Yangon, Myanmar — Myanmar’s junta on Wednesday extended the state of emergency by six months, again delaying fresh polls it has promised to hold as it battles opposition to its coup.
The Southeast Asian nation has been in turmoil since the February 2021 coup which ended a 10-year experiment with democracy and sparked mass protests and a crackdown on dissent.
Three and a half years later, the junta is struggling to crush widespread armed opposition and recently suffered a series of stunning losses to an alliance of ethnic minority armed groups.
The junta had been unable to hold fresh polls as planned following an initial two-year state of emergency “due to the terrorist acts” by its opponents, broadcaster MRTV reported.
All the members of the junta-stacked National Defense and Security Council “unanimously decided to extend the period of the state of emergency for another six months,” MRTV said.
Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing had proposed the extension “in order to prepare valid and accurate ballots” for the election the junta has promised to hold, possibly in 2025.
The extension was also needed to “carry out the population census and in order to continue the implementation of the work to be done,” MRTV said.
Under the military-drafted 2008 constitution, which the junta has said is still in force, authorities are required to hold fresh elections within six months of a state of emergency being lifted.
Battlefield defeats
The military seized power after making unsubstantiated allegations of fraud in 2020 elections which Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, NLD, won in a landslide.
It has extended the state of emergency multiple times since as it battles established ethnic minority armed groups and newer pro-democracy “People’s Defence Forces.”
In recent months it has suffered a string of battlefield defeats to an alliance of ethnic minority armed groups in the north and west of the country.
Last week the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, MNDAA, claimed it had seized the northern town of Lashio, which sits on a vital trade highway to China and is home to the military’s northeastern command.
The junta denied the claim.
The loss of Lashio and the regional military command would be a huge blow to the junta, which has lost territory to the MNDAA and other armed groups in recent weeks.
In January the MNDAA captured the city of Laukkai near Myanmar’s border with China after around 2,000 junta troops surrendered, in one of the military’s biggest defeats in decades.
Since the coup fighting between the military and its opponents has forced 2.7 million people to flee their home, according to the United Nations.
More than 5,400 people have been killed and 27,000 arrested in the junta’s crackdown on dissent since the coup, according to a local monitoring group.
The junta has said it will hold fresh elections in 2025.
But critics say the proposed polls will be neither free nor fair.
Last year the junta-stacked election commission announced that Suu Kyi’s NLD would be dissolved for failing to re-register under a tough new military-drafted electoral law.
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