“Dictatorship must fail,” read the writing on the back of one Myanmar doctor’s hazmat suit in a statement of defiance against Monday’s military coup.
Other medics in at least 20 government hospitals rallied to a campaign of civil disobedience against the generals who overthrew elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday and cut short a tentative transition to democracy.
Doctors threatened to stop work even with coronavirus infections still rising steadily in the country of 54 million.
“We cannot accept dictators and an unelected government,” Myo Thet Oo, a doctor participating in the campaign, told Reuters from the northeastern town of Lashio.
“They can arrest us anytime. We have decided to face it... All of us have decided not to go to the hospital.”
Reuters was unable to contact Myanmar’s new army government for comment on the doctors’ boycott and the broader signs of spreading dissent.
Anger against the military surged on social media, with a swathe of Facebook users in a country where it is the main platform changing profile pictures to portraits of Suu Kyi or the red colour of her National League for Democracy party.
In the main city of Yangon, people banged pans and sounded car horns after dark in protest.
One of Myanmar’s biggest youth groups and its federation of student unions called for civil disobedience campaigns along with the doctors from across the country — including a 1,000-bed hospital in the capital Naypyitaw.
“That is inspiring,” activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi told Reuters of the civil disobedience campaign, whose new Facebook page already had more than 112,000 likes.
The military also had its supporters, winning backing from the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in the Buddhist majority country. Hundreds of people rallied in the centre of the main city, Yangon, to support coup leader Min Aung Hlaing.
Biden mulls sanctions
US President Joe Biden, facing his first major international crisis after Myanmar’s military seized power, could impose a new programme of sanctions, cut aid or target generals and the companies they run to pressure for a return to democracy.
