Myanmar: Why the military seized power
The people of Myanmar are standing up against the generals, said Larry Jagan in the Bangkok Post (Thailand). Since the military toppled the country’s civilian-led government on Feb. 1 and placed de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets each night, banging on pots and pans in protest. During the day, a “civil disobedience campaign is growing.” First health-care workers began demonstrating outside hospitals, wearing red and “defiantly holding up the three-finger salute of protest from the film The Hunger Games,” and then the strikes spread to government-run factories and businesses. Staff of the General Administration Department—largely composed of ex-soldiers who serve as “the eyes and ears of the military” across the country—have resigned en masse. These civilians don’t buy the military’s absurd and evidence-free claim that Suu Kyi’s popular National League for Democracy party (NLD) rigged its landslide election victory in November. Myanmar was under total military rule for nearly 50 years until 2011, and the people won’t stand for it again.
The coup is the culmination of a yearslong power struggle between Suu Kyi and the military’s top commander, said Mary Callahan in the Australian Financial Review (Australia). Both Suu Kyi, 75, and Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, 64, are economic and social conservatives, and “both consider themselves the embodiment of the nation.” Suu Kyi—daughter of the martyred founder of modern Myanmar—spent 15 years under house arrest for her pro-democracy campaigning. Released in 2010, the Nobel laureate became the country’s unofficial civilian leader five years later, when her NLD party won the country’s first free election in more than two decades. Her power, though, was limited. Under the 2008 constitution, the military kept control of all state security bodies and got a quarter of seats in the legislature. Suu Kyi tried to appease the military by endorsing its murderous offensive against Rohingya Muslims. But when the NLD triumphed overwhelmingly in last year’s election, Min Aung Hlaing felt he had to take action or see his power wither away.
He almost certainly had the support of Myanmar’s foreign backer, said the Taipei Times (Taiwan) in an editorial. Beijing has extended billions of dollars in high-interest loans to the country as part of “Chinese debt-trap diplomacy,” hoping to snap up assets when those loans come due. The NLD was trying to extricate Myanmar from this con, something China wouldn’t tolerate. The generals had their own economic reasons for ousting Suu Kyi. They run the country’s biggest firms, and the NLD, with its promarket agenda, threatens that control. But the military may have bitten off more than it can chew, said Philipp Annawitt in Asia. Nikkei.com (Japan). Myanmar’s people have had a decade of relative democracy, and they like it. The civil service, the police, and the troops largely voted for the NLD. If Western governments can convince the military’s rank and file that the generals are greedy and unpatriotic, this could still end up as “a failed coup.”