Myanmar police raid protest district

Reuters :
Myanmar police launched a crackdown overnight in a neighbourhood of the main city of Yangon to break up a protest against a military-appointed official, as the World Bank said it would not process requests for funds made after the Feb. 1 coup.
The Southeast Asian country has been in crisis since the army seized power and detained civilian government leader Aung San Suu Kyi and much of her party leadership after the military complained of fraud in a November election.
Riot police fired shots into the air and set off stun grenades in Yangon’s Tamwe neighbourhood on
Thursday night to disperse a crowd protesting against a military-appointed official, according to witnesses and state-run media.
“We were really scared,” one resident who declined to be identified said of the police action that went on into the early hours of Friday.
In the morning, residents found stun grenade casings and flip-flops abandoned by fleeing protesters strewn in the streets.
State media said legal action would be taken against 23 people, 10 of them women, in connection with the protest.
The confrontation illustrates the defiance the military is facing from people of all walks of life as it seeks to reimpose its authority on a population that had grown used to civilian rule under Suu Kyi’s government.
There have been daily protests and strikes by democracy supporters for about three weeks, often drawing hundreds of thousands of people across the diverse country.
Earlier on Thursday, violence broke out in Yangon when a crowd of about 1,000 military loyalists attacked pro-democracy supporters and media. Several people were beaten and at least two people were stabbed, video footage showed.
The threat of violence did not stop another protest in Yangon on Friday by hundreds of mostly young people, which ended quickly when police moved in to disperse the crowd and detained several people, witnesses said.
“This is very important for our future,” protester Nyein Chan Sithu, 21, said of the demonstrations.
“We want a government that treats people with respect. My generation will be the last to fight a junta.”
In another act of resistance, media organisations said on Thursday they would not comply with an order to refrain from using words like “coup” to refer to the ouster of the elected government.