The military junta in Myanmar recently announced that the country’s first election in 20 years will be held Nov. 7.
This is the country formerly known as Burma, that went to the polls in 1990 and voted overwhelmingly for the National League for Democracy (NLD), only to have the results thrown out by the junta.
This is the military junta that has kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for most of the past 20 years and made her one of today’s leading global symbols of the struggle for democracy and human rights.
This is the junta — led by Senior Gen. Than Shwe — that has presided over the world’s longest continuing civil war (since 1949), that brutally suppressed monk-led demonstrations (in 2007), that was slow in responding to the worst natural disaster in the country’s history (Cyclone Nargis in 2008), and that allowed the country to sink to the bottom rank of the world’s countries by most social and economic indicators.
And Than Shwe is the dictator who has been impervious to the sanctions imposed by the United States and other democratic countries, as well as to pleas from the United Nations to bring an end to decades of flagrant human rights abuses.
Why then is the junta holding an election now?...
Contiue reading
Lex Rieffel and David Steinberg @'Global Post'
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