By P. K. Balachandran

The ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi, is expected to win Myanmar’s deeply flawed parliamentary elections being held on Sunday, 8. An estimated 1.5 to 2 million Rohingya Muslims had been disenfranchised earlier by discriminatory citizenship laws and intimidation cum military action to force them to flee the country.

“It’s appalling that Aung San Suu Kyi is determined to hold an election that excludes Rohingya voters and candidates,” Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement before the polls. “She knows that real democracy cannot flourish in an apartheid regime imposed on the Rohingya,” Adams said.

Polling is also not being held in designated ‘conflict zones’. The decision of the Union Election Commission (UEC) to exclude ‘conflict zones’ has effectively disenfranchised many ethnic minority groups as these are typically their homelands.  The areas affected by this decision are Rakhine, Kachin, Kayin and Bago.

In addition there are no elections for 25% of the seats reserved for the military in each of the two Houses of Parliament,  known as the ‘Assembly of the Union’.

Polls are being held for the 224-member Upper House (the House of Nationalities); the 440-member Lower House (the House of Representatives); and State and Regional legislatures. Elections for Ethnic Affairs Ministers are also held in ethnic electorates. But here again, only select ethnic minorities in particular states and regions are entitled to vote. Reportedly more than 1000 candidates from 90 parties are in the fray.

NLD has majority Bamar support 

Doubts about the quality of the poll notwithstanding, Suu Kyi’s ruling NLD is all set to win the elections for the second time in a row.  The Nobel Peace Prize winner undoubtedly enjoys substantial support among the majority Buddhist Bamar community and also the educated liberals who look upon her as the harbinger of democracy and human rights.

The majority of Bamars and liberals want a full-fledged democracy with the military completely de-politicized and kept out of Parliament. Suu Kyi herself has been ill-disposed to the military having fought military juntas all her political life. However, like the educated elite in many countries, the Myanmar or Bamar elite want democracy for themselves and not for the minorities. So in Myanmar too, the elite turn a blind eye to the injustices being done to the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities.

However, ultra-nationalists, who are quite numerous among the Bamar, are firm supporters of the military, and the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).   Like the military, these ultra-nationalists are anti-Muslim and are strong opponents of any constitutional or legal concession to the minority ethnic groups, especially the Muslim Rohingyas. The pro-military groups also support the virulently anti-Muslim Buddhist monk, Asin Wirathu.

The pro-military nationalists cannot be written off. In the current 224-member Upper House, the USDP has 56 MPs and in the 440-member Lower House, it has 110 members. The figures for NLD are 129 and 248 respectively.

Rohingya issue

Due to a sustained military action over years, 1.5 million to two million Rohingyas were  forced to flee the country and take shelter in over-crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh.  They were  also disenfranchised and their National Register of Citizens (NRC) cards taken away.

In an interview to Nikkei, Tayub Uddin, 65, a senior vice chairman of the Rohingya party, the Democracy and Human Rights Party (DHRP), said his parents were stripped off their citizenship when their  National Register of Citizenship (NRC) cardswere taken away. The Rohingyas had won seats in elections starting in 1939 and several were elected till 2010, but not since, due to disenfranchisement, Tayub Uddin said.

As in 2015, this time too, Rohingya candidates had been barred from contesting, Nikkei reported. The Election Commission said the authorities could not confirm the citizenship of their parents when candidates were born, a criterion for election to Parliament under the existing law. Dus Muhammad, A DHRP disappointed election aspirant asked: “How come my father could serve as a police officer if he was a foreigner?” Muhammad was disqualified as the UEC said his father was not a citizen when he was born.

“According to the law, candidates can be disqualified anytime, even after they pass the final step, if we find something that does not meet the criteria,” Myint Naing, a member of the election commission, told reporters during an online press conference in October.

Rohingyas who hold temporary registration certificates, known as ‘White Cards’, were able to vote in the 2010 general elections. But in 2015, the then military-backed government announced the White Card was no longer valid for voting.

While the Rohingyas maintain they are indigenous to the Rakhine State in Myanmar, the majority Bamars, the military and the NLD,  think they are recent immigrants from the Chittagong region of Bangladesh because their mother-tongue is a Bengali dialect. The Rohingyas are also accused of wanting Rakhine to be merged with East Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947. Later they were accused of forming an armed secessionist group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).

In the guise of fighting ARSA, the Myanmar military systematically carried out ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State. In fact, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague is hearing a case of genocide filed by The Gambia against Myanmar.

Threat of military coup?

Days before polling, Myanmar’s military (called Tatmadaw) issued two statements about the voting, one of which warned the government it must take responsibility for mistakes on the part of the Election Commission.  In an exclusive interview with Popular News Agency on Tuesday (3), the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Services, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, said: “The Tatmadaw is responsible for protecting the country and the Constitution.”

He then went on to say it would be difficult to achieve a stable democracy when there were violations in the election process. On Thursday (5), the military pointed out that while their chief’s rank is equivalent to that of the vice-president of the country, the State protocol department ranks him at No. 8 after the Union Chief Justice.

It is clear the military had upped its ante. It is scared that if the NLD comes back to power, it will attempt to revise the constitution to deny it, or reduce, it’s, membership in Parliament. Right now the Tatmadaw has 25% of the seats in each of the Houses of Parliament. It also has a monopoly over the ministries of Defence, Borders, and Internal Security. In March, the military managed to thwart an attempt to amend the constitution to bring down its representation in parliament gradually over the next 15 years.

The military also fears that for political survival, Suu Kyi and her NLD might, over time, deliver on the promise to the ethnic minorities to devolve power to regions dominated by the ethnic minorities. She might even make some concessions to the Rohingyas under Western pressure. After all, Suu Kyi had been sheltered and encouraged by the West to fight army rule in Myanmar and the West had given her the Nobel Peace Prize for her services to democracy.

However, the military could be wrong on the Rohingya issue as Suu Kyi appears to be quite a Bamar hardliner on the Rohingya issue. Her testimony at the ICC in The Hague would suggest that, and it is an acknowledged fact that she had become more popular because of her fearless advocacy of Myanmar’s case vis-à-vis the Rohingyas.

A plethora of parties (as many as 90 of them) had fielded candidates in Sunday’s polls, a good number of them represent minority ethnic groups who comprise 30% of Myanmar’s population and occupy areas rich in mineral resources and hydroelectric potential. China, India and the West have an eye on these regions. But the ethnic groups are hopelessly divided. If they do combine, they may be able to play a decisive role in Myanmar’s parliamentary politics. They could be kingmakers in the case of a close contest between the NLD and USDP.

 -P K. Balachandran is a senior Colombo-based journalist who in the past two decades, has reported for The Hindustan Times, The New Indian Express and the Economist