Voting has begun in Myanmar’s first general election since the country’s military overthrew the democratically elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in a 2021 coup.
Sunday’s highly restricted election was held in about a third of the Southeast Asian country’s 330 townships, where civil war rages between the military and numerous rebel and ethnic armed groups.
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The first phase will be followed by two rounds of voting on January 11 and January 25, but all voting has been canceled in 65 townships.
“This means at least 20% of the country has been disenfranchised at this stage,” Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng said in an interview from Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.
“The big question is here in the cities: What will turnout be like?”
Polling stations opened in Yangon at 6am on Sunday (23:30 GMT on Saturday) and as the sun rose “we saw a relatively regular flow of voters,” Chen said.
“But voters are generally middle-aged, and we don’t see many young people. When you look at the ballot paper, there are very few choices, and the vast majority of those choices are military parties,” he added.
The election has been ridiculed by critics, including the United Nations, some Western countries and human rights groups, as a campaign without anti-military parties and not free, fair and credible.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was ousted by the military months after her National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in the last general election in 2020, remains in detention and her party has been dissolved.
The pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is widely expected to emerge as the largest party.
The military, which has ruled Myanmar since 2021, said the vote was a chance for a new political and economic start for the country of 55 million people, and Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has consistently positioned the poll as a path to reconciliation.
An op-ed in state newspaper Global New Light of Myanmar on Saturday said the poll “opens a new page for Myanmar, moving the narrative from a conflict-affected and crisis-ridden country to a new chapter of peace-building and hope for economic reconstruction.”
But fighting remains fierce in many parts of the country, and elections are being held in an environment of violence and repression, U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said last week.
High Commissioner for Human Rights Turk said: “There are no conditions for the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly that would enable the free and meaningful participation of citizens.”
The civil war sparked by the 2021 coup has left an estimated 90,000 people dead, 3.5 million people displaced, and around 22 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, more than 22,000 people are currently detained for political crimes.
Train stations in downtown Yangon were closed overnight, security guards were posted outside and armed police guarded intersections.
Among some early voters, 45-year-old Swe Mau dismissed international criticism.
“That’s not the main issue,” he told AFP news agency. “There are always people who like it and people who don’t like it.”
In total, only about 100 people voted at both stations in the first hour, according to an AFP tally.
“It is impossible for this election to be free and fair,” said Moe Moe Min, who has spent the past two months “on the run” from military airstrikes.
“How can we support elections run by the junta when the military has destroyed our lives?” she told AFP from her village in central Mandalay.
“We are homeless, hiding in the jungle, living between life and death,” said the 40-year-old.
The second round of voting will take place in two weeks, and the third and final round will take place on January 25th. The date of vote counting and announcement of election results have not been announced.
Analysts say the military’s attempts to establish a stable government in the midst of a growing conflict are fraught with risks, and even with a civilian guise, a military-controlled government is unlikely to receive significant international recognition.
