“Five years to the day after a military junta released her from political house arrest, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi achieved a long-awaited victory: Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), triumphed on Friday in the Southeast Asian country’s first credible parliamentary elections in a generation, securing enough seats to form a government and select the next president. …
“From 1962 to 2011, military dictators ruled the country with an iron fist, throwing political activists in prison, waging civil wars against ethnic minorities, and isolating the country from the international community, which imposed sanctions on the regime for human rights abuses. …
“But serious impediments remain, including a constitution written by Burma’s former rulers and passed in 2008 to safeguard their authority, regardless of election results. It reserves a quarter of the seats in parliament for unelected military representatives, and gives them de facto veto power over constitutional amendments. The constitution makes Suu Kyi, the country’s most popular politician, ineligible for the presidency because her two sons hold foreign citizenship. And in a state of emergency, a military-led body can assume sweeping powers.”
And there is, of course, the danger that the military may stage a coup and seize power anew. But at least the people of Burma were given a chance to speak, and they have spoken, and the military can no longer claim a mandate. If they decide to continue their rule, the whole world will know they are illegitimate and ruling by brute force. And the West, presumably, will reimpose the economic sanctions that forced them to allow elections in the first place.
Read story here.