Burmese President Thein Sein had tried and failed at least twice before to topple his archrival Shwe Mann, but when armed police burst into the headquarters of the country’s ruling party late on Aug. 12, he finally succeeded.
Police piled the mobile phones and computers from those inside on a desk and then stood by as the president’s supporters met to enact an order from the president to replace Shwe Mann as chairman of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).
By reasserting his grip on the party, Thein Sein boosted his own prospects of retaining the presidency, while dampening optimism among those inside and outside the former Burma who hope for a quickening of reforms after an election in November.
“I heard people coming in and when I looked up from the computer, I was surrounded by half a dozen armed guards,” said one person who was inside the building when the police entered, declining to be identified due to concern for personal safety. “They did not draw their weapons. It’s obvious they didn’t want anybody to communicate to the outside world.”
Shwe Mann was not there, and the lockdown ensured neither he nor his allies could make any countermoves during the crucial hours in which the president’s supporters were taking control of the party.
The maneuver, which had echoes of the purges of Myanmar’s junta-ruled recent past, effectively took Shwe Mann out of the running for the presidency less than three months before the country’s first free general election in years.
Advisers said that it also derailed a plan the deposed party chairman was poised to announce that may have included a speedier transition to full democracy.
Meanwhile, Thein Sein has cleared the way to either remain president himself or to impose a candidate of his choosing, if his party can form a majority coalition after the vote.
A former top-ranking general in a party dominated by retired military men, Shwe Mann was no radical reformist.
However, he had become a stronger voice for reform in the party and was working on a wide-ranging policy document that may have broadened the scope and pace of reforms, advisors said.
He drew the suspicion of the president’s faction by building ties with their nemesis, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
“There was an internal crisis in the party,” Burmese Minister of Information and spokesman for the president Ye Htut said. “This kind of leadership change is not a good thing for the USDP or any other political party. They did it as a last resort.”
Shwe Mann’s office has declined requests for an interview since his ousting.
Thein Sein ushered in the reforms since 2011 that have made resource-rich Myanmar a partial democracy after almost half a century of isolation and military rule, but many feel the reform process has stalled.
The sacking of Shwe Mann, who has made no secret of his ambition to become president, was another blow to international and domestic confidence in that process.
In interviews with members of the ruling party, advisers to the USDP and diplomats, reporters have learned that the president had failed at least twice to unseat Shwe Mann from the position of party chairman through backstage machinations.
Shwe Mann and his allies blocked two previous attempts to oust him at leadership meetings — one in December and another in May — a party adviser and a Western diplomat said.
Both meetings ended in stalemate after the two factions jousted over who should be the presidential candidate and chairman, and the party’s list of election candidates, the sources said.
“These attempts have been going on since last year,” said Win Oo, a rank-and-file USDP lawmaker supportive of the ousted chairman, although he said he was unaware of the details.
Emboldened, Shwe Mann used his position as speaker of the lower house of parliament in an increasingly assertive push to become the country’s leading presidential candidate.
He antagonized the military by backing Aung San Suu Kyi’s campaign to change the constitution, which grants unelected members of the armed forces one-quarter of the seats in parliament.
That was a red flag for hardliners, already facing the prospect of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy winning the lion’s share of contested seats in November’s poll.
“The hardliners from the military and the president strongly disliked his effort to amend the constitution,” said one USDP lawmaker, who was at party headquarters when the security forces locked it down, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Shwe Mann had been trying to reform the USDP and the military ordered him to stop.”
Divisions worsened after the death last month of ex-colonel and USDP disciplinarian Aung Thaung, who was seen as a restraining influence on the ambitious Shwe Mann.
Aung Thaung was an ally of Shwe Mann, but retained a strong relationship with both the president and the military. With him gone, the knives came out.
Some members of the USDP executive committee sent Thein Sein a letter a few weeks ago voicing concerns about Shwe Mann’s policies and the party’s decisionmaking process, Ye Htut said.
Tensions rose further the day before Shwe Mann was sacked, when the USDP’s parliamentary candidates list omitted the majority of a group of about 150 officers who retired from military service to run for parliament.
It is unclear what role the country’s powerful military played in the downfall of Shwe Mann, but they must have acquiesced to the use of force, political observers say.
An order to deploy police would need approval by Burmese Minister of Home Affairs Major General Ko Ko. The ministry is one of the three allotted to the armed forces under the military-drafted constitution.
“What they did was a demonstration of power,” USDP Legislator Win Oo said. “Showing to others: ‘Watch out, we can do this.’”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver