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Myanmar Campus Sealed Off



Myanmar campus sealed off amid student unrest, UN chief calls for talks
Sat 05 Sep 98 - 07:40 GMT
YANGON, Sept 5 (AFP) - A downtown Yangon university was sealed off by riot
police
Saturday after three consecutive days of unrest, witnesses said, as UN
Secretary-General Kofi
Annan urged Myanmar authorities to move towards democracy and hold a dialogue
with the
opposition.
Police numbers had been reduced and security remained low-key after Friday
night passed
peacefully at the Hlaing campus, witnesses said.
"There isn't much going on, but a few hundred students are sticking it out and
there might be
another flare-up," a foreign diplomat here said.
"But there is no hint of confrontation. The police are standing guard outside,
the students are
inside."
Students at Hlaing -- numbering between several hundred and several thousand
according to
different estimates -- shouted anti-government slogans during a peaceful
protest Thursday night,
witnesses said eralier.
Authorities responded by formally closing the campus, which largely serves as
a preparatory
school for other tertiary institutions, they added. Most of the protestors
were from outside
Yangon and were staying in dormitories on the campus, which are now also to be
closed.
The gates to the campus were locked by police, with some 1,000 students
remaining inside.
Some 300 police remained around the campus, but another western diplomat said
it was a "not
a big deal at the moment."
"They've got their shields and their truncheons but we haven't seen any guns
and their numbers
aren't that big. I think the government wants to play it peacefully."
The students were angered by arrangements for their courses, which have only
restarted in
recent weeks after universities across the country were closed following
campus unrest in
December 1996.
Students were given only a few days of classes to prepare for examinations,
which at Hlaing are
scheduled for September 7, in what foreign diplomats say is a bid to rid the
system of those
involved in the 1996 unrest and restart the education process.
Political tensions are rising in Myanmar and the leading opposition National
League for
Democracy (NLD) of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has vowed to convene
the
parliament elected in 1990 but which has never been allowed to sit.
The opposition won the 1990 polls by a landslide but the junta has refused to
relinquish power.
Some 3,000 students shouting slogans against Myanmar's junta staged a protest
at Hlaing
Wednesday as another estimated 800 students chanted at the nearby Yangon
Institute of
Technology. Both protests ended peacefully.
Those demonstrations were the biggest since the 1996 unrest. Riot police broke
up a smaller
protest outside Yangon University on August 25 and arrested dozens of people,
according to
witnesses.
Another protest was staged later that day at Yangon Institute of Technology,
during which
rocks were thrown and riot police mobilised.
The latest stand-off came as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged Myanmar
authorities to
take steps towards democracy and to hold a dialogue with the main opposition
leader, his
spokesman said in New York.
UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said that at a meeting with the junta's foreign
minister on the
sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Durban, South Africa,
Annan
"pressed him on the need for the democratic liberalisation of Myanmar."
He also called for "a sustained and effective dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi,"
Eckhard said.
Eckhard did not mention Annan's attempts to send a high-level envoy to Myanmar
which has
been rebuffed by the authorities.
The husband of Aung San Suu Kyi, meanwhile, accepted on her behalf an honorary
degree in
Australia and said he believed the country's military rulers were gradually
moving towards
dialogue.
Michael Aris accepted the Doctor of Laws from the University of Melbourne,
saying the
military in Myanmar would not have allowed his wife back into the country if
she had visited
Australia.
"How pleased they would have been if she left and how sad for her supporters,"
he told a
graduation ceremony Saturday.
"Although it is nearly three years since I was last allowed by Burma's
military rulers to see her,
and many months since I could speak to her by telephone, last year she was
able to ask me to
represent her here today."
Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest for six years until 1995.
Aris, an Oxford University fellow, said the conferring of the degree was
recognition of his wife's
attempt to establish the rule of law in Myanmar.
"Every day of the week in Burma's official media, Suu Kyi is vilified,
slandered, taunted,
ridiculed and insulted -- in the cowardly way adopted by soldiers who have
lost their sense of
honour and dignity, she has no right of reply."