United States President, Obama has said Burma‘s first elections in 20 years will be ”anything but free and fair”
The rules in Burma‘s elections - where polls have now closed - give the game away. Literally, SkyNews reports.
Candidates had to fork out more than £300 to register - nearly a year‘s salary for the average Burmese worker.
Mass rallies are prohibited, and nobody is allowed to criticise the regime.
Even before the vote began, a quarter of all parliamentary seats were reserved for serving officers in the armed forces.
As a result, most voters had a choice between a pair of candidates representing the two main parties.
Both parties are regarded as thinly disguised fronts for the military dictatorship that has ruled the country since 1962.
They are both led by recently retired officers, and funded by businessmen with connections to the generals at the centre of power. One of them is even using state funds to pay for its campaign.
Both President Obama and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have hit out at the legitimacy of the elections.
Critics add that the entire process is designed to appease foreign governments who are critical of Burma‘s human rights record, while ensuring that nothing really changes.
”It‘s artificial,” says journalist Daniel Pedersen of the handover of power from men in uniform to men in suits.
”They‘ll say, ‘We‘ve reformed, we‘re new, we‘ve taken our uniforms off‘. But it‘s political expediency. Everyone knows it‘s a lie.”
Burma‘s last election, in 1990, delivered a landslide victory to the National League for Democracy, the party of Oxford-educated Aung San Suu Kyi.
The military junta responded by ignoring the result and locking up hundreds of the party‘s supporters. Suu Kyi has spent most of the last two decades under house arrest.
This time around, Burma‘s ruling generals have carefully stage-managed the election.
Foreign journalists have been barred from entering Burma during the voting.
But with the help of Burmese contacts who risked their own safety, a Sky News crew was able to enter the country secretly to visit Karen State, where thousands of men and women will be denied the right to vote.
They live in a ”black” area - a region home to an ethnic minority that has seen decades of bloody conflict with the regime.
The government has deemed it too dangerous for polling. Locals say they regard the election as a sham.
American-educated Colonel Nerdah Mya commands the Karen National Liberation Army.
Source:http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art2010110813154151
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