For the first time in decades, the Burmese people have been able to express their political will – after a landslide election victory for Aung San Suu Kyi.
What a difference a day makes…
Yesterday evening, as the polls closed in Burma’s by-election and the ballots were being counted, a significant number of people had already written off the entire exercise. I for one thought there was little chance that this poll would be viewed as credible, both by the international community and by the Burmese themselves.
There were just too many allegations of ballot sabotage, intimidation, registration fraud and physical violence being made to support any other conclusion.
The Channel 4 News team was taken to a secret location in a quiet Rangoon suburb where a group of activists and teachers had set up their own ‘election monitoring centre’.
They were collating information from all of the 45 constituencies around the country for a series of reports detailing various election scams – the most common was the use of wax, dripped onto the box where those minded to vote for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League of Democracy (NLD), would place their tick.
The leader of this group, who call themselves the ‘Yangon School of Political Science’, is called Myat Thu. He told me that that this sort of ‘technique’ was a new one to him, then added that tens of thousands of ballots had been destroyed this way. Myat Thu said the by-election would be known in the future as ‘the wax election.’
But today’s events seem likely to prove him wrong. Election monitors working for the NLD have been reporting overwhelming wins for their candidates in virtually every polling station. While Ms Suu Kyi’s party has probably been robbed of plenty of votes, the hard reality is this: nothing short of blatant ballot box stuffing was going to prevent the NLD from winning.
We weren’t expecting the result for some days yet. Burma’s electoral commission has the ultimate power to recognise winners and that can take up to a week. Tonight however, the NLD received a letter from the commission declaring its candidates winners in 43 out of the 44 constituencies.
It is an absolutely stunning win for Aung San Suu Kyi. Take her party’s victories in all four of the by-election seats in the country’s new-build capital, Naypyidaw. The vast majority of voters there owe their livelihoods in some shape or form to the government – or more specifically, to the NLD’s main rival – the military-backed USDP (Union Solidarity and Development Party). In many cases pressure would have been brought to bear either directly, or indirectly, on them to vote for the USDP – but clearly, the people weren’t listening.
Instead of the ‘wax-election’ then, this contest may end up simply being called the ‘people’s election’, because for the first time since 1990, the will of the people seems to have been reasonably accurately reflected (the NLD won the 1990 election but the military junta squashed the results).
There are serious dangers here of course. If the country’s President, Thein Sein, sticks to this democratic course, he’s probably guaranteeing his own political demise as well as the USDP – and the next general election comes around in 2015. I expect the hardliners in the military and its government supporters in the parliament are not best pleased this evening, and President Sein may begin to feel increasingly vulnerable.
But that, as they say, is a worry for another day.
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