From inside a military base last week, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing announced who he wanted voters to pick in Sunday’s general election, nearly five years after seizing power in a coup.
“He suggested that during the upcoming election period, voters should choose candidates who can cooperate with the Tatmadaw,” state-run media reported, referring to Myanmar’s powerful armed forces.
The comments underline the junta’s attempts to hold on to power as it uses ballots to do what it could not on the battlefield — cement its control over the country in the face of fierce armed resistance that has emerged since the coup, while gaining some international legitimacy for its rule — but analysts and diplomats say the aim of establishing a stable administration in the Southeast Asian nation is far-fetched since the civil war is still raging and a military-controlled government with a civilian veneer is unlikely to win many backers overseas.
“A new iteration of indirect military rule will do nothing to resolve the armed conflict or civil resistance, and Myanmar will remain mired in crisis,” said Richard Horsey, senior Myanmar adviser at Crisis Group.
Voting is to be held in two phases, on Sunday and Jan. 11, in only 202 of Myanmar’s 330 townships where the military has varying degrees of control.
Dates for a potential third phase, counting or results have not been announced.
The battle-hardened Tatmadaw has long dominated politics in Myanmar, which won independence from the UK in 1948, with a string of military chiefs running the country with an iron grip.
Min Aung Hlaing joined their ranks in February 2021, when he ousted a civilian government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi on the unproven allegation of electoral fraud by her party, which had won the preceding years’ polls by a landslide.
“The military is incapable of anything but cosmetic change that will not threaten their core interests of central control,” said David Mathieson, an independent Myanmar analyst.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which won the past two general elections in 2020 and 2015, remains dissolved by the election commission and many other anti-junta political outfits are not in the running.
Six parties are competing nationwide, including the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) that has the largest slate of candidates and is tipped to win the polls, creating conditions for the junta chief to take a civilian role.
“The USDP already has established political leaders within its ranks,” said political analyst Sai Kyi Zin Soe, suggesting that Min Aung Hlaing’s route to the presidency might not be straightforward, although the general is expected to remain tremendously powerful.
“While it is likely that a national leader will emerge from the military-aligned USDP, we have to wait and see if that leader will be Min Aung Hlaing,” he said.
In a military-managed election in 2010, the Tatmadaw installed a former general as a civilian president, a move intended to oversee a tightly controlled political opening.
Former Burmese president Thein Sein later launched reforms that surprised critics and supporters alike. These included freeing political prisoners, easing long-standing media censorship and overseeing the 2015 election that resulted in a transfer of power to Aung San Suu Kyi after his party lost the vote, but comparisons between the current situation and past processes can be flawed, partly because of the unprecedented violence that has ravaged Myanmar since the coup, as a popular armed resistance has combined with long-standing ethnic armies in the country’s borderlands to challenge the Tatmadaw.
“Rather than stabilizing the country, military-orchestrated elections are likely to intensify violence while failing to generate durable political or economic stability,” said Ye Myo Hein, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Southeast Asia Peace Institute.
The elections are also a move by Min Aung Hlaing and his brass to seek foreign legitimacy after being shunned by the international community in the wake of the coup, analysts said.
Although planned with the backing of key ally China, the junta is seeking to gather broader support for the elections, including from neighbors such as India and Thailand, as well as 11-member ASEAN that has barred the ruling generals from its summits.
Thailand’s foreign minister last month said that ASEAN would find it difficult to re-engage with Myanmar because the election was being held without the necessary “inclusive dialogue,” and also called for Aung San Suu Kyi’s release.
The UN, human rights groups and many Western nations have been vocal in their criticism of the elections that the junta is carrying out with the help of a law that punishes dissent and under which it has charged hundreds of people.
“Any meaningful election requires an end to violence and dialogue amongst all parties concerned, and there are no indications that the planned elections will be perceived as free or fair,” the UK said at the UN Security Council this week.
The junta insists that the polls have popular support, denying that they are being conducted with coercion, force or suppression.
“The election is being conducted for the people of Myanmar, not for the international community,” junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun told reporters earlier this month, state-run media reported. “Whether the international community is satisfied or not is irrelevant.”
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
Taiwan-India relations appear to have been put on the back burner this year, including on Taiwan’s side. Geopolitical pressures have compelled both countries to recalibrate their priorities, even as their core security challenges remain unchanged. However, what is striking is the visible decline in the attention India once received from Taiwan. The absence of the annual Diwali celebrations for the Indian community and the lack of a commemoration marking the 30-year anniversary of the representative offices, the India Taipei Association and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center, speak volumes and raise serious questions about whether Taiwan still has a coherent India
RSS