The plot behind the coup in Myanmar | The…

Myanmar armed forces hinted at fraud in November election last and sunday They arrested all the leaders of the government that 75-year-old Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was running without chairing. The blow is over, the military declared a state of emergency for one year and announced that former General Myint Swe would occupy the presidency of the country.

In Myanmar, formerly Burma, in the middle of India, China, Thailand and Bangladesh people like Aung Tun live. Mid-rise, 45, sells cell phones in Yangon. On his Facebook photos, he appears with a sarong and his two sons with painted faces, like all Burmese men. His profile picture is framed by that of his boss and the sentence: “I am with Aung Sang Suu Kyi”. Now he writes: “We want to ask the world leaders, the United Nations, the media to help our country, we want to develop like our neighbors.”

The hero of Burmese independence was Aung Sang (father of Aung Sang Suu Kyi), assassinated in 1947. Exile led Suu Kyi to study first in Delhi, later in Oxford and to remain in England. In 1988 he returned. They asked him to speak in a ceremony at Shwedagon Pagoda, a 2,500-year-old Buddhist temple with a gold dome that can be seen from all over Yangon. Half a million people have discovered the leader of their democratic revolution there. Suu Kiy swept the 1990 election but the army failed to recognize the result and jailed all opponents. A year later, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, refused to be extradited and endured 15 years of house arrest.

The dictatorship relaxed freedoms and called legislative elections in 2010, but before that it reformed the constitution: it retained 25% of seats in parliament, the power to appoint ministers and form a government “in case of emergency “, the management of natural resources and the ban on being president for anyone from a non-Burmese family, just like Suu Kii, whose children and late husband were born in England. Presidential elections were called in 2016 and Suu Kyi’s NLD swept aside Htin Hyaw as a candidate. Suu Kii was appointed Councilor of State, a sort of president ipso facto.

Until 2014, the United Nations Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar was Argentine lawyer Tomás Ojea Quintana. “For me, it’s already vú,” he said to PageI12. In 2010, he personally met Suu Kyi and expressed the importance of prosecuting crimes committed by the military over the past decades, which has never happened. Ojea Quintana surprised by coup, believes trigger may have been Suu Kyi’s new crushing victory in November electionsIt was a renewal of legitimacy: “with the continuity of the elected government with this level of support, the power that the military retained would be weakened”.

The Burmese Theory of Two Demons

For Myanmar, they are Bengalis, for Bangladesh, they are Burmese. The Rohingyas are stateless. “They have to stop. I have never seen such a discriminated population in my life, ”said United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterrez. The Rohingya are vulnerable as an ethnic minority, as Muslims and as descendants of the Indian subcontinent. According to UNHCR, at least 723,000 Rohingya, one of the more than 100 ethnic groups that call Myanmar home, have had to flee official Burmese forces to Bangladesh since mid-2017. 40% are under 12 years old. In Bangladesh, they are being held in a 13 square kilometer refugee camp.

The excuse is to fight the ARSA, an insurgent group of no more than 500 members whom the Buddhist ultranationalists equate with Daesh. After decades of isolation in telecommunications, the eruption of cell phones and the Internet has been a rush. The Ma Ba Tha Buddhist movement’s false information campaign describing the one million Rohingyas as part of the ARSA deeply impressed the Suu Kii Buddhist electoral base. In 2018, Facebook admitted in a statement that it “could have done more” to prevent its platform from being used for genocidal purposes. At the end of 2019, Aung Sang Suu Kyi appealed to the International Court of Justice to defend the same armed forces that had taken her to prison. He acknowledged the crimes against humanity but placed them in the context of a conflict that ARSA started.

Until coming to power, the West viewed Suu Kyi as a pair of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. But another Nobel Prize winner, Barack Obama, noticed something different. When he visited him in 2012, they spoke of the dilemma of moving from an icon of opposition to power. “I have always been a political leader,” Suu Kyi told him. Ben Rodes, then Obama’s adviser, said as he got out, back in the limousine, the former president reflected: “I was also the face of a poster, the image fades.”

West and China

The devaluation of Suu Kyi’s image in the West has forced her to seek support wherever possible. He went to see the Hungarian president, the nationalist Viktor Orban, to talk about “the growth of the Muslim population”. China – which is also accused of crimes against humanity against Uyghur Islamists in the Xinjiang region – saw an opportunity.

Similar to what happens in other areas where Britain has drawn maps mixing peoples, such as the Middle East, Myanmar is a country without a consolidated single nation. Against this, China, for a decade, has observed what is happening on its southern border and from time to time moves a piece.

In 2017, China incorporated the Belt and Road Initiative into the Constitution, introduced shortly before by Xi Jin Pin as the 21st Century Silk Road, a program to which the Chinese premier invited countries to join the largest global logistics network in which Asia the country is the major promoter. Asian tigers jump and crouch too. The Chinese are not far from establishing themselves as the main decision-makers in Southeast Asia. One of the fundamentals of the project is the port Xi Jin Pin hopes to build in Myanmar for direct access to the Indian Sea, along with a pipeline that would save him a few million dollars in importing crude from the Persian Gulf. . The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor would consolidate this policy and, for this, China submitted to the Burmese government 38 infrastructure projects that Suu Kyi did not develop with the speed wanted by the Chinese.

At the end of January, an event occurred which would have offended the Red Patience: Myanmar acquired one and a half million Covid-19 vaccines from India and signed a contract with the Serum Institute of the same country to receive them. 30 million more.

So far, China has not formally condemned the overthrow of the civilian government in Myanmar, but Foreign Minister Wang Wenbin explained that “China and Myanmar are good neighbors. We hope that all parties can resolve their differences within the framework of the Constitution and the law, preserving political and social stability ”. A curious event occurred on January 12th. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met Min Aung Hlaing, head of the armed forces in the Burmese capital. Since yesterday morning, Min Aung Hlaing is the one who signs Myanmar’s decrees.

Thousands like Aung Tun are fighting on their Facebook, Suu Kyi is in prison again, the soldiers are returning to where they never left and the Argentinian lawyer who denounced them ten years ago, Tomás Ojea Quintana, is taking advantage of the universal jurisprudence of crimes against humanity. In Argentina, he defends a Rohingya organization which has just filed a complaint for genocide in the Burmese province of Rakhine before the court of Servini de Cubria.