Mon, Nov 09, 2015 page1

• Burmese vote in first real election in 25 years

  • Reuters, YANGON, Myanmar
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  As polls closed on Myanmar’s historic election day, diplomats and other observers said the vote was largely free and fair, with no reports so far of violence or major fraud, just a solid turnout from a lively and informed electorate.

  “From the dozens of people we have spoken to since 6am today [yesterday], everybody feels they have been able to vote for whoever they wanted to in security and safety,” said Durudee Sirichanya, an international observer with the ASEAN Secretariat.

  Factory manager Shein Win and his wife, Khin Myat Maw, arrived holding hands to cast their votes in Yangon in Myanmar’s first credible general election in 25 years. Both now aged 46, they took part in a 1988 democracy protest that brought Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to prominence.

  

  Burmese National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, left, is greeted by a supporter at a polling station in a village near Yangon, Myanmar, yesterday.

  Photo: EPA

  “We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” Khin Myat Maw said as they stood in line.

  There were cheers from crowds of well-wishers, who held up ink-stained fingers to show they had voted, as Aung San Suu Kyi made a whistle-stop tour of polling booths in her constituency near Myanmar’s commercial capital.

  Roughly 30 million people were eligible to vote yesterday, many expressing joy at the milestone their country had reached after nearly half a century of dictatorship, and a sense of duty to be part of it. One man who works as an accountant in Singapore said he had flown home just to vote and would head back the next day.

  In a downtown neighborhood of northern city Mandalay, Myint Myint, 95, was perched on a plastic chair carried by three men along a dirt path and past a snaking line of voters to the local polling station.

  “A vote is a vote,” her granddaughter, Phyo Kyaw, said. “Come on, this is our responsibility.”

  However, there was also anxiety, as many voters recalled the election in 1990, when a landslide victory for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party was brushed aside by military rulers.

  Khin May Oo, a 73-year-old doctor who voted in Yangon, said the election might have brought Myanmar to a turning point, but spoke nervously of the generals who retain significant power: “I’m not sure whether they will accept the election results.”

  The military’s commander-in-chief yesterday told reporters the outcome of the vote would be respected, even if — as is widely expected — Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD emerges as the winner.

  Indeed, at a military base in the capital, Naypyidaw, Captain Wai Yan Aung said that when his duty shift ended, he would change from his uniform into traditional dress and cast his vote.

  Dampening the celebration was the cancelation of voting in areas of the country affected by ethnic violence, which activists estimate has cut about 4 million people out of the electoral process.

  In Mandalay, about 100 people were stopped from voting after election officials discovered they were outsiders who had been added to the voter list by a third party and then bussed in to vote.

  “It was an attempt at fraud, that’s why we didn’t let them vote,” said Hla Soe of Myanmar’s Union Election Commission.

  There was also indignation about voter lists riddled with errors.

  Linn Htet Aung, 25, who works for an non-governmental organization in Yangon, said he was excited about the potential for change in the country, but disappointed because his name was omitted from the voter list in a slum area on the outskirts of the city.

  “I am angry,” he said. “All my friends are voting today, but I can’t. I want to choose the government I like, but I can’t.”
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