The general who overthrew Myanmar’s elected government in 2021 has been formally elected president by his hand-picked military parliament. Min Aung Hlaing received 429 of 584 votes — a result as predetermined as the election that produced it.
Al Jazeera and the BBC covered the story. Fox News did not. RT did not. ZeroHedge did not. PressTV did not. CNN was not prominent on it. The formal death of democracy in a country of 54 million people was, for most of the world’s media, a non-event.
The 155 members who either opposed or abstained suggest internal fractures within the military establishment itself. The civil war continues, with resistance forces controlling significant territory in the border regions. The conflict has displaced millions and killed thousands.
Myanmar’s democratic experiment — which began in 2010 after decades of military rule, produced a Nobel laureate leader in Aung San Suu Kyi, and briefly promised a different future for Southeast Asia — is formally over. The general who ended it has now legalized his seizure of power through a process that satisfies no definition of legitimacy.
The international community abandoned Myanmar years ago. There will be no sanctions that matter, no intervention, no sustained diplomatic pressure. The resistance movement needed external support that never came and will not come now, because the cameras are pointed at Iran and the attention is elsewhere.
Another democracy dies. The world notes it, briefly, and moves on.
