Myanmar in crisis again after military takeover
MYANMAR’S military staged a coup yesterday and detained senior politicians, including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi – in a sharp reversal of the significant, if uneven, progress towards democracy that the Asian nation has made following five decades of military rule.
An announcement read on military-owned Myawaddy TV said the military would take control of the country for one year. It said the seizure was necessary because the government had not acted on the military’s claims of fraud in November’s elections, in which Ms Suu Kyi’s ruling party won a majority of the parliamentary seats up for grabs, and because it allowed the election to go ahead despite the coronavirus pandemic.
The takeover came on the morning the country’s new parliamentary session was to begin, and follows days of concern that the military was plotting a coup.
The military maintained its actions are legally justified, citing a section of the constitution it drafted that allows it to take control in times of national emergency, though Ms Suu Kyi’s party spokesman as well as many international observers have said it amounts to a coup.
It is a dramatic reverse for Myanmar, also known as Burma, which was emerging from decades of strict military rule and international isolation that began in 1962.
It was also a shocking fall from power for Ms Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate who had lived under house arrest for years as she tried to push her country toward democracy and then became its de facto leader after her National League for Democracy won elections in 2015.
While Ms Suu Kyi had been a fierce antagonist of the army while under house arrest, since her release and return to politics she has had to work with the country’s generals, who never fully gave up power.
While the 75-year-old has remained wildly popular at home, Ms Suu Kyi’s deference to the generals, going so far as to defend their crackdown on Rohingya Muslims that the United States and others have labelled genocide, has left her reputation internationally in tatters.
The coup presents a test for the international community, which had ostracised Myanmar while it was under military rule and then enthusiastically embraced Ms Suu Kyi’s government as a sign the country was finally on the path to democracy. There are likely to be calls for a reintroduction of some of the sanctions the country had long faced.
The first signs that the military was planning to seize power were reports that Ms Suu Kyi and Win Myint, the country’s president, had been detained before dawn.
Myo Nyunt, a spokesman for Ms Suu Kyi’s party, told the online news service The Irrawaddy that, in addition to Ms Suu Kyi and the president, members of the party’s central executive committee, many of its politicians and other senior leaders had also been taken into custody. Television signals were cut across the country and passenger flights were grounded, as was phone and internet access in Naypyitaw, the capital.
Boris Johnson has condemned the military coup. The UK Prime Minister used Twitter to say: “I condemn the coup and unlawful imprisonment of civilians, including Aung San Suu Kyi, in Myanmar.
“The vote of the people must be respected,” he added, “and civilian leaders released.”