Police in Myanmar were accused of beating and detaining protesters on Thursday as they broke up the country’s first major demonstrations in years. The spreading rallies against power cuts, the first protests since a deadly crackdown on monk-led demonstrations in 2007, are being closely watched as a test of the new quasi-civilian government’s tolerance of public discontent. Several demonstrators were beaten and six people were taken away by police for questioning for several hours, said protest leader Kyaw Swe, one of those detained in Pyay town, some 300 kilometres (180 miles) north of Yangon. “Two men… were seriously injured as the police beat us while we were protesting. I was also beaten,” he told AFP by telephone after his release. “Our whole town is in trouble because of the lack of electricity. That’s why we decided to protest. We are just asking for our rights.” A local resident also reported heavy-handed tactics. “About 50 police arrived and asked the people to stop… some people were injured,” Nyi Nyi Aung said. Nyan Win, a spokesman for opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party, said three or four of its members were among those detained in Pyay. The rallies, which started at the weekend in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city, have also spread to Yangon, where about 250 residents on Wednesday defied a police request to disperse. Until Thursday’s incident, police had not deployed tough tactics to disperse protests.
