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Sunday is set to be Myanmar’s second general election after 50 years of military rule, but international organizations have already expressed skepticism.
Burma, a country now known as Myanmar, switched from militarism to democracy in November 2010, following the release of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi after a long captivity that year.
Yet Suu Kyi, who won a landslide victory in the first free elections in 2015, is now busy answering allegations of Rohingya genocide against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, accusing some sectors of trying to justify the crime.
At least 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh to escape persecution by the army in the country’s Rakhine state.
While this is the biggest problem for the international community in recent years, it is difficult to find an answer to the importance of this choice, or whether the country’s military stance on the Rohingya is accepted by political parties without question.
In a recent interview, U Thanh Thee, leader of the country’s Union, Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), said Myanmar has nothing to regret about the Rohingya.
Unlike Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), the main opposition party is the USDP, which is believed to be close to the country’s military.
The USDP came to power through a questionable mass election in 2010, an election in which Suu Kyi’s party did not run.
One of the things the USDP is saying against its rival NLD in this election campaign is that ‘NLD welcomes Muslim Bengali’.
In Myanmar, the term ‘Muslim Bengali’ is commonly used to refer to the Rohingya.
A report by the French news agency AFP was published on Frontier Myanmar.net, where Yangon-based analyst Khin Zhawin said that speaking out against Rohingya or Muslims is not usually a problem in Myanmar.
Only four percent of the country’s 5.5 million people are Muslim and do not have a conventional political party.
The Muslim population of the country complains of discrimination against them in various sectors, including education and health.
However, the issue is being debated about the conduct of the elections itself, because the international community has already expressed doubts about whether the elections will be free and fair.
The Myanmar Times reported on November 4 that the country’s influential military had questioned whether the Union Election Commission (UEC) was capable of holding free and fair elections.
The military, which has been in power since 1972, now says electoral vulnerabilities could cast doubt on its legitimacy.
However, one of the reasons the international community has called the elections opaque is to keep millions of Muslims from northern Rakhine out of the process.
The Frontier Times reports that the NLD is expected to win Sunday’s vote and remain in power.
Another media outlet, The Diplomat, says that voting for the NLD means voting for Suu Kyi, as her popularity in international court is believed to have increased.
But from past experience, no one has a clear idea of what the situation of minorities in the country will be.
In 2015, Rakhine voters elected the Rakhine National Arakan Nationalist Party to the Rakhine State Parliament.
But the NLD chairman ignored this and appointed one of his own party as the chief minister in Rakhine state.
Democracy without rights
Conversation.com headed a section of a report titled “Democracy Without Rights.”
According to the report, the Rohingya issue has been kept secret, but Aung San Suu Kyi has defended genocide in the international court, showing that she has extended her cooperative hand (to the military) in domestic politics.
But no matter how free and fair the elections may be, the path to democracy will weaken as the Rohingya continue to be killed, according to the report.
The New York-based international human rights organization Human Rights Watch has previously said that the upcoming elections are full of flaws.
They say that elections cannot be free and fair, with seats reserved for the army and free access to the media.
The agency also complained that the country’s small ethnic groups had been deprived of their right to vote.
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