Myanmar student protesters (L) clash with riot police during a march in Letpadan town, north of Yangon, on Tuesday. AFP PHOTO/Phyo Hein Kyaw
After arresting 127 activists campaigning for changes to a controversial education bill approved last year, authorities say they will release the “real” students so they can go home and study, but “action will be taken” against everyone else, state media reported on Thursday.
According to the article, which ran on the front page of government newspaper The Global New Light of Myanmar, police are questioning 127 detainees, 20 of whom are women, “in order to hand over real students who are studying at schools, colleges and universities to their parents.”
The paper cited “empathy for their [the protesters’] parents, leniency, and intention to allow them to continue their studies” as reasons for letting them go.
Monks who vowed not to participate in politics were released, the paper reported.
Yee Mon, a Yangon University student, was one of those freed on Thursday. She told the Associated Press that 12 students were out and 15 more were slated for release.
But the leniency and emphathy do not extend to everyone, according to the report, which said that “action will be taken against those who committed criminal acts, instigate instability and lead the protests behind the scene.”
Information Minister Ye Htut defended the crackdown in a television interview quoted by the same newspaper on Thursday, saying protesters had “tried to penetrate the police blockade and the police were legally obligated to disperse them.”
He also called Tuesday’s violence a “sorrowful incident,” but bridled at international criticism, arguing that when authorities in the United States moved on protesters during Occupy Wall Street and in Ferguson, “nobody spoke of US democracy having backtracked.”
Two large groups of student activists were trucked to Letpadan Township Court on Wednesday and told that they face a raft of serious charges, including incitement, causing hurt to deter a public servant from his duty and rioting, the Myanmar Times reported. According to the Times, those convicted on all counts could face up to nine-and-a-half years in prison.
Footage and photographs of the crackdown on Tuesday, which occurred after an eight-day impasse in Letpadan, about 90 miles north of Yangon, showed police beating protesters with batons, a sharp contrast with the peaceful, if tense, nature of the standoff until then. The students, who want more academic freedoms incorporated into the education law, had been marching from Mandalay since January in an attempt to reach Yangon. Myanmar lawmakers are currently reviewing the legislation in parliament.
Meanwhile, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which has sat conspicuously on the sidelines during the student campaign, demanded an investigation into the violence on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
