Myanmar sets December 28 elections amid conflict and criticism

Myanmar’s military-appointed election commission has scheduled polls for December 28, in a vote critics call a sham to legitimise the army’s 2021 coup.

Bangkok: Myanmar’s military-appointed election commission announced Monday that elections will begin December 28, setting a date for polls that critics have denounced as a sham intended to normalise the army’s 2021 seizure of power even as armed conflict rages throughout much of the country.

The Union Election Commission said in a statement sent to journalists that the elections will be conducted in phases over several days and that a full schedule will be released soon.

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A separate statement from the commission, published Saturday in the state-run Myanma Alinn newspaper, said that all 330 townships in the country have been designated as constituencies for the election.

Nearly 60 parties, including the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, have registered to run, according to the list on the commission’s website.

It is unclear how polling can take place in many areas that are not under the control of the military government but are held instead by pro-democracy resistance fighters or ethnic minority rebels. Much of the country is wracked by civil war.

Several opposition organisations, including armed resistance groups, have said they will seek to derail the election.

Last month, the military government enacted a new electoral law that imposes punishments of up to the death penalty for anyone who opposes or disrupts the elections.

Critics have already said the military-planned election will be neither free nor fair because there is no free media and most of the leaders of Aung San Suu Kyi’s popular but now dissolved National League for Democracy party have been arrested.

Suu Kyi’s party won a landslide victory in the last general election in 2020, but the military seized power from her government in February 2021, as it was about to begin a second five-year term.

Suu Kyi, 80, is serving prison sentences totalling 27 years after being convicted in a series of politically tainted prosecutions brought by the military.

The military justified its seizure of power by claiming massive fraud in the 2020 general election, though independent election observers did not find any major irregularities.

The army takeover was met with widespread popular opposition, triggering armed resistance, and large parts of the country are embroiled in conflict. The ruling military said an election was its primary goal but repeatedly pushed back the date.

The country’s current security situation poses a serious challenge to holding elections, with the military believed to control less than half the country. The military government had previously said the election would be conducted phase by phase in areas under its command.

It has currently stepped up military activity, both on the ground and with airstrikes, to retake areas controlled by opposition forces ahead of the election, and there have been reports of increasing numbers of airstrikes killing scores of civilians in recent weeks.

On Sunday, at least 24 people were reportedly killed and several were injured after the military dropped bombs on a hospital in a small town of Mawchi, in Kayah state, also known as Karenni, Myanmar’s independent online media reported. The town is known as a centre for the mining of wolfram and tungsten.

In a separate attack, at least 21 people, including a pregnant woman, were killed last Thursday by an airstrike on the town of Mogok, the centre of the Southeast Asian country’s lucrative gem-mining industry, according to numerous reports.

The incidents were not confirmed by the army, which normally responds to similar reports by saying it only attacks legitimate targets of war, accusing the resistance forces of being terrorists.