After five decades of junta rule, a series of rigged or cancelled elections, and the last five years of a quasi-civilian government comprising retired military generals, there is a fierce storm of change blowing across Myanmar. At the centre of it is its most famous citizen, the daughter of Myanmar’s independence hero (General Aung San) and the woman often recognised as ‘The Lady’ in her country, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) has won in the just concluded elections in the country. Myanmar’s constitution reserves a quarter of the 664 seats in parliament for unelected members of the military. Despite that Suu Kyi’s NLD is expected to form Myanmar’s first democratically- elected government since the early 1960s.
The situation is not very unlike that which occurred 25 years before. The NLD had won a historical parliamentary election back then, but the junta quashed the results and placed the election hero, Suu Kyi, under house arrest. Even as the world feted her for her spirit and resilience, which resulted in the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, she spent 15 of the next 20 years under house arrest, turning down even the opportunity to meet her dying husband in the UK lest she be disallowed, as would certainly happen, back into Myanmar.
Suu Kyi’s victory will be remarkable given the absence of an independent election commission, the stranglehold of the ruling party on the country’s media, and the widespread reports of election fraud and mass disenfranchisement of several voters in the country. Several military leaders gave up their uniforms to establish a quasi-civilian government in 2011. And it has to be seen how easily they will give up their power and allow her to lead the country.
Myanmar itself has been undergoing rapid change. As sanctions against the country have been eased and the country has been opened up to foreign investment, a new prosperity is now visible in the country. According to a New York Times article, foreign direct investment in the last fiscal year stood at $8 billion, more than five times the flows recorded just two years earlier.
But Suu Kyi will also inherit several major problems, ranging from not just establishing a working relationship with parliamentary colleagues who were once her captors, but also large-scale corruption, frequent sectarian violence, and the stranglehold of ethnic militias on large swathes of land. The saint of democracy and peace will need to become a politician to deal with these issues and that of the Rohingya Muslims, whose persecution by extremist Buddhists she has not spoken against.
But Suu Kyi, however grand her party’s performance in this election, will not become the country’s president. In 2008, the country’s military rulers, threatened by Suu Kyi’s popularity, had introduced a clause in the new Constitution which effectively bars her from holding this post. According to this clause, any Myanmar national married to a foreign citizen or whose children are foreigners— Suu Kyi’s late historian husband and her two sons are British citizens—cannot become president or vice president of the country. Suu Kyi has however claimed that if she wins the election, she will, as the leader of the party, control power. She will field a president from within the party, she has hinted, but she will be ‘above the president’.
When asked to elaborate, she said with a laugh to several reporters, “It’s a name only… A rose by any other name.”
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