So why take over if you’re already in charge? Doesn’t the Tatmadaw only stand to lose from staging a crude, retrograde coup? It can fight various groups around the country in supreme confidence that it will face no legal repercussions. The Tatmadaw’s economic interests are largely untouched, with a vast defense budget and steady income streams from holding companies. It was an irrefutable popular endorsement of the administration.īut 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. 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. In November, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 70 percent of eligible voters turned out and handed the N.L.D. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy recently bested its landslide victory of 2015. Raw power is its own reward only in appearance.Īfter one term in office, Ms. Why this? Why now? 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.īut it may have acted too late. 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. Min Aung Hlaing, is now essentially a dictator. 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. It arrested Daw Aung San Suu Kyi - formally the state counselor, but really the country’s de facto leader - as well as other senior officials and a handful of prominent political and social figures. In the early hours of Monday, as the new national Parliament was scheduled to convene for its first session, the military, known as the Tatmadaw, announced that it was taking over, alleging fraud during the last general elections in November. Myanmar’s decade-long experiment in conditional democracy just ended in a textbook example of a coup - a coup that was a pre-emptive strike.
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