Fear and intimidation before military leaders vote

On rugged terrain near the Irrawaddy River, aspiring MP and retired lieutenant general Tayza Kyaw attempts to excite his audience with a speech promising better times ahead.

He is the candidate of the Myanmar military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in Aungmyaythazan, a constituency in Mandalay City.

The crowd of 300 to 400 people grabbed the designer hats and flags handed out to them, but quickly faded in the heat of the afternoon, with some dozing off.

Children run and play between the rows of chairs. Many of these families are victims of the earthquake that severely damaged Mandalay and surrounding areas in March, and are hoping to receive help. They disappear at the end of the rally.

On Sunday, the people of Myanmar have the first opportunity to vote in an election since the military seized power in a coup nearly five years ago, sparking a devastating civil war.

But the vote, already delayed several times by the ruling junta, is widely condemned as a sham. The most popular party, the National League for Democracy, has been dissolved and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is incarcerated in a secret prison.

The vote, which will take place in three stages over a period of one month, will not even be possible in large parts of the country still ravaged by war. Even where voting takes place, it is marred by a climate of fear and intimidation.

When the BBC tried to ask the rally attendees in Mandalay what they thought of the election, party officials told us not to do so. They might say the wrong things, one man explained: They don’t know how to talk to journalists.

The number of plainclothes military intelligence officers present on site partly explains their nervousness. In a dictatorship that criminalized liking Facebook pages critical of elections or using the word revolution, even these staunchly pro-military activists feared the consequences of allowing a foreign journalist to ask questions without censorship.

The same fear persists in the streets of Mandalay. At a market stall selling fresh river fish, customers all refused to answer what they thought of the election. We have no choice, so we must vote, one of them said. The fish seller chased us away. “You’re going to get me into trouble,” she said.

Only one woman had the courage to speak frankly, but we had to find a private place to meet and hide her identity, just to hear her perspective on the election.

“This election is a lie,” she said. “Everyone is afraid. Everyone has lost their humanity and their freedom. So many people have died, been tortured or fled to other countries. If the army continues to rule the country, how can things change?”

She wouldn’t vote, she said, but she knew the decision carried risks.

Military authorities imposed a new law in July criminalizing “any speech, organization, incitement, protest or distribution of leaflets with a view to destroying part of the electoral process.”

Earlier this month, Tayzar San, a doctor and one of the first to organize a protest against the 2021 coup, was also among the first to be charged under the law, after distributing leaflets calling for a boycott of the elections. The junta has offered a reward for information leading to his arrest.

In September, in Yangon, three young people were sentenced to 42 to 49 years each for putting up stickers showing a ball and a ballot box together.

“Cooperate and crush all those who harm the union,” commands a large red poster above families and couples enjoying a late afternoon stroll beneath the old red brick walls of Mandalay Royal Palace.

In this threatening climate, anything close to a free vote is unimaginable.

Yet junta leader Min Aung Hlaing has momentum these days. He seems convinced that these extraordinary elections, where there will be no votes in half the country, will give him the legitimacy he failed to acquire during his five disastrous years in power.

He even attended a Christmas mass at Yangon Cathedral and condemned “hatred and resentment between individuals” that lead to “domination, oppression and violence in human communities.”

This is a man accused by the United Nations and human rights groups of genocide against Rohingya Muslims, whose coup sparked a civil war that, according to data analysis group ACLED, killed 90,000 people.

Min Aung Hlaing’s electoral strategy enjoys the full diplomatic support of China which, strangely for a one-party state, is providing technical and financial support for this multi-party exercise. It is likely to be grudgingly accepted in the rest of Asia as well.

Its army, newly equipped with Chinese and Russian weapons, is in the process of regaining the ground lost over the last two years against the various armed groups opposed to the coup. He clearly hopes to include more of the reconquered territories in the third stage of elections at the end of January.

With Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD out of the battlefield, her USDP is virtually guaranteed to win. In the last free elections in 2020, the USDP won only six percent of parliamentary seats.

Some observers have noted that Min Aung Hlaing is not popular even within his own regime, or his own party, where his leadership qualities are questioned. He will likely retain the presidency after the elections, but his power will to some extent be diluted by the resumption of parliamentary politics, albeit without most of the parties that won seats in the 2020 elections.

The election is clearly seen by China as a way out, a way for the military to break out of the destructive impasse caused by its misguided coup.

Even near the seemingly peaceful city life of Mandalay, the deep scars left by Myanmar’s civil war, which is still far from over, are visible.

Across the Irrawaddy River is the spectacular Mingun temple complex, once a popular tourist attraction. Getting there requires a short drive along a riverside road, but for the past four years this area, like much of the area around Mandalay, has been contested territory, where the People’s Volunteer Defense Forces control many villages and launch ambushes against military convoys.

To reach Mingun, we had to pass several checkpoints. We sat in a teahouse with the local police commander to negotiate our passage.

He was a young man, who wore the enormous pressure of his work on his face. He had a revolver stuck in the back of his pants, and two even younger men—boys, perhaps—carrying military assault rifles sat nearby as bodyguards.

He said he had to carry these weapons just to move around the village.

On his phone were images of his opponents: young men, dressed in tatters, with an assortment of weapons they might have smuggled from Myanmar’s border regions or obtained from dead soldiers and police. One group, calling themselves the Unicorn Guerrilla Force, was his toughest opponent. They never negotiated, he said. “If we see each other, we always shoot. That’s how it is.”

Elections, he added, would not take place in most villages north of him. “Everyone here has taken sides in this conflict. It’s so complicated and difficult. But no one is willing to compromise.”

After an hour we were told it would be too dangerous to reach Mingun. PDFs may not know you are journalists, he said.

There are few signs of compromise, either, from the military that overthrew Myanmar’s young democracy and now wants to reorganize its regime with a veneer of quasi-democratic respectability.

Asked about the appalling civilian casualties since the coup and airstrikes on schools and hospitals, Gen. Tayza Kyaw blamed the losses entirely on those who opposed the military takeover.

“They chose armed resistance,” he said. “Those who are with the enemy cannot be considered the people, according to the law. So they are simply terrorists.”

Mandalay residents say this election has none of the color and energy of the 2020 election. There were few rallies. Only five other parties are allowed to challenge the USDP nationally, and none have the resources or institutional support. Participation is not expected to be high.

And yet, the fear of possible reprisals, or simply exhaustion due to the civil war, is such that many Burmese will continue to go to polling stations, regardless of their opinion on the election.

“We will vote,” one woman said, “but not with our hearts.”

Additional reporting by Lulu Luo