LORRYLOADS of police prevented hundreds of student protesters from continuing their march to Myanmar’s biggest city yesterday to push for educational reform.
Students have been walking from Myanmar’s second-largest city of Mandalay to the former capital of Yangon since January, demanding changes to a recently passed education law that they warned would restrict academic freedom.
The weary demonstrators had spent the last 10 days in Letpadan about 90 miles north of Yangon and were planning to resume their long march yesterday.
But they woke to find more than a dozen police vehicles including water cannon parked outside the monastery where they were staying.
The government had warned the students last week that, if they continued with the protest, action would be taken “to maintain law and order, security and tranquility.”
Passed by the parliament in September, the new law puts all decisions about policy and curriculum in the hands of a body largely made up of government ministers.
It bans students from forming unions and ignores calls for local languages to be used in instruction even in ethnically-specific states.
However, public support has been increasing for the students during their 400-mile trek.
The threat of an expanded protest is sensitive in Myanmar, in part because students were at the forefront of pro-democracy protests in 1988 that were brutally crushed by the military.
international@peoples-press.com
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-7ec6-Police-forces-block-students-protest#.VPVvq3yUeCO
