https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p7DoE_IP8Q
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Biden launches barbaric attack on immigrants
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/16/immi-m16.html
Eric London
17 hours ago
The scenes playing out across the US-Mexico border disqualify the US government from ever lecturing the world on “human rights,” its favorite pretext for invading countries and laying waste to entire societies.
The number of immigrant children detained by the US government has risen from 3,200 to 4,200 this week. Children report to attorneys that they are not allowed to shower and that they have not seen the sky in days. Yesterday, the Biden administration announced that instead of releasing children to family members, the government will transport 3,000 teenage boys to a Dallas convention hall, which they have chillingly dubbed an “immigrant decompression center.”
The events make clear that far from representing a break with Donald Trump, the Democratic Party is continuing and deepening his anti-immigrant policies. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the situation at the border a “humanitarian crisis,” as though the Biden administration and her own party were not primarily responsible for it.
The scant media attention to the attacks on immigrants has focused on the mass detention of unaccompanied children, presenting the matter as a “crisis.” Republican members of Congress traveled to the border on Monday, masquerading as the Child Protection League, declaring that the “barbaric” conditions of migrant children traveling to the US border “broke their hearts.” In other words, they want them kept out.
Perhaps even worse than the conditions imposed by the Biden administration on the children and youth that it has allowed to enter the country is its decision to summarily expel all arriving adult immigrants and those children crossing with relatives on the grounds that they pose a health risk due to the coronavirus.
In a late January letter to the Biden administration, dozens of medical experts explained that such “Title 42” expulsions serve no medical purpose: “Imposing restrictions on asylum seekers and other migrants based on immigration status is discriminatory and has no scientific basis as a public health measure.” Title 42 abolishes due process, ends the right to apply for asylum or other relief, and denies immigrants the right to appear for a hearing before expulsion. Seventy percent of the over 100,000 people who attempted to cross the border in February, including thousands of children, were expelled in this manner.
Those immigrants deported under Title 42 are sent back across the border after US authorities strip them of their possessions, including their shoelaces, leaving them to shuffle across bridges into Mexico. Many are flown hundreds of miles away from where they crossed, to be expelled at a different point along the border. Thousands presently find themselves homeless or detained along the US-Mexico border where the pandemic is spreading unabated.
In Mexico, immigrants are held in government facilities that a Doctors Without Borders official described as “worse than a makeshift camp, you don’t even have access to proper water.” The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced yesterday it has detained 1,000 children in such facilities, complying with demands by the Biden administration for a harsher crackdown. Mexican officials have also conducted a series of high-profile mass raids in recent weeks on behalf of the US.
The crackdown has resulted in death on a mass scale. On Saturday, the Guatemalan town of Comitancillo held a funeral for 11 town residents, who were murdered by gang members and their bodies burned in a car fire while trying to enter the US in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas in January—a crime which Mexican authorities covered up. Earlier this month, a car packed with immigrants crashed while attempting to enter the US, killing 13 immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Adult immigrants and accompanied children who are “fortunate” enough to make it into the United States without summary expulsion are held in crowded detention centers where COVID-19 is also spreading like wildfire. There are presently 420 active cases in detention centers, up from 370 at the end of last week. A total of 10,000 detainees have been infected with the virus since the start of the pandemic.
As for those who are able to win release from detention centers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been dropping off sick COVID-positive immigrants in towns on the Texas side of the border to fend for themselves without medical attention and without informing medical officials or local non-profits.
This reality exposes the lie that the Democratic Party represents a “lesser evil” compared to the Trump administration’s fascistic attack on immigrants. Even under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, immigrants were ostensibly allowed to apply for asylum, unlike today.
The Biden administration will soon introduce its main immigration bill, the US Citizenship Act. In announcing the bill, Biden and Democrats will spew meaningless platitudes about how America is “a nation of immigrants” (one might add, despite their best efforts). But the bill does nothing to undo the criminalization of immigrants and will pave the way for millions of deportations, especially of those who are now trying to enter the United States, as well as those with criminal records.
Under the bill, immigrants will still have no right to an attorney, the network of immigration jails will remain open, the immigration court system will remain under the control of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), child detention will remain “legal,” the border will be further militarized, hundreds of millions of dollars will go to arming Central American police and death squads and a “public information campaign” will be conducted to scare Central Americans away from trying to reach the US border.
Workers in the United States and Europe must come to the defense of their class allies in Mexico, Central and South America, rejecting the xenophobic propaganda coming from the capitalist parties and the corporate media.
Those risking their lives to enter the US and EU are workers, small farmers and ruined small shopkeepers from countries whose natural resources have been plundered and whose population has been exploited and suppressed by powerful corporations and imperialist-backed dictators for over a century.
The coronavirus pandemic has killed nearly 800,000 across Latin America. The World Economic Forum estimated that 500 million people will fall into poverty, while the International Labor Organization predicted that 1.6 billion informal jobs worldwide—including a large section of the working class in Latin America—will be lost or see huge wage cuts. The total amount of income loss suffered by the international working class in 2020 was $3.4 trillion, roughly equal to the amount gained by the world’s richest people. The World Bank reported that 800 million immigrant family members have lost $110 billion in remittance transfers from the US and Europe for food and other necessities.
Workers in the advanced and underdeveloped countries alike confront hardship as a direct result of the policies of the ruling classes. The global working class must mobilize its tremendous social power in the struggle against these conditions by uniting across national boundaries. For this reason, defending the democratic rights of immigrant workers is a strategic imperative in the fight for socialist revolution.
Watch SEP meeting video: “The Coles Smeaton Grange struggle: The next stage for the working class”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/16/cole-m16.html
Our reporter
13 hours ago
Last Sunday, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) held a public meeting reviewing the political lessons of the more than three-month lockout of Coles workers at the company’s Smeaton Grange warehouse in southwestern Sydney.
The event was attended by almost 90 people, including postal and warehousing workers, as well as teachers and students in Australia, along with participants from New Zealand and Sri Lanka.
Late last month, the Smeaton Grange workers were starved into accepting a sellout agreement by the United Workers Union (UWU), which isolated their locked out members, refusing to provide strike pay or organise any support for industrial action by other Coles workers.
The return-to-work agreement, which had been consistently rejected by workers during the lockout, ratified the closure of the warehouse and the axing of all its jobs in exchange for a paltry wage and redundancy deal demanded by the multi-billion dollar supermarket corporation.
The determined struggle of the Smeaton Grange workers bluntly exposed the unions as an industrial police force, highlighting the urgent need for a new strategy and organisations of working class struggle.
Sunday’s meeting, which can be watched below was, and remains, the only public event examining the longest industrial dispute in Australia’s largest city in decades.
Quad summit consolidates US-led military bloc to prepare for war against China
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/16/quad-m16.html
Peter Symonds
14 hours ago
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard with then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012 (Wikipedia)
The first leaders’ summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, which took place online last Friday, has dramatically raised the stakes in the accelerating US-led war drive against China. While the Quad is not yet a formal military alliance, the Biden administration clearly views the consolidation of the partnership as a central element in its efforts to undermine, encircle and prepare for military conflict against China.
The summit not only issued a formal statement. Unusually also, Biden and the prime ministers of India, Australia and Japan—Narendra Modi, Scott Morrison and Yoshihide Suga respectively—put their names to an opinion piece published prominently in the Washington Post on Sunday. The comment is replete with cynical motherhood statements about their advocacy of democracy, action on climate change and COVID-19 vaccines, and commitment to “an Indo-Pacific region that is free, open, secure and prosperous.”
However, while China is not mentioned, it dominated the discussion at the summit. The pledges by the four leaders to pursue regional co-operation, partnership and engagement do not, of course, extend to Beijing. Buried in the various public statements were thinly-veiled references to Chinese coercion—from the US that has routinely waged war and ousted governments to advance its imperialist interests—and the need to uphold “freedom of navigation”—that is, for the US Navy to provocatively intrude into waters around Chinese-controlled islets in the South China Sea.
The Washington Post comment includes a fanciful history of the Quad—supposedly borne out of the cooperation of the four countries in response to the catastrophic 2004 tsunami in Asia. “Our cooperation, known as the Quad, was born in crisis. It became a diplomatic dialogue in 2007 and was reborn in 2017,” the leaders write. How and why it mysteriously disappeared, and reappeared a decade later, is left unexplained.
Yet the genesis of the Quad is very revealing. It did not begin with the tsunami but with the election of the right-wing Japanese politician Shinzo Abe as prime minister in 2006. He called for enhancing the US-Japan military alliance by forging close partnerships with India and Australia. The plan was driven by growing concerns in the Japanese ruling class about China, which was about to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy. The Bush administration, under fire from the Democrats for inaction over China, seized on the proposal and the first official meeting took place in May 2007. Its military purpose was underscored in September 2007 by the expansion of the annual US-India Malabar naval war games to include the navies of Australia and Japan.
Beijing protested against the formation of what was emerging as a military alliance in the Indo-Pacific targeting China. The Quad ignominiously collapsed months later in February 2008 when the newly-elected Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, concerned about relations with Australia’s largest trading partner and the danger of war, abruptly withdrew from the dialogue. Foreign Minister Steven Smith underscored the Canberra’s determination not to join a grouping that could be construed as anti-Chinese by making the announcement while standing alongside Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
Rudd’s withdrawal from the Quad was just one of the “crimes” for which he was ousted in a US-orchestrated regime-change operation in June 2010. While he was fully committed to the US-Australian alliance, Rudd’s advocacy of the US making compromises with China to avert war came into conflict with the thrust of the Obama administration’s policy to confront China. Rudd was summarily removed as prime minister by four key Labor powerbrokers, later revealed by WikiLeaks to be “protected sources” of the US embassy in Canberra, in an operation that kept, not only the public, but Labor ministers and party members in the dark.
The following year, in November 2011, Obama, who had twice called off visits to Australia when Rudd was in office, announced his “pivot to Asia” strategy directed against China. Unveiled by Obama in the Australian parliament, the “pivot” involved comprehensive diplomatic, economic and strategic plans to undermine and encircle China throughout the region. Militarily, the Pentagon foreshadowed the restructuring of US bases in the region, the strengthening of alliances and strategic partnerships and the transfer of 60 percent of its naval and air assets to Asia. While in Australia, Obama and a fawning Prime Minister Julia Gillard signed an agreement to station US Marines in the country’s north.
Biden, as vice president under Obama and former chair of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was closely involved in all these machinations. By convening last Friday’s summit, he elevated the Quad to a new level, demonstrating that his administration will intensify the aggressive anti-China stance of the Obama and Trump administrations. The Quad, which was revived under Trump, is about to play a far more prominent role, with regular ministerial-level meetings, a face-to-face summit later this year, and a further expansion of joint military exercises.
None of the strategic commentators on the Quad is under any misapprehension that it is targeting China. It is already a quasi-military alliance engaged in a range of annual war games. Australia and Japan are longstanding military allies of the US, while India has forged intimate ties through a strategic partnership that includes comprehensive basing arrangements and technological assistance.
In the lead-up to the Quad summit, Trump’s former Defence Secretary James “mad-dog” Mattis and two other military analysts wrote a comment for Foreign Policy entitled “Getting the Quad right is Biden’s most important job.” It said “the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue is the best hope for standing up to China.” It declared that Biden faced “a resurgent China, more confident than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic” and praised him for continuing Trump’s initiative in reviving the Quad.
The comment identified four areas where the Quad had to take action: to counter China in the South China and East China Seas; to ensure “supply-chain security”—that is, to guarantee access to vital imports necessary to fight a war; to maintain the technological edge over China particularly in crucial hi-tech areas; and to enhance diplomatic ties throughout Asia, “in ways not possible for Washington alone.” All four areas were referred to, if only obliquely, in the joint statement issued by the Quad leaders. Each item has been a preoccupation of the US military as it prepares to fight what would be a war between nuclear-armed powers with incalculable consequences.
Over the past decade, the US plans for war against China have been more and more evident: from the steady military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific, including anti-ballistic systems designed for fighting a nuclear war, to the increasingly strident and bellicose anti-Chinese propaganda, featuring fraudulent “human rights” campaigns over Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, Hong Kong and Taiwan aimed, above all, at weakening and fracturing China.
In the lead-up to the Quad summit, the head of the US Indo-Pacific command, Admiral Philip Davidson testified to the US Congress. He called for a doubling of the Pentagon’s budget for the region and predicted that the US could face war with China within five years. The headlong plunge toward war by US imperialism is driven by the fear in Washington that China is overtaking it economically and technologically, as well as by the need to direct the tensions fuelled by the profound political and social crisis at home outward against an external enemy.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) have been alone in warning the working class of growing danger of a disastrous world war and calling for a unified international anti-war movement of workers. In its powerful statement entitled “Socialism and the Fight Against War” issued in February 2016, the ICFI outlined the principles that have to animate such a movement:
The struggle against war must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population.
The new anti-war movement must be anti-capitalist and socialist, since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and put an end to the economic system that is the fundamental cause of militarism and war.
The new anti-war movement must therefore, of necessity, be completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organisations of the capitalist class.
The new anti-war movement must, above all, be international, mobilising the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle against imperialism.
We urge workers and young people who want to discuss these issues and join in the struggle to build such an international anti-war movement to contact us.
The first leaders’ summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, which took place online last Friday, has dramatically raised the stakes in the accelerating US-led war drive against China. While the Quad is not yet a formal military alliance, the Biden administration clearly views the consolidation of the partnership as a central element in its efforts to undermine, encircle and prepare for military conflict against China.
The summit not only issued a formal statement. Unusually also, Biden and the prime ministers of India, Australia and Japan—Narendra Modi, Scott Morrison and Yoshihide Suga respectively—put their names to an opinion piece published prominently in the Washington Post on Sunday. The comment is replete with cynical motherhood statements about their advocacy of democracy, action on climate change and COVID-19 vaccines, and commitment to “an Indo-Pacific region that is free, open, secure and prosperous.”
However, while China is not mentioned, it dominated the discussion at the summit. The pledges by the four leaders to pursue regional co-operation, partnership and engagement do not, of course, extend to Beijing. Buried in the various public statements were thinly-veiled references to Chinese coercion—from the US that has routinely waged war and ousted governments to advance its imperialist interests—and the need to uphold “freedom of navigation”—that is, for the US Navy to provocatively intrude into waters around Chinese-controlled islets in the South China Sea.
The Washington Post comment includes a fanciful history of the Quad—supposedly borne out of the cooperation of the four countries in response to the catastrophic 2004 tsunami in Asia. “Our cooperation, known as the Quad, was born in crisis. It became a diplomatic dialogue in 2007 and was reborn in 2017,” the leaders write. How and why it mysteriously disappeared, and reappeared a decade later, is left unexplained.
Yet the genesis of the Quad is very revealing. It did not begin with the tsunami but with the election of the right-wing Japanese politician Shinzo Abe as prime minister in 2006. He called for enhancing the US-Japan military alliance by forging close partnerships with India and Australia. The plan was driven by growing concerns in the Japanese ruling class about China, which was about to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy. The Bush administration, under fire from the Democrats for inaction over China, seized on the proposal and the first official meeting took place in May 2007. Its military purpose was underscored in September 2007 by the expansion of the annual US-India Malabar naval war games to include the navies of Australia and Japan.
Beijing protested against the formation of what was emerging as a military alliance in the Indo-Pacific targeting China. The Quad ignominiously collapsed months later in February 2008 when the newly-elected Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, concerned about relations with Australia’s largest trading partner and the danger of war, abruptly withdrew from the dialogue. Foreign Minister Steven Smith underscored the Canberra’s determination not to join a grouping that could be construed as anti-Chinese by making the announcement while standing alongside Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
Rudd’s withdrawal from the Quad was just one of the “crimes” for which he was ousted in a US-orchestrated regime-change operation in June 2010. While he was fully committed to the US-Australian alliance, Rudd’s advocacy of the US making compromises with China to avert war came into conflict with the thrust of the Obama administration’s policy to confront China. Rudd was summarily removed as prime minister by four key Labor powerbrokers, later revealed by WikiLeaks to be “protected sources” of the US embassy in Canberra, in an operation that kept, not only the public, but Labor ministers and party members in the dark.
The following year, in November 2011, Obama, who had twice called off visits to Australia when Rudd was in office, announced his “pivot to Asia” strategy directed against China. Unveiled by Obama in the Australian parliament, the “pivot” involved comprehensive diplomatic, economic and strategic plans to undermine and encircle China throughout the region. Militarily, the Pentagon foreshadowed the restructuring of US bases in the region, the strengthening of alliances and strategic partnerships and the transfer of 60 percent of its naval and air assets to Asia. While in Australia, Obama and a fawning Prime Minister Julia Gillard signed an agreement to station US Marines in the country’s north.
Biden, as vice president under Obama and former chair of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was closely involved in all these machinations. By convening last Friday’s summit, he elevated the Quad to a new level, demonstrating that his administration will intensify the aggressive anti-China stance of the Obama and Trump administrations. The Quad, which was revived under Trump, is about to play a far more prominent role, with regular ministerial-level meetings, a face-to-face summit later this year, and a further expansion of joint military exercises.
None of the strategic commentators on the Quad is under any misapprehension that it is targeting China. It is already a quasi-military alliance engaged in a range of annual war games. Australia and Japan are longstanding military allies of the US, while India has forged intimate ties through a strategic partnership that includes comprehensive basing arrangements and technological assistance.
In the lead-up to the Quad summit, Trump’s former Defence Secretary James “mad-dog” Mattis and two other military analysts wrote a comment for Foreign Policy entitled “Getting the Quad right is Biden’s most important job.” It said “the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue is the best hope for standing up to China.” It declared that Biden faced “a resurgent China, more confident than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic” and praised him for continuing Trump’s initiative in reviving the Quad.
The comment identified four areas where the Quad had to take action: to counter China in the South China and East China Seas; to ensure “supply-chain security”—that is, to guarantee access to vital imports necessary to fight a war; to maintain the technological edge over China particularly in crucial hi-tech areas; and to enhance diplomatic ties throughout Asia, “in ways not possible for Washington alone.” All four areas were referred to, if only obliquely, in the joint statement issued by the Quad leaders. Each item has been a preoccupation of the US military as it prepares to fight what would be a war between nuclear-armed powers with incalculable consequences.
Over the past decade, the US plans for war against China have been more and more evident: from the steady military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific, including anti-ballistic systems designed for fighting a nuclear war, to the increasingly strident and bellicose anti-Chinese propaganda, featuring fraudulent “human rights” campaigns over Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, Hong Kong and Taiwan aimed, above all, at weakening and fracturing China.
In the lead-up to the Quad summit, the head of the US Indo-Pacific command, Admiral Philip Davidson testified to the US Congress. He called for a doubling of the Pentagon’s budget for the region and predicted that the US could face war with China within five years. The headlong plunge toward war by US imperialism is driven by the fear in Washington that China is overtaking it economically and technologically, as well as by the need to direct the tensions fuelled by the profound political and social crisis at home outward against an external enemy.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) have been alone in warning the working class of growing danger of a disastrous world war and calling for a unified international anti-war movement of workers. In its powerful statement entitled “Socialism and the Fight Against War” issued in February 2016, the ICFI outlined the principles that have to animate such a movement:
The struggle against war must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population.
The new anti-war movement must be anti-capitalist and socialist, since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and put an end to the economic system that is the fundamental cause of militarism and war.
The new anti-war movement must therefore, of necessity, be completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organisations of the capitalist class.
The new anti-war movement must, above all, be international, mobilising the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle against imperialism.
We urge workers and young people who want to discuss these issues and join in the struggle to build such an international anti-war movement to contact us.
Bloodiest crackdown yet on Myanmar protests
Owen Howell
14 hours ago
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/16/myan-m16.html
Myanmar’s military regime launched a vicious crackdown on unarmed protesters on Sunday, in which at least 63 people were killed and hundreds injured by security forces firing live ammunition, making it by far the bloodiest day since the February 1 military coup.
Doctors and rescue workers fear that the present toll of over 150 deaths will continue to rise as many of the wounded victims are in critical condition. Reports are also surfacing of dead bodies seized by police, after protesters were unable to retrieve them.
As previously, demonstrations in towns and cities across the country were confronted early in the day by a massive show of force by riot police and soldiers. One protester was shot dead in Mandalay, the second largest city, and another in Hpakant in Kachin State. Two were found dead after gunfire dispersed a mass student rally in Bago: a young boy and a woman whose body was dumped in a drain by security forces.
However, the most shocking display of violence was in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, where at least 59 people so far have been reported dead. Military assaults were largely focused on the city’s poor industrial suburbs, including Hlaingthaya, Thingangyun, Shwepyitha, Kyimyindaing, and South Dagon townships. Local hospitals were still filling with dead or seriously wounded protesters late Sunday night and Monday morning.
Health workers spoke to the independent news agency Myanmar Now of the devastation. A senior official at Yangon General Hospital claimed that seven of 56 people brought to hospital were pronounced dead on arrival, while Thingangyun Sanpya Hospital received around 18 dead and 70 injured, according to a striking doctor. In Hlaingthaya, which witnessed the bulk of the violence, 34 dead protesters were brought to the main hospital and 40 others admitted with serious gunshot wounds.
The killing in Hlaingthaya Township, a working-class district on the western outskirts of Yangon, reportedly began after fires broke out at two separate garment factories early Sunday afternoon. Hlaingthaya is home to a large population of impoverished migrant workers from rural areas across the country.
The circumstances surrounding the factory fires remain murky. An official from the industrial zone explained that the factories, Global Fashion and Tsang Yih, were owned by Chinese and Taiwanese investors, and that the cause of the fires is still under investigation. No group has claimed responsibility.
Nevertheless, military-run Myawaddy TV stated that protesters, whom the junta is labelling “criminals,” had set four factories and a fertiliser plant ablaze and stopped fire engines from reaching them. Additionally, the Chinese embassy said many Chinese staff were injured and trapped in the arson attacks, with Beijing-based CGTN later claiming people armed with iron bars, axes, and petrol attacked 10 factories in Hlaingthaya. In response, protest leader Ei Thinzar Maung has insisted on Facebook that only two factories were found burnt.
Military trucks swiftly rolled into the streets at around 1p.m. when soldiers opened fire on gatherings of peaceful protesters. The shooting continued all day and raged on into the night, residents said. Witnesses observed that troops used the nearby Aung Zeya bridge as a vantage point to fire on fleeing protesters, injuring dozens in the neighbouring Insein Township with sustained bursts of gunfire and rubber bullets.
Retreating protesters carried injured people where they could. Footage from the Democratic Voice of Burma showed some attempting to revive dying victims. Billows of black smoke covered much of the district as police set fire to roadblocks constructed by protesters.
A Hlaingthaya protester told the Irrawaddy newspaper, “These shootings are totally unacceptable. They are not dispersing the protests. They are just murdering the people with violence.”
Video on social media showed that protesters demonstrated considerable courage, reconvening throughout the day. Mostly wearing hard hats and gas masks, protesters sprayed fire extinguishers as they fled, in order to smother tear gas and create a screen between them and police.
Atrocities also occurred elsewhere in Yangon. In Tamwe Township, police dragged the wounded body of a junior medical student lying in a pool of blood while kicking and beating a woman trying to save him. Hours-long shooting was also reported in South Dagon Township, where around 50 were injured and three confirmed dead, including a 15-year-old girl who was shot in the head and abdomen.
Martial law was later imposed on numerous Yangon townships where protests had been the largest: Hlaingthaya and Shwepyitha on Sunday night, and South Dagon, North Dagon, Dagon Seikkan, and North Okkalapa on Monday morning. More direct military control of security, instead of police, was also declared in several parts of Mandalay.
The announcement, broadcast on state-owned MRTV, said the junta was enhancing security to restore “law and order,” entrusting Yangon’s regional commander with administrative and judicial powers in the area under his command. Moreover, in an apparent bid to suppress news of Sunday’s turmoil, telecoms service providers were ordered to block all mobile data nationwide, two sources told Reuters, leaving all mobile internet inaccessible.
The bloodshed followed a week of heightened state repression. After the violence unleashed on March 3, authorities have relentlessly terrorised neighbourhoods in Yangon, conducting mass arbitrary arrests and nighttime police raids, during which they have beaten civilians with impunity, fired gunshots at buildings, set off stun grenades, and damaged cars and shopfronts.
In particular, these actions have targeted sections of workers who have played pivotal roles in the widespread strikes and work stoppages known as the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), such as doctors, civil servants, and railway workers. Thailand-based monitoring group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners confirmed that at least 2,150 people had been detained by Saturday, the vast majority of them workers associated with the CDM.
An onslaught of soldiers and police on Saturday killed 13 protesters, meaning the weekend toll is as many as 72 dead. Five were shot dead in Mandalay, two in the central town of Pyay, and a truck driver in Chauk, Magway Region died after being shot in the chest.
In Yangon, where five were killed and dozens more injured, soldiers occupied hospitals and prevented families from collecting their relatives’ bodies. The killings did not stop the mostly young demonstrators who crowded into a downtown commercial area intersection past the official 8 p.m. curfew to hold a mass candlelight vigil. Similar after-dark rallies were held in Mandalay.
Saturday’s protests were called online to commemorate victims of the 1988 uprising against military rule, which was crushed by the armed forces in a brutal crackdown that killed an estimated 3,000 people. It has become clearer after last week that the military is fully prepared to ramp up repression even further and oversee a crackdown on the scale of the 1988 massacre.
The junta’s use of violence has greatly intensified since February 20, when security personnel attacked striking shipyard workers in Mandalay, deliberately firing live rounds on protesters for the first time.
The mounting pressure caused by the nationwide strike movement—which has persisted for six weeks and paralysed major sectors of the economy—is also driving the military to adopt more drastic political measures.
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