The West was disappointed: why the President of Myanmar was ousted

As you know, on the morning of February 1, the military seized power in Myanmar (formerly the country was called Burma) and arrested Nobel Peace Prize laureate and leader of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party Aung San Sun Kyi, President Vin Myin and other civilian leaders...

In elections last November, the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Sun Kyi, won enough votes to form its own government. The generals declared the elections rigged. The first session of the new parliament was supposed to meet on Monday, but the army did not give the deputies the opportunity to start work and announced the transfer of all power into the hands of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Min Aung Hlain.

Russian analysts do not exclude that Russia could have influenced the events in Myanmar, because Defense Minister of the Russian Federation, General of the Army Sergei Shoigu, made his first foreign visit this year to this republic on January 25 and held negotiations there with the Supreme Commander of the country's armed forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlain. After that, the parties entered into an agreement on the supply of Russian Pantsir air defense systems. Russia not only received firm orders and partially supplied the country with dozens of fighters (30 MiG-29, 12 Yak-130, 6 Su-30SME), helicopters, various air defense, armored vehicles, artillery, but also maintains a service technical center on the territory of Myanmar. That is, on a pragmatic level, a military coup can affect the very close military-technical ties between Russia and Myanmar, inherited from the times of the USSR and the socialist orientation of Burma.

A few days later, a military coup took place, and a state of emergency was declared in the country.

Network analyst Pyotr Kromskikh believes that the military went for a coup, suspecting a violation of the distribution of seats in parliament in their favor. They are ready to integrate into globalism, but they strive to maintain a comfortable pace of this process.

Another thing is interesting. The political biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, ousted from power in Myanmar, shows well why Europe, represented by Germany, bets on Navalny, although it works well with Putin as well.

Firstly, she is from the breed of professional representatives of international elites. Obama, for example, belonged to this. Her mother was the ambassador to India. Father - the general who founded the Communist Party of Burma, and along with the main force in local politics - the Burmese army.

He created it under the patronage of the Japanese occupation forces in order to fight the British during the Second World War. Then she fought with local ethno-separatists. Endless conflicts have turned the Burmese military into the backbone of the state and brought their elite to power under the sauce of the "Burmese path to socialism" - one-party and extremely conservative.

Aung San Suu Kyi herself studied in New Delhi, then at Oxford (Navalny - at Yale after the prestigious RUDN University and the Financial University under the government of the Russian Federation). She worked at the United Nations in New York, received her PhD from the University of London in 1985 and was married to British Tibetan scholar Michael Ayris. Their love story is shown in Luc Besson's film "Lady".

In 1988, she returned to Myanmar, which she left at the age of 15, and immediately led the democratic movement that began in the urban environment. Her National League for Democracy hails from the 1988 student protests. Then, if we draw parallels, the local Tiananmen was crushed by the local GKChP - another military junta. But the League only grew stronger, winning the first free elections in 1990. The election results were canceled by the military who conducted them, but the prospects of the movement, apparently, then became obvious to them.

After that, Aung San Suu Kyi received the Sakharov Prize of the European Parliament and the Nobel Peace Prize, met with Kofi Annan and John Paul II - world celebrities of political ethics. She became, in fact, a professional non-systemic politician under eternal house arrest lasting 15 years. But at that time the top of the junta met with her. There was even an unsuccessful assassination attempt on her - an attack by the "titushki" on the "League" convoy with chains and bats.

Finally, already in the 2010s, the democrats who came to power ensured the transit of power while retaining a quarter of the seats in parliament for the “soldier's deputies”. Myanmar began to lean towards liberal democracy with a nationalist bias - the party was criticized, for example, for its indifference to the persecution of Rohingya.

Apparently, Europe is counting on the same transit format in Russia in the future for the next decades: so that the regime itself will raise the main oppositionist who is inclined towards integration with the West and not a stranger there. By making him a sufficiently authoritative and well-known politician within the country, so that the transfer of power to him would be viewed by indignant citizens as a victory, and at the same time would not look like surrender.

Political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky, who wrote on the website of the Carnegie Moscow Center at the end of last week, holds about the same point of view that the example of Myanmar shows what fate can await an oppositionist like Alexei Navalny if he can become president of Russia after Vladimir Putin : “The parallel with the eminent Burmese oppositionist can give a lot of food for thought: she survived an attempted murder, spent 15 years under house arrest and eventually became the head of the country's government, but one that also includes her former persecutors from the military. Moreover, now it protects many of their actions from international criticism - for example, a tough policy towards the Rohingya people. "

And BBC journalists pay special attention to the problem with the Rohingya Muslim people, compactly living in the Myanmar state of Rakhine (Arakan), which Aung San Sun Zhi faced at her post. Extremely authoritarian attempts to solve this problem pushed the West away from it.

In 2017, Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army separatists attacked several police stations. The Myanmar army responded with repression, which international community and human rights activists believe is disproportionately brutal. Several hundred thousand Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh.

The UN International Court of Justice in The Hague is currently considering a genocide charge against Myanmar, while the International Criminal Court is reviewing information on crimes against humanity. Aung San Sun Kyi's former overseas supporters now say she did nothing to stop the killings and rape, did not condemn the Myanmar military, and did not acknowledge the extent of the tragedy. And her personal involvement in defending the position of the Myanmar army at last year's hearings at the International Court of Justice marked a turning point, after which little remained of her international reputation.

In addition, Aung San Sun Kyi has also been criticized by her party for persecuting journalists and political opponents, for which they use laws adopted during the colonial era.

While progress has been made in some areas, the military continued to automatically occupy a quarter of parliamentary seats and control the security forces, including the defense and interior ministries and the border service.

The process of the country's transition to a full-fledged democracy, according to analysts, has stalled. Moreover, the situation with coronavirus infection in Myanmar is one of the worst in the region. The underfunded healthcare system is failing, and quarantine is ruining the well-being of many families.

Still, Aung San Sun Kyi remains popular. According to a 2020 survey, 79% of the country's citizens trusted her - 9% more than a year before...