Military stages coup in Myanmar, detains Aung San Suu Kyi

NAYPYITAW, Myanmar (AP) — Myanmar’s military staged a coup Monday and detained senior politicians including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi — a sharp reversal of the significant, if uneven, progress toward democracy in the Southeast Asian nation has made following five decades of military rule.

An announcement read on military-owned Myawaddy TV said Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing would be in charge of the country for one year.

It said the seizure was necessary because the government had not acted on the military’s claims of fraud in November’s elections — in which Suu Kyi’s ruling party won a majority of the parliamentary seats up for grabs — and because it allowed the election to go ahead despite the coronavirus pandemic.

The takeover came the morning the country’s new parliamentary session was to begin and follows days of concern that a coup was coming.

The military maintains its actions are legally justified — citing a section of the constitution it drafted that allows it to take control in times of national emergency — though Suu Kyi’s party spokesman as well as many international observers have said it amounts to a coup.

It was a dramatic backslide for Myanmar, which was emerging from decades of strict military rule and international isolation that began in 1962.

It was also a shocking fall from power for Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate who had lived under house arrest for years as she tried to push her country toward democracy and then became its de facto leader after her National League for Democracy won elections in 2015.

While Suu Kyi had been a fierce antagonist of the army while under house arrest, since her release and return to politics, she has had to work with the country’s generals, who never fully gave up power.

While the 75-year-old has remained wildly popular at home, Suu Kyi’s deference to the generals — going so far as to defend their crackdown on Rohingya Muslims that the United States and others have labelled genocide — has left her reputation internationally in tatters.

For some, Monday’s takeover was seen as confirmation that the military holds ultimate power despite the veneer of democracy.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has previously described the clause in the constitution that the military invoked as a “coup mechanism in waiting.”

The embarrassingly poor showing of the military-backed party in the November vote may have been the spark.

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