Myanmar junta arrests 18 more in protest crackdown

YANGON, Aug 24 (Reuters) Myanmar's generals arrested 18 more activists today and deployed pro-junta gangs on the streets of Yangon for the third straight day in a major crackdown on protests against soaring fuel prices.

Plainclothes police and members of the junta's feared Union Solidarity and Development Association, or USDA, detained 12 women and five men after a commotion outside the former capital's City Hall, witnesses said.

Having swooped on 13 top dissidents on Wednesday night, internal security police also arrested former opposition politician and rights activist Myint Aye today, sources close to his family told Reuters.

The army also ordered members of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) in Yenangyaung, 360 miles north of Yangon, not to assemble in groups of more than five after 60 people staged a peaceful protest march yesterday.

The town -- birthplace of Aung San, the former Burma's independence hero and father of NLD figurehead and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi -- has long been a hotbed of anti-junta feeling.

Nobody was arrested in the Yenangyaung march and the NLD members refused on Friday to sign an agreement not to gather, NLD spokesman Nyan Win told Reuters.

BOLD CRITICISM Nyan Win said he had no word on the fate of 20 NLD members taken by a USDA gang after another demonstration in Yangon on Thursday.

For the first time, the NLD also criticised last week's shock doubling of diesel prices and the five-fold increase in the cost of compressed natural gas that brought Yangon's bus networks to a standstill and stoked fears of galloping inflation.

''People are demonstrating their feelings peacefully since they cannot bear the soaring cost of living any more. The authorities are arresting, ill-treating, beating, swearing and endangering their lives,'' the NLD said in a statement.

''The authorities, who claim to be building a democratic nation, should explain to the people why the fuel prices were increased,'' it said. ''Cruel suppression will never resolve the problems the people have in their daily lives.'' Despite the determination of small groups in defying the crackdown, analysts say ordinary people are probably too scared to get involved, suggesting a repeat of the 1988 mass uprising of students, monks and civil servants is unlikely.

As many as 3,000 people are thought to have been killed in the army's ruthless suppression of that unrest.

Since then, most civil servants have been moved to a distant new capital and university campuses relocated to Yangon's outskirts -- tactics possibly designed to counter any future unrest, Myanmar exile groups in Thailand say.

The world's largest rice exporter when it won independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar is now one of Asia's poorest countries after more than four decades of unbroken military rule.

Suu Kyi, whose NLD won a 1990 landslide election victory only to be denied power by the army, has spent most of the 17 years since in prison or under house arrest.

REUTERS PD VV1645