MANDALAY, Myanmar (AP) – Health workers marched through Myanmar’s second largest city at dawn on Sunday, starting yet another day of protests across the country against last month’s coup. Elsewhere, the police used violence against demonstrators and security forces killed at least one person.
About 100 doctors, nurses, medical students and pharmacists, wearing long white coats, lined up on a main road in Mandalay to chant slogans and express their opposition to the February 1 coup that overthrew the elected civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi .
Mandalay has been a major center of opposition to the acquisition and, later, the engineers there carried out what was dubbed “non-human attack”, an increasingly popular tactic that involves the alignment of signs on the streets or other public areas such as prosecutors for human protesters.
The protests are part of a broader civil disobedience movement, including boycotts and strikes, aimed at restoring civilian government and returning Myanmar to its slow march towards democracy that began almost a decade ago when the military began to loosen its grip after five decades of government
In recent weeks, however, the number of protesters has declined and the death toll has increased due to the lethal force of police and soldiers shooting at the crowd. The independent Association of Assistance to Political Prisoners reported 247 deaths across the country.
While Mandalay’s early morning march was not harassed by security forces, at least one protester was shot dead on Sunday in Monywa, another city in central Myanmar, according to the online news site Myanmar Now and several publications on the social networks.
Myanmar Now, quoting a doctor in Monywa, identified the victim as Min Min Zaw, who was shot in the head while helping to set up barricades for a protest. Virtually all of the dead since the coup have been shooting at the victims and, in many cases, have been shot in the head.
Elsewhere, students, teachers and engineers marched in Dawei, a city in southeastern Myanmar that has become an opposition center and witnessed at least five deaths by security forces.
On Sunday, the protesters split into small groups and varied their march times in an effort to avoid clashes. In the initial period after the coup, protests were widely attended. But after the police claimed to shoot crowds, attendance declined.
In a more rural outlying area, protesters from several villages in Launglone Township demonstrated on motorcycles.
In the Thaketa neighborhood of Yangon, a funeral was held on Sunday for 15-year-old student Aung Kaung Htet, who was killed a day earlier, Myanmar Now reported.
According to social media posts, Thaketa was one of several areas where police fired their weapons on Sunday, the others including Tachileik and Taunnggyi in Shan state, in eastern Myanmar, and Gangaw, a city in the Magway Division on the central-west of the country.
The cause of the protesters over the weekend was supported by demonstrations in several places abroad, including Tokyo, Taipei in Taiwan and Times Square in New York.
Although nearly 250 deaths have been confirmed since the coup, the Association of Assistance to Political Prisoners says the actual total, including cases where verification was difficult, is likely to be much higher.
The group also confirmed that 2,345 people had been arrested or charged since the coup, with 1,994 still detained or wanted for prison.