Military takes control of Myanmar, leaders detained
Armed forces announce one-year ‘state of emergency’
Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her top lieutenants were detained yesterday, as the military reasserted its grip on the country with a coup against a Government that had been in power for only five years.
Officials from the governing National League for Democracy confirmed the detentions yesterday. Hours later, a military television network announced a one-year state of emergency with power transferred to the Army chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.
Mobile networks and the internet were down in major cities in Myanmar, and some local journalists went into hiding for fear their reporting could compromise their safety. Domestic flights were suspended, and the main international airport in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, had been shuttered.
Myanmar had been celebrated as a rare case in which generals willingly handed over some power to civilians, honouring 2015 election results that ushered into office the National League for Democracy.
The stalwarts of that party had spent years in jail for their political opposition to the military. Suu Kyi, the political party’s patron saint, spent 15 years under house arrest and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her non-violent resistance to the junta that locked her up.
But the Army under Min Aung Hlaing has maintained important levers of power, and the detention of the top government leaders, along with activists and other veteran politicians, appeared to prove the lie in its commitment to democracy.
“The doors just opened to a different, almost certainly darker future,” said Thant Myint-U, a historian of Myanmar who has written several books about the country.
“Myanmar is a country already at war with itself, awash in weapons, with millions barely able to feed themselves, deeply divided along religious and ethnic lines.”
As it began its political evolution, Myanmar was lauded by Western Governments as a democratic beacon in a world where authoritarianism was on the rise. But the political transition in the Southeast Asian nation was never as smooth or as significant as the political fairy tale made it out to be.
The Army, which began a political transition toward what it called, confusingly, “discipline-flourishing democracy” in 2011, made sure to keep significant power for itself.
One-quarter of Parliament is filled by men in military uniforms. Key ministries are under Army control.
And in the chaotic years of early democratisation, fire sales of state assets often ended up with military companies or their proxies capturing the choicest prizes.
In 2017, the military stepped up its brutal campaign against the Rohingya, compelling 750,000 members of the Muslim ethnic minority to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh in one of the largest global outpourings of refugees in a generation. United Nations officials have said the mass burnings of Rohingya villages, systematic executions and rape were carried out with genocidal intent.
The latest turmoil was ostensibly provoked by concerns about fraud in the November elections, which delivered an even bigger landslide to the National League for Democracy than the party enjoyed five years earlier.
The governing party secured 396 out of 476 seats in Parliament, while the military’s proxy party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, managed just 33.
The Union Solidarity and Development Party cried foul, as did political parties representing hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities who were disenfranchised shortly before the vote because the areas where they lived were supposedly too gripped by strife for elections occur.
Rohingya Muslims were also unable to cast their ballots.
But few in Myanmar believed that the detentions yesterday, which netted top National League for Democracy officials, were made only over concerns over electoral fraud.
Worries that the military might intervene started in October, when the vote was cancelled in some of the ethnic minority areas.
“The ominous warning signs had been in plain sight all along,” said U Khin Zaw Win, who runs a policy think tank in Yangon, the commercial capital of Myanmar.
The military’s reassertion of authority could prolong the power of Min Aung Hlaing, who is supposed to age out as Army chief this northern summer. His patronage network, centred on lucrative family businesses, could well have been undermined by his retirement, especially had he not been able to secure a clean exit.
In recent years, Suu Kyi, 75, once celebrated as an international champion of human rights for her campaign of conscience against the junta while under house arrest, emerged as one of the military’s biggest public defenders. Despite a mountain of evidence against the military, she publicly rejected accusations that the security forces waged a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya.
But with her national popularity enduring, and her party winning another electoral mandate, the generals began losing patience with the facade of civilian rule they had designed.
Last week, an Army spokesperson refused to rule out a coup, and Min Aung Hlaing said the constitution could be scrapped if the law was broken.