Myanmar halts "long march" protest and arrests leaders

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar’s military junta halted a 170-mile (270-km) protest march in its first few steps on Monday and arrested three of its organisers as one of the harshest crackdowns on dissent in 20 years showed no signs of abating.

The planned "long march" from Labutta, deep in the Irrawaddy Delta, to the former capital, Yangon, was the latest in a rare series of demonstrations against soaring costs of living and falling standards in the former Burma.

Organiser Aung Moe Win had aired his plans on the Myanmar-language service of Radio Free Asia (RFA), virtually guaranteeing police or pro-junta gangs turn up to break it up.

"The march was stopped by the authorities outside the town this morning and at least three leading activists, including Aung Moe Win, were arrested," a source in Labutta told Reuters.

In an interview with U.S.-funded RFA, Aung Moe Win had predicted the march -- an echo of Gandhi’s 1930 "Salt March" against British rule in India -- would run into trouble.

"We are not inciting unrest, just peacefully demonstrating the plight of the people," he said.

The opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) says more than 100 people have been arrested in the 10-day crackdown, one of the harshest since the army put down a mass uprising in 1988 with the loss of an .....continued below

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However, small protests at last month’s doubling of diesel prices and five-fold increase in the cost of gas, have continued.

Police in northern Rakhine state arrested a man on Sunday for waving a placard denouncing the hikes, a local source said.

Some dissidents have gone on hunger strike at police refusal to treat a protester with a broken leg, one activist said.

Most of the leaders of the 1988 protests, including Min Ko Naing, the most influential dissident after detained Nobel laureate and NLD chief Aung San Suu Kyi, have been picked up and the generals are tightening the net on those still at large.

Buses are being stopped and searched on the road to Thailand, a major escape route in 1988, and police have raided the homes of well-known activists and distributed their photographs to hotels and guesthouses around the city.

"DISCIPLINE-FLOURISHING DEMOCRACY"

Against this backdrop, the junta kept a tight lid on the formal completion of its National Convention, a 1,000-strong, hand-picked assembly that has taken 14 years to draw up the "detailed basic principles" of a new constitution.

Diplomats and reporters for foreign media were barred from the ceremony, at which acting Prime Minister Thein Sein promised that a constitution, referendum, elections and parliament would ensue under a seven-stage "roadmap to democracy".

He made no mention of any timescale, fuelling the suspicions of critics who believe the convention and roadmap are just a smokescreen to try to convince Myanmar’s 53 million people the generals are serious about restoring civilian rule one day.

Diplomats said the agreed framework for what the generals like to call "discipline-flourishing democracy" was a blueprint for continuation of 45 years of Burmese military rule in a country of more than 100 different ethnic groups.

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