Crisis in Myanmar after army alleges election fraud
Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior figures from the ruling party were detained in an early morning raid on Monday (Feb 1), the spokesman for the governing National League for Democracy said.
The move came after Myanmar's powerful military triggered worry about a coup last week after threatening to "take action"
over alleged fraud in a November election won by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD).
The NLD led by Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner and figurehead of Myanmar's long struggle against dictatorship, won 83
per cent of available seats in the Nov 8 election seen as a referendum on her fledgling democratic government.
WHO RULES IN MYANMAR?
Nobel Peace Prize winner Suu Kyi, 75, came to power after a 2015 landslide election win that followed decades of house arrest in a struggle for democracy that turned her into an international icon.
Her international standing was damaged after hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled army operations into refuge from Myanmar's western Rakhine state in 2017, but she remains hugely popular at home.
The military, as the architect of Myanmar's 2008 constitution and fledgling democracy, sees itself as the guardian of national unity and the constitution, and it has enshrined a permanent role for itself in the political system.
Known as the Tatmadaw, it gets an unelected quota of 25 per cent of parliamentary seats and it controls the defence, interior and borders ministries, ensuring an important stake in politics.
WHY DID THE MILITARY CHALLENGE THE LATEST VOTE?
The military alleged discrepancies such as duplicated names on voting lists in scores of districts and was unhappy with the election commission's response to its complaints.
The military did not say if irregularities were substantial enough to have changed the election outcome.
Its grievance was similar to that of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the former ruling party created by the military before it officially ceded power in 2011.
The USDP, widely seen as a military proxy, was humiliated in the election, winning only 33 of 476 available seats.
