Posts Tagged ‘election’

Independent Burmese observers have reported widespread allegations of voter intimidation and bribery in the country’s first elections in a generation.

Yesterday’s poll has already been written off by most international observers as a sham designed to entrench military rule, but further evidence of vote-rigging by the ruling military junta will only weaken its claims to have held a free and fair election.

Several hundred observers from a politically neutral Burmese organisation, which cannot be named for security reasons, monitored preparations for the election and polling in districts across the country. They found widespread interference from the ruling military junta in the campaign and conduct of the elections, particularly in rural areas.

The allegations emerged after the US, the UK, the EU and Japan condemned the vote as neither free nor fair and repeated calls to free opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Her youngest son, Kim Aris, flew from London to Bangkok last week, prompting speculation that her release was imminent, but the Burmese embassy denied his application for a visa.

The Burmese observers’ accounts of the election are all the more valuable as the junta banned all foreign journalists and monitors from the country ahead of the poll.

A Japanese reporter was detained yesterday in Myawaddy, a town on the country’s eastern border with Thailand, which was also the scene of clashes between government troops and ethnic Karen rebels.

State TV said voters cast their ballots “freely and happily” but the observers detailed how many were coerced into voting for the military junta’s political arm, the Union Solidarity and Development party.

Civil servants were told they would lose their jobs if they did not support the party while, in Rakhine state in western Burma, the owners of salt fields were told their land would be confiscated if they did not vote for the USDP. In other areas, villagers were warned all development programmes and public services would be cut if they did not vote for the government.

Vote-buying was also reported: 30% of observers reported that cash or in kind contributions were offered to people in exchange for government votes.

In Karen State, a USDP candidate paid village leaders 200,000 kyats (about £125), and in Rakhine state electorate, elderly people were given reading glasses and hospital patients 50,000 kyats by the government’s candidate.

Other villages were promised new roads or street lighting in exchange for votes.

At 13% of polling stations, observers said, voters faced intimidation or disturbance while voting.

Several parties have lodged complaints with the electoral commission over advance voting, where the military collected votes from people in the days before the election.

Polling stations were allegedly set up in government offices and at industrial zones where large numbers of voters could be signed up.

In Keng Tung township in Shan state, all 200 advance votes cast were for the government party. In nearly two-thirds of polling stations, observers report, advance votes were counted separately from regular votes.

Concerns have also been raised about votes being counted away from public or opposition party scrutiny.

Sporadic clashes between government troops and Karen rebels continued today along the Thai border after a faction of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army seized the town’s police station and post office yesterday. The group sides with the regime, but a faction is fighting with other rebel factions against the central government.

At least 10 people were wounded and thousands of refugees fled into Thailand amid gunshots and mortar fire.

A Japanese photographer, Toru Yamaji, 49, was detained in Myawaddy yesterday on suspicion of illegal entry after slipping across the Thai border to try to cover the election, Japan’s embassy said.