COURAGE AND TERROR IN MYANMAR
When the soldiers came knocking in the middle of the night, some ministers had already packed a bag. After days of hushed rumours, Myanmar awoke to a crushing new reality: its decade-long experiment in democracy, for all its flaws, was over.
The 1 February coup forced the nation of 54 million back under military rule. It marked the latest slide to autocracy in Asia, where democratic freedoms have been in retreat from Thailand and Cambodia to Hong Kong. In Myanmar, though, the generals had never even left the chamber.
Under a constitution they engineered for a ‘disciplined democracy’, the military was guaranteed a quarter of parliamentary seats – enough for veto powers. The army also controlled three key ministries, enshrining its grip over a country it had impoverished over half a century of authoritarian rule.
Still, in 2015 much of Myanmar and the world had celebrated the landslide victory of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) as a dream come true. The septuagenarian, who had been held under house arrest for 15 years, had trounced her captors in Myanmar’s first fair elections since the last polls she won in 1990 (that the then-junta refused to recognize).
The euphoria was short-lived. In office the NLD appeared poorly prepared, offering little vision for the future. There were new political and economic opportunities, but not for everyone. And instead of reforming oppressive laws such as those quashing free speech, it wielded them. In recent years hard-won press freedoms had begun to deteriorate and even the mildest of dissent against the government, and particularly the military, could land critics in jail.
The junta had deposed a democratically elected government but it was nowhere near winning control. The carefully choreographed coup was veering off script
None of this would damage Suu Kyi’s global reputation like The Nobel Peace Prize winner, once described as ‘the conscience of a country and a heroine for humanity’, went on to defend the military at the International Court of Justice.
