BURMA’S STATE TV says voters cast their ballots “freely and happily” on Sunday. That will be surprising news to the three million ethnic minority citizens whose vote was cancelled by the junta, to poll-boycotting supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi, the winner of the last democratic election in 1990, still under house arrest and whose party has been closed down, to candidates denied or priced out of the right to register or campaign, to the country’s 2,000-plus political prisoners, to its muzzled press, and to its brutalised, harassed, and impoverished people.
The election was “stolen”, President Obama rightly insisted yesterday, and the business-suited regime that emerges will have no more authority or legitimacy to rule from its shiny new capital Naypyidaw than its military predecessor. It too will govern by brute force alone like regional soul mate North Korea.
The junta that runs Burma (and which renamed the state “Myanmar”) claims the country is on the road to democracy – “disciplined democracy” is its definition – courtesy of a new constitution approved in 2008, and that the elections reflect a transition that should be acknowledged. A transition, in truth, from one form of dictatorship to another. The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), closely aligned to regime supremo Than Shwe, fielded 27 ministers in the poll, contesting almost all the 1,163 seats. It – and another pro-junta party – are the only ones even capable of achieving a majority by virtue of restrictions on candidate registration. In any case, the military retains a quarter of the seats in parliament and control over key ministries.
A parliamentary majority of three-quarters is also required to change the constitution, clearly an impossibility without military consent. But such realities have not prevented some oppositionists from clutching at straws to argue that the very existence of a new parliament with rival parties, however flawed, can create a window for opposing views and some democratic space.
Internationally that has also fuelled arguments about re-engagement with the regime and ending sanctions, not least from China and India which have increasing economic interests in Burma. China has invested $8 billion in the first five months of this year in natural gas and other resources. But such softening of international isolation would be wrong and much too early, even if as expected, Ms Suu Kyi is released shortly. To do so would simply be to reward the fraud perpetrated on the Burmese people on Sunday.