Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights

BURMA: Opposition Balks at Giving Legitimacy to 2010 Polls

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 5 2009 (IPS) - With the hint of a general election in the air, the largest opposition party in military-ruled Burma is facing a dilemma about its future. Should it or should it not contest the planned poll in 2010?

The uncertainty that grips the National League for Democracy (NLD) was evident in the statements that flowed from a rare meeting of its leadership during the last week of April. The NLD has opted for a wait-and-see approach about fielding candidates for next year’s poll.

Notable, is the party’s tactful use of this pre-election summit at its headquarters to test the political waters – now that the junta has made a commitment towards parliamentary elections after 19 years as part of its “roadmap to democracy.”

It was a gamble with high risks, even possible jail terms for the 150 delegates from across the country who attended. After all, the junta’s oppressive sweep has forced the party to close down all its offices across the country bar one, and denied the party the right to meet as a collective for over a decade.

The regime in Burma, or Myanmar, as the military rulers have renamed the country, has also arrested and imprisoned scores of NLD members, including those elected to parliament during the 1990 poll. No one symbolises this more than Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who heads the NLD. The pro-democracy leader continues to remain under house arrest, now in its thirteenth year.

In a direct challenge to the junta’s push towards the polls, the NLD’s chairman, Aung Shwe, called for the “unconditional release” of all political prisoners – now over 2,100 – and freedom for Suu Kyi to pave the way for an inclusive political environment ahead of next year’s country-wide elections.

The party’s two-day gathering in Rangoon, the former capital, also called for a “review of the 2008 constitution” and “politically substantive initial dialogue” between Suu Kyi and Burma’s head of state, Senior General Than Shwe, according to an NLD document seen by IPS.

Regarding the 2010 poll, the NLD held back from giving it any legitimacy by stating, “We need to wait and see the political party registration law and electoral law to decide whether we could participate in the election under this constitution.”

“The NLD is not going to give in to the junta very easily. The party wants to hear the views of all leaders and to be able to speak in one voice when the decision is made about the 2010 elections,” says Zinn Lin, an NLD member currently living in exile in Thailand. “The last time the party tried to meet was in 1998, but the authorities didn’t permit that gathering. And they have been denied this right till now.”

“It is uncertain what will happen to the delegates who came for the meeting, because the party’s headquarters was watched by hundreds of intelligence officers and people from the special branch, taking pictures and filming it on video,” Zinn Lin told IPS. “Such intimidation is proof that NLD members are not free to operate ahead of the election that the military regime wants to have next year.”

The current climate of intimidation NLD members face is a far cry from what it was during the months leading up to the 1990 general elections. “The 1990 elections were conducted under a free and fair situation. Political parties openly campaigned,” says Win Hlaing, minister in the prime minister’s office of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), the democratically elected government in exile.

“There has been no positive change since then, after Gen. Than Shwe’s era began,” he told IPS. “There is so much hardship and intimidation. The NLD and all opposition voices are targets.”

Mark Canning, the British ambassador in Burma, echoes such sentiments. “It remains the case that the situation in Burma is characterised by the denial of freedom. It is a very very repressive place,” he said in Bangkok last week.

The junta’s oppression, in fact, is rooted in the outcome of the 1990 poll that shocked the military regime of the day, which had been in power since a 1962 coup. The NLD, which had been formed ahead of that poll, won a convincing 82 percents of the seats in 485-seat legislature.

It was a victory fuelled by local anger following 28 years of military oppression and a brutal crackdown of a pro-democracy uprising in August 1988, which saw over 3,000 unarmed protesters gunned down by troops on the streets of Rangoon.

The military regime refused to recognise the results of the 1990 election, denying the NCGUB the opportunity to replace the powerful military government.

To avoid a repeat of such an election debacle in 2010, the junta has pushed through a new constitution with conditions that favour undiluted power of the military, including a required 25 percent of the seats in the upper and lower houses of the new legislature reserved for army officers.

The May 2008 referendum to approve the new constitution was mired in charges of voter rigging and other election malpractice. The junta, however, praised the outcome, which it claimed had been endorsed by 94.4 percent of the voters and had a 98.1 percent voter turnout.

“The 2008 constitution makes it impossible for political parties to contest in 2010 based on their own vision,” says Aung Htoo, general secretary of the Burma Lawyers’ Council, based in Mae Sot, on the Thai-Burma border. “Chapter 10 denies parties like the NLD to set their own objectives. Under this constitution, you cannot even form a Green Party to campaign for the environment.”

I don’t think that the party registration law and the electoral law that the NLD is waiting to see will improve anything,” he told IPS. “The constitution’s restrictions are what matters.”