• by Marwaan Macan-Markar (bangkok)
• Friday, August 13, 2010
• Inter Press Service

By finally announcing the date of the country’s first general election in 20 years, Burma’s military regime has lived up to a promise it made in its seven-step 'roadmap', a blueprint in its desperate quest for political legitimacy.

'Multi-party general elections for the country’s parliament will be held on Sunday, November 7,' state-run television and radio stations announced on Friday. This statement from the junta-appointed Elections Commission (EC) said political parties have from Aug. 16 to 30 to submit the names of their poll candidates.

The announcement of the long-awaited poll date comes a day after the EC declared that a total of 330 constituencies will be contested during the vote, as reported by another junta mouthpiece, the English-language newspaper ‘The New Light of Myanmar'. Rangoon, the former capital, will have 45 seats up for grabs, while Naypidaw, the new capital, will have eight seats.

The general election in Burma, also known as Myanmar, is the fifth measure in the seven-step scheme that the junta has repeatedly said is pivotal to establishing a 'discipline flourishing democracy' in the South-east Asian country.

The steps that preceded the poll included the drafting and approval of the 2008 constitution, both of which ran into a storm of criticism for being attempts by the military to further its power in the country. The regime’s chosen Nov. 7 poll date also effectively rules out any campaigning role that the foremost opposition figure in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi, might have planned. This is because the 65-year-old Nobel Peace laureate will have to stay detained in her Rangoon home till her current sentence runs out in late November.

Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for over 14 of the last 20 years, was slapped with her current 18-month sentence following a controversial case that stemmed from the illegal entry into her lakeside villa by a U.S. national in May 2009.

She is among the over 2,200 political prisoners in the country, a number that includes former elected parliamentarians, labour rights activists, former student leaders, Buddhist monks and humanitarian workers. Western governments have called for their release ahead of this year's vote in order to help make it legitimate.

'This election will be a carefully orchestrated, choreographed exercise,' said Aung Naing Oo, an independent Burmese political analyst living in exile. 'It had to take place before Aung San Suu Kyi is released.'

The EC is likely to approve the final list of candidates by the second week of September, he told IPS. 'There will probably be two weeks of campaigning that will be permitted, starting in late October,' Aung Naing Oo added.

But these restrictions -- in a country that has been under successive military regimes since a 1962 coup -- have not dampened the enthusiasm by some in the majority Burman community and in the country's mix of ethnic minorities to contest the poll.

For now, the reported 27.2 million registered voters in a population of 57 million people will have 44 political parties to select their parliamentary candidates from.

The most formidable remains the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which enjoys unlimited resources and freedom denied other contenders.

Besides 20 ethnic-based parties expected to contest for seats in the country’s border areas, which are home to ethnic minorities like the Karen, Kachin and Shan, voters will also have a choice of three national parties that are shaping up to be an opposition bloc. They include the National Democratic Front (NDF), Union Democratic Party (UDP) and the Democratic Party of Myanmar (DPM).

The NDF’s membership is drawn from activists who broke away from the National League for Democracy (NLD), the Suu Kyi-led party that was disbanded after it decided early this year to boycott the election.

'The junta has always wanted to avoid a repeat of the 1990 election,' said Zin Linn, spokesman for the National Coalition Government for the Union of Burma (NCGUB), referring to the last general election.

The NLD won 82 percent of the 485 parliamentary seats in that vote. But the junta denied the NCGUB, which emerged from that thumping victory, the right to govern and thus forced it into exile.

'The period for parties to campaign will also be limited, unlike in 1990. Then, they had three months to campaign,' Zin Linn said in an interview. 'Getting people to submit names as party candidates has also run into difficulty this year, because the EC is sending the names it gets to the special branch (of the police).'

Indeed, harsher restrictions have been placed on contenders for parliamentary seats in this year’s elections than in the 1990 vote.

In June, the EC banned parties from chanting slogans, displaying party flags and marching through the streets in political rallies. Political speeches that would 'tarnish' the powerful military’s image were also prohibited.

But these realities, which critics say make the holding of a genuine, free and fair election difficult if not impossible, have not come in the way of support for the impending poll from Burma’s neighbours.

'Thailand welcomes this announcement, which comes as expected,' Thani Thongphakdi, deputy spokesman of the Thai foreign ministry, told IPS. 'It is an important step in the process of national reconciliation and we hope that it will be a free, fair and inclusive election.'

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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