BANGKOK: Two years after a military coup snuffed out Myanmar’s short-lived democratic experiment, the Junta is planning elections that analysts warn could lead to further bloodshed as opposition to the military’s hold on power rages on.
Observers also say the planned elections cannot be free and fair under the present circumstances, with one analyst calling it a mere “performance” aimed at justifying the junta’s rule.
Allegations of polling fraud in the last election in November 2020, which Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won, were the Junta’s excuse to seize power on February 1, 2021. Though the claims were never substantiated, the generals detained Suu Kyi and other top civilian leaders in a series of pre-dawn raids.
With the political opposition now battered, the military is expected to hold a new election later this year, no later than August, according to the constitution. But with resistance underway in the hilly jungles of the borderlands to the plains of the army’s traditional recruiting grounds, people across the swathes of the country will be unlikely to vote and run the risk of reprisals if they do.
Any Junta-held poll to be ‘like a cart with only one wheel’
Any poll held by the military Junta will be “like a cart with only one wheel,” an ex-civil servant in Yangon who has been on strike since the coup told AFP.
“There is no way it will bring any progress,” he said, asking for anonymity amid fear of reprisals.
Last week, the United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said the country was going through a “catastrophic situation, which sees only deepening human suffering and rights violations daily”.
Over a million people have been displaced by violence since the coup, according to the UN, with the military accused of bombing and shelling civilians and committing war crimes as it struggles to curb resistance.
APP/AFP
