Burmese Election 2015 - How Free and Fair?

This is the first in a three-part series on Burma. 

On 7 November 2010 I was watching the first Burmese general election since 1990 from the Thai border town of Mae Sot. I was there to work as a volunteer with Burmese migrant women, mainly teaching English, political science and human rights.

However, for one week during the election I assisted the organization Burma Partnership with electoral monitoring and the development of an election tracker, mapping reports of various incidents such as vote buying, voter intimidation, violence, etc., mainly on the part of the Union Solidarity Development Party (USDP), the junta-backed political party. International election monitors had been barred from the country, but we received phone calls and eye witness accounts from inside Burma.

At the end of our project our map of Burma was full of pins dropped to indicate various abuses during the election. One voter in Shan State reported that:

“Although we don’t like the USDP, all the villagers including me voted for the USDP since we were ordered by the town authorities to vote for the USDP. We were afraid while we were voting since the authorities were watching on us at the polling station, to see if we were voting for them or not.”

It came as no surprise that the junta’s USDP won the election. The National League of Democracy (NDL) led by Aung San Suu Kyi, decided not to participate and few other parties had the experience or enough time to prepare to lead successful campaigns. This combined with the high levels of irregularities during the election.

What was surprising, however, was the international community’s reaction. While many expressed concern over irregularities, the response was widely positive – Burma seemed to be lauded for even holding a general election at all. The government received even more praise when they released Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest on 13 November (Aung San Suu Kyi spent almost 15 years in house arrest between 1988 and 2010).

In the months following the election prime ministers and business leaders from all over the world visited Burma in a bid to gain influence, and receive profitable contracts no doubt, over the ‘democratization’ of the new and open Burma. Even the well-respected International Crisis Group jumped on the over-enthusiastic bandwagon, claiming that ‘rapid and significant change has taken place in Myanmar in recent months’ and that now was ‘not the time for the West to remain disengaged and sceptical.’ The Burmese government went from being an international pariah to acceptable partner in the blink of an eye.

For us in the human rights advocacy community all this elation and celebration of a new and democratic Burma seemed very premature. Armed conflict raged, and still does, in the country and it was difficult to imagine how a country that had been a dictatorship since 1962 could become democratic that fast. Indeed, even Aung San Suu Kyi warned against the ‘reckless optimism’ about Burma’s reforms and instead encouraged a healthy dose of ‘cautious optimism’.

Now were are here, five years later, and facing another general election in just about two months, on 8 November, which the government has promised will be free and fair. While I don’t want to be a pessimist, several things make the context of these elections problematic already.

First of all, even if the election itself this time is free and fair, the Burmese constitution poses some serious problems. The constitution reserves 25% of the seats of both the lower and the upper house of Burma’s parliament for the military. These representatives will be handpicked by the army and will thus represent and be accountable to the army, not the Burmese people (article 109 and 141). The constitution also bars anyone whose spouse or children are citizens of a foreign country from becoming president (article 59(f)). It doesn’t take much to see who the drafters had in mind here…

Second, the armed conflict in Burma, which has been going on for over forty years, is still going on between government forces (the infamous Tatmadaw) and various ethnic groups. The government has for years tried to broker a peace deal, but ethnic armed groups have continued to doubts the government’s genuineness as the government for a long time insisted on signing separate deals with each ethnic group rather than one comprehensive peace deal – something seen as the old ‘divide and rule’ tactic.

Currently, negotiations are taking place between the government and fifteen different groups (six armed groups not recognized by the government have been excluded). A tentative agreement to sign a ceasefire next month was reached on 9 September. However, as previous such agreements have fallen through we’ll just have to wait and see and hope for the best. Meanwhile the Tatmadaw continues to fight ethnic groups, primarily in Shan State and Kachin States.

Third, the situation of the Rohingya brings serious doubts to the legitimacy of the upcoming election. Burma is home of over one million Rohingya, a mainly Muslim ethnic group who lives mainly in Rakhine/Arakan state in western Burma on the border with Bangladesh. The Rohingya are one of the most persecuted people in the world according to the UN and are not even recognized in Burma by their own name. Instead they are often called ‘Bengali’ in an effort to deny their historical existence in Burma and their claim to citizenship, despite the fact that the Rohingya have lived on the territory of what is now Burma for centuries. In fact, the government stripped the Rohingya of citizenship rights in 1982, leaving them stateless. Since anti-Rohingya violence (which later turned into wide spread anti-Muslim violence) broke out in 2010, hundreds of thousands have been displaced and are living in squalor in camps – not allowed to leave, for their ‘own protection’ according to the government.

Before the election in 2010 the government had issued temporary ‘white card’ identity documents to some 700,000 Rohingya, allowing them to take part in the vote. However, despite promises that card holders would also be allowed to vote in this election, the when the government published the voting lists in Rakhine/Arakan state, no Rohinya were on these lists. The ruling USDP party even barred its own Rohingya MP Shwe Maung from running in the upcoming election, due to the fact that his parents were not Burmese citizens at the time of his birth.

Many more issues will influence the legitimacy and outcome of the elections. However, the issues mentioned above already bring into serious question whether this election could ever be seen as free and fair.

It is expected that the NLD will do very well, and probably win a majority of the votes in parliament, mostly due to the popularity of Aung San Suu Kyi. However, the NLD has recently come under fire for excluding Muslims from its list of candidates, after pressure from nationalist Buddhist groups. The party also chose only one out of 17 candidates from the respected ’88 Generation’, including the much loved Ko Ko Gyi who was one of the movement’s leaders during the 1988 protests, something that produced widespread consternation and criticism. These actions may make the NLD more mainstream and may be a move to attract nationalist voters in a bid to secure an election win. Nevertheless, it puts into serious question the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi and the other members of the central committee. It also puts into question the NLD’s ability to stand up for human rights and to lead the country into a new and more democratic future.

In a video posted a few days ago, Aung San Suu Kyi urged the international community to observe ‘what happens before the elections, during the elections, and crucially after the elections’. I just hope that this time, any such monitoring will be free of the rose-tinted glasses worn by the international community five years ago. What happens after the election remains to be seen.