Myanmar Students Rally, Urge Freeing of Nobel Peace Laureate

Students defied Myanmar’s military junta for a second day Wednesday by rallying at Yangon University to call for the release of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi, the leader of the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar, formerly Burma, has been under house arrest for two years. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in absentia Tuesday.

Hundreds of students gathered at the university Tuesday to protest her detention, the first major anti-government unrest since the military put down a nationwide pro-democracy movement in 1988, killing hundreds if not thousands of people.

Two sources gave differing accounts of Wednesday’s protests. There was no comment from officials, and the discrepancies could not be reconciled.

A Western diplomat contacted from Thailand said he heard unofficial reports that soldiers and police entered the university campus, arrested some students and closed the school. But a Yangon resident said the students dispersed peacefully without any arrests and that classes were only suspended.

The resident, speaking on condition of anonymity, said classes began as usual Wednesday morning at Yangon University.

Then about four or five students with their faces covered shouted anti-government slogans at the recreation center in the main university campus, she said.

Several hundred students joined them before the demonstration broke up peacefully two hours after it started, she said.

The junta refused to surrender power after Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy overwhelmingly won nationwide elections in May, 1990.