More Than Half a Million March in Burmese Cities

More than half a million people marched through cities across Burma today demanding an end to the 26-year-old socialist government.

Most of the demonstrations were peaceful, but there were reports that six people had been shot to death in Moulmein, a city 110 miles east of Rangoon, and of shootings in Tatkon, 240 miles north of the capital, the diplomats said.

Radio Rangoon said Buddhist monks led demonstrators in a violent attack on the Moulmein Customs House. The official radio said the demonstrators looted the building and sank a boat.

The crowds in the capital, estimated by diplomats and witnesses at about 200,000, pushed aside barbed-wire barricades, and rifle-toting troops melted away from the central city area as the crowds swelled.

A diplomat said the demonstrations were the biggest in more than a quarter of a century.

Well over 250,000 paraded through Mandalay, in the north, where one diplomat said every household is sending two people to take part, and a further 200,000 in Tavoy, in the south.

Diplomats said that in both those cities and others there were reports of the civil administration’s collapsing, with Buddhist monks taking over abandoned council offices.

A Western ambassador in Rangoon said the size of the uprising “must be threatening the government seriously.”

The “people power” movement, now embracing students, monks, doctors, lawyers, actors, singers, film stars and workers, is united in two fundamental demands. They are an end to 26 years of single-party rule under the Burma Socialist Program Party, which has repressed opposition and ruined a once-prosperous economy, and release of political prisoners.