has widespread support across the country. It targets the military’s extensive business interests and government functions essential to military rule, as well as encompassing street demonstrations and a noisy new evening ritual of banging on pots and pans.

The outpouring of support is all the more impressive given the military’s brutal history of gunning down pro-democracy protesters in 1988 and 2007. One expert on the government’s civil service system estimated that the country had about 1 million civil servants and that about three-quarters of them had walked off their jobs.

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On Monday morning, soldiers began appearing on the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, and Mandalay in place of police officers in prominent locations.

In a further sign of the military’s effort to stifle the protesters, internet service was halted in practically the entire country early Tuesday for the second consecutive day.

Overnight, the military had stationed armoured vehicles in downtown Yangon, apparently to intimidate the protesters. Instead, people placed placards on the vehicles with slogans such as “We Do Not Want Military Government” and posed with them for group photos.

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Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, leader of the Feb. 1 coup, had issued the call for government workers to return to work last week, saying they had been incited by “unscrupulous persons.”

In Mandalay on Monday afternoon, hundreds of protesters gathered outside offices of the state-run Myanmar Economic Bank and urged employees to join the walkout. Soldiers and police officers broke up the protest, chasing some demonstrators into nearby houses and beating them.