News Desk :
As the new national Parliament was scheduled to convene for its first session, the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, announced that it was taking over, alleging fraud during the last general elections in November. It arrested Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as well as other senior officials and a handful of prominent political and social figures.
The Tatmadaw invoked the Constitution (which it drafted back in 2008) to declare a state of emergency for a year; the already-powerful commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, is now essentially a dictator. He has pledged “to practice the genuine, discipline-flourishing multiparty democratic system in a fair manner” and has announced plans to hold another election at an unspecified date.
The military has manufactured a crisis so that it could step in again as the purported savior of the Constitution and the country, while vanquishing an ever-popular political foe.
But it may have acted too late. Raw power is its own reward only in appearance.
After one term in office, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy recently bested its landslide victory of 2015. In November, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 70 percent of eligible voters turned out and handed the N.L.D. more than 80 percent of the vote. International and domestic observers, including from the Carter Center and the People’s Alliance for Credible Elections, declared the election to be free and fair. It was an irrefutable popular endorsement of the administration.
But the military still has much power, constitutionally guaranteed: It controls the ministries of defense, home affairs and border affairs; 25 percent of seats in the national and regional assemblies are reserved for it; it has veto authority over amendments to key provisions of the Constitution.
Doesn’t the Tatmadaw only stand to lose from staging a crude, retrograde coup?
There is much animus between Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and General Min Aung Hlaing. The two have rarely met since 2015, often only at strained public events.
Beyond the personal tensions, there is, of course, institutional antagonism. For some three decades, the N.L.D. was subject to crushing persecution at the hands of the Tatmadaw and the security forces; hundreds of the party’s members were arrested, tortured, killed or driven into exile. In some respects, Monday’s coup looks like a petulantly personalized contest between two elites, both Buddhist and from the ethnic Bamar majority, and both infused with a born-to-rule mentality.
During its first five years in power, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party essentially refrained from seriously diminishing the military’s power, constitutionally, legally or financially. The administration seemed to pursue a democratization agenda predicated on avoiding pushback from the generals.
Then came the party’s victory in the November election, and another sweeping mandate for a second term. That seemed to upset the uneasy balance of power in place, at least in the eyes of the Tatmadaw, and to threaten the military’s prerogatives and privileges. The coup may have been a pre-emptive strike against its losing ground.
Perhaps especially, and personally, for General Min Aung Hlaing. He was scheduled to step down this year, after the retirement age for his position was moved back, five years ago, from 60 to 65. Diplomats have said privately that he is concerned that, once out of office, he might be vulnerable to prosecution, at least internationally, for his leadership over the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, among other things. (Yet now, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi will no longer be around to defend him, or the Myanmar military, against charges of genocide, as she did before the International Court of Justice in 2019.)
One open question about the coup, however, is how popular it will be within the ranks of the military. Given the groundswell of support for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi in November, soldiers, too, presumably voted for the N.L.D. The party won seats, locally and nationally, representing the township of Kengtung, the home of a regional military command and thousands of troops in Shan State, in the eastern part of the country. Courtesy: The New York Times
