Consider This from NPR - Myanmar Explained: How A Coup Followed Unproven Allegations Of Voter Fraud

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

For months, Myanmar's military party has claimed — without evidence — that its poor performance in the country's November parliamentary elections was the result of voter fraud. This week, when the... new Parliament was scheduled to convene, the military launched a coup, detaining top civilian officials including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. Michael Sullivan reports from Thailand on the uncertainty over what happens next. Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria explains why the coup represents a test for the Biden administration. Zakaria is the author of Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at considerthis@npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Some of this may sound familiar. The armed forces have refused to accept November's election results, alleging widespread voter fraud. They've threatened to take action if their complaints aren't addressed. In November, the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar held parliamentary elections. The military-ruled party performed badly and spent months making accusations of fraud without any specific evidence. Then this week, when the newly elected parliament was scheduled to convene, the military launched a coup. Now there's a curfew in place, armed soldiers patrol the streets, and top officials, including the country's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi,
Starting point is 00:00:49 were arrested in a series of raids. It is an extraordinary pleasure for me to welcome State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and her delegation. Suu Kyi has been the civilian leader, or the state counselor, since 2016. She met with President Obama in the White House after winning in a landslide. Her path to power was long. Her party won an election in 1990 that the military refused to recognize, and she spent nearly two decades under house arrest fighting for democracy, and became an international icon, winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I need hardly say that I'm very happy to be here. She said in that White House meeting she wanted to create unity out of diversity. And we look to the United States and our friends to continue with us along the road of progress.
Starting point is 00:01:32 So how did a country making real democratic progress descend into a coup? Well, first, I think it's important to recognize that Myanmar was still evolving as a democracy. That's Laurel Miller of the International Crisis Group. I think we have to say it was a partial democracy in which the military already had an enormous share of power in the country. Consider this. Democracy is fragile, in some countries more than others. Now Myanmar's democracy faces a test and the Biden administration,
Starting point is 00:02:07 which wants to reassert American leadership on the world stage, faces one too. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Tuesday, February 2nd. This message comes from NPR sponsor BetterHelp, the online counseling service dedicated to connecting you with a licensed counselor to help you overcome whatever stands in the way of your happiness. Fill out a questionnaire and get matched with a professional tailored to your needs. And if you aren't satisfied with your counselor, you can request a new one at any time free of charge. Visit betterhelp.com slash consider to get 10% off your first month. Get the
Starting point is 00:02:46 help you deserve with BetterHelp. If you're never quite sure how to answer the question, where are you from? NPR's Rough Translation might be the podcast for you. Yes, finally, someone else. Give us your accents and your origin stories, your cross-cultural misfits yearning to just be, and listen to Rough Translation on NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. First, let's say the situation in Myanmar is a developing story and it's changing fast, and may have even changed by the time you hear this. It was really only about a week ago that most people in Myanmar and most Myanmar specialists overseas started to believe that the military was serious about taking back power. this. It was really only about a week ago that most people in Myanmar and most Myanmar specialists
Starting point is 00:03:25 overseas started to believe that the military was serious about taking back power. Aaron Connolly, an analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, spoke to NPR this week. He said that the military in Myanmar has claimed there were, quote, irregularities with voter lists in the country's November election. Particularly in ethnic areas, and that if the election voter lists were scrutinized more closely, then that they would have had a chance of winning more seats in the national legislature. Again, no specific evidence for that claim. And the military is a powerful force in Myanmar.
Starting point is 00:04:00 It controls the country's Ministry of Defense, Home Affairs, and all other security forces. This week's coup is not its first time in the international spotlight. More than 700,000 Muslims fled Myanmar when the military launched a crackdown in Rakhine State in August 2017. In recent years, almost a million Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar to escape what's been described as an ethnic cleansing campaign by the military involving mass rapes and killings. Many of those people fled to Bangladesh, where one of them, a woman named Dildar Begum, told NPR that government troops killed 29 members
Starting point is 00:04:40 of her family. I want to pause here with a warning because the details are graphic. It's been 12 months that I'm living in Bangladesh, but there's not any days in which I don't remember my family. Begum described soldiers ripping her baby from her arms and hacking him to death. She watched them slit her husband's throat. She and her daughter survived by pretending to be dead. I don't expect they will let us stay here very much longer, but I would rather die than go back there. I would rather drink poison than go back to Myanmar. The Rohingya in Myanmar had suffered persecution for generations, but the campaign of killings and arrests by the military in recent years led to an international criminal trial at
Starting point is 00:05:26 the Hague, where Aung San Suu Kyi surprised a lot of her admirers in Western liberal democracies. Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has told the UN's top court that there was no proof of genocidal intent behind her country's military campaign against Rohingya Muslims. Yes, that year, 2019, Suu Kyi defended her country's military against accusations of genocide and said they were merely responding to elements of a violent rebellion. Here's what else she had to say at the time. Please bear in mind this complex situation and the challenge to sovereignty and security in our country when you are assessing the intent of those who attempted to deal with the rebellion. Surely, under the circumstances, genocidal intent cannot be the only hypothesis.
Starting point is 00:06:19 So how did Suu Kyi go from defending the actions of her country's military to being arrested by them? Michael Sullivan reports from Thailand, where across the border, the military in Myanmar has declared a state of emergency. The military says its state of emergency will only last a year. Mo Tu-Za of the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore isn't buying. She has a long memory and recalls a similar promise made by the military after a student-led uprising decades ago. I go back to 1988. The promise was to convene elections and hand over power to the party that won the elections. And we all know what happened in 1990. What happened then, she says, was that Aung San Suu Kyi's party won, convincingly, a victory the military then refused to recognize.
Starting point is 00:07:08 But today, she insists, things are different than they were 30 years ago. The global political and economic climate will just be very unfavorable for a military junta seeking to justify its actions, I think. That's assuming the military cares. I think they've probably calculated that they've got friends in the world that will be disappointed in them, but will ultimately put their own self-interest to the fore and let them get away with it. David Matheson is a Yangon-based analyst reached in Thailand.
Starting point is 00:07:35 The endgame, I think, is quite disturbing. I think it's them holding onto power indefinitely. Mary Callahan, a Myanmar scholar at the University of Washington, who is in the former capital, Yangon, isn't so sure. I don't even know if they have a plan. But she says even without a plan. This crisis was inevitable given the cohabitation that the 2008 constitution imposed upon political and personal foes or enemies. So I'm not so shocked, to be honest.
Starting point is 00:08:12 That arrangement, she says, was created in part by the military-drafted constitution that allowed it to retain control over several key ministries while guaranteeing the military a quarter of the seats in parliament, effective veto power. Despite this, Aung San Suu Kyi went to the International Court of Justice in 2019 to refute allegations of genocide by Myanmar's military against the Muslim minority Rohingya. I think foreigners read too much into that. And that's what's being, that's what we're hearing over and over, which is that, you know, she went to bat for the military, but she went to bat for her country. I mean, she saw this ICJ case as an attack on her country. And inevitable or not, Callahan says, this crisis couldn't have come at a worse time. Myanmar is facing its greatest health threat since the Spanish flu of 1918.
Starting point is 00:09:06 There's new outbreaks of fighting in places where there had not been violence in a decade. And now it has a national political crisis. One, she says, that will not turn out well for the people of Myanmar. That's Michael Sullivan reporting from Chiang Rai, Thailand. While Myanmar's coup represents a test for that country's evolving democracy, it also represents a test of sorts for the new administration in the U.S., which has threatened to reimpose sanctions on Myanmar that were lifted more than a decade ago. As President Joe Biden weighs whether to follow through on that threat, he'll have to decide how involved to be in a region of the world where China's influence is growing.
Starting point is 00:10:02 Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria spoke about that with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly. I want to start with sanctions. In the case of Myanmar, good idea. Can they make much of a difference? They're a good idea in the sense that we do want to register in some way that we disapprove of a military coup, which is, of course, exactly what it is. But they're not likely to be very effective. It's an isolated country, Myanmar. Most of the influence is Chinese. As long as the Chinese continue to deal with them, the Chinese buy enormous amounts of energy, timber from Myanmar. So it's a good example of the limits, in a sense, of American influence in a part of the world that is now largely dominated by China.
Starting point is 00:10:45 Dominated by China. I mean, bigger picture here, Biden and his Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, came into office promising to recommit to U.S. leadership in the world. In the case of Myanmar or Burma, as the U.S. still calls it, what does that look like, U.S. leadership? I think the only way you could have effective leadership would be twofold. One is to stand for the right thing, which is democracy, the rule of law, constitutionalism, all of which was largely violated by this coup. But the second is effective international engagement, which means, truth be told, trying to find some way of working with China on this. And this may become a familiar theme for the next 20 to 30 years
Starting point is 00:11:32 of American foreign policy. You can't make that much headway if you are not willing to engage the other superpower in the world now. China is the running thread through all or at least much of U.S. foreign policy. Just to follow on something you just said, Farid, you talked about the U.S. standing for the right thing. Does the U.S. have much moral high ground to stand on here, lecturing another country about how to handle a disputed November election, which includes false claims of voter fraud? It was interesting the way that the Biden, I think it was President Biden himself or the administration put out its denunciation. It sounded as if it was denouncing the January 6th
Starting point is 00:12:17 attempted coup in Washington, D.C. But to answer your question- You mean if you substitute in a different country, they could have been saying the exact same thing. Exactly. But to answer your question, the U.S. does have moral authority. I think we shouldn't get so hobbled by our own problems to forget that at the end of the day, the United States passed the test.
Starting point is 00:12:38 The American system did endure despite the most severe challenge probably since the Civil War. And it only shows that democracy is fragile. It has to be protected. These things don't happen automatically or by magic. And, you know, the United States' moral authority really comes from the fact that it is the oldest constitutional democracy in the world,
Starting point is 00:13:00 has withstood a lot, including the assault by Donald Trump. For Reid Zakaria, columnist for The Washington Post. He's also author of the book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.

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