Protesters defy junta crackdown in Myanmar town

YANGON, Aug 27 (Reuters) Around 50 members of Myanmar's main opposition party staged a protest march in a provincial town today, witnesses said, as a junta crackdown failed to stifle rare displays of public anger at soaring fuel prices.

Gangs of men from the army's feared Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) shadowed the march through Bago, 50 miles (80 km) north of Yangon, taking pictures and video footage, but did not intervene.

The protesters, all from the National League for Democracy (NLD) party of detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, agreed with police and town officials to halt their march after an hour, one of their leaders said. Nobody was arrested.

''We came to realise later that about 200 USDA thugs were waiting for us a couple of hundred yards away from where we were stopped. If we hadn't stopped, something could have happened,'' local NLD secretary Ko Thein Tan told Reuters by telephone.

As with similar protests last week in Yangon, people cheered the marchers and offered them water, but did not join in, suggesting the string of small protests over the last week is not about to snowball into a repeat of the 1988 anti-junta uprising.

In Yangon, the former Burma's main commercial city, USDA trucks which had parked in back streets near the NLD headquarters withdrew, easing fears of another move against the major vehicle for anti-junta sentiment.

Around 30 NLD members marching to their party headquarters during a rare series of protests last week were arrested by men believed to be from the USDA. Witnesses said some were slapped and punched as they were forced into trucks.

In addition, the junta arrested 13 leading dissidents, including Min Ko Naing, a student leader during the 1988 uprising who still carries a great deal of influence.

SEDITION CHARGES Relatives of the group say they have been transferred to Yangon's infamous Insein prison, where they are awaiting trial on sedition charges carrying up to 20 years in jail.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, in a statement, decried the arrests and urged Myanmar authorities ''to immediately release those detained and engage in consultation and dialogue with the demonstrators on their concerns.'' Min Ko Naing, a nom de guerre that means ''Conqueror of Kings'' in Burmese, spent 15 years in jail after the 1988 uprising.

Htay Kywe, another prominent member of the so-called ''88 Generation Student Group, remains in hiding, having escaped a city-wide manhunt in which cars and buses have been stopped and searched and trains and ferry terminals monitored.

The world's largest rice exporter when it won independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar has become one of Asia's most desperate basket cases after 45 years of unbroken army rule.

The military government said today it was forced to increase fuel prices this month because it could not afford the growing cost of subsidies. Diesel prices were doubled and a five-fold hike made in the cost of compressed natural gas.

Suu Kyi, whose NLD party won a 1990 election by a landslide only to be denied power by the military, has spent nearly 12 of the last 17 years in prison or under house arrest.

REUTERS RAR VC1947