It's been a year to remember. After two decades of waiting, Burma finally had an election in 2010, a year that will be largely defined by that event. But on other fronts, too, the year shaped up to be an interesting and, quite possibly, crucial one for the country's future.
The Nov. 7 vote turned out, as most observers expected, to be an anticlimax. After effectively excluding all of Burma's major democratic leaders by barring convicted “criminals” from taking part in the election, the regime allowed less threatening would-be rivals to form parties that stood little chance of winning.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the last great hope of Burmese democracy, was notably among those deemed unfit to contest the election. This forced her National League for Democracy (NLD) to make a choice that did not sit well with all of its members. In March, the party decided against re-registering after it refused to expel Suu Kyi and other detained leaders. (Notably, this esteemed group no longer included the NLD's 82-year-old vice chairman, Tin Oo, who had been released upon completion of his term of house arrest the previous month.)
“We cannot expel Aung San Suu Kyi and others who are or have been imprisoned under this corrupt and unfair legal system. Without them, our party would be nothing,” said Win Tin, another of the party's stalwarts, who himself had spent nearly two decades behind bars.
The fallout of this fateful decision was the break-up of the party, with a faction led Dr Than Nyein opting to form a new party, the National Democratic Front (NDF), to try its luck on election day. In the end, it walked away with just 16 of the more than 1,100 seats up for grabs. The junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), predictably, won by a landslide, claiming nearly 77 percent of the seats in the two houses of the national parliament and in the state and regional assemblies.
Other parties, meanwhile, fared better than the NDF, but remained far behind the USDP. The pro-military National Unity Party came in a very distant second with a total of 63 seats, while the Shan Nationalities Democratic Party took 57 and the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party won 35. The All Mon Region Democracy Party tied the NDF with 16 seats. Soon after the election, all three of these ethnic-based parties received permission to start their own trading companies, in a move likely intended to ensure their cooperation with the new government, which must be formed sometime early next year.
Elsewhere on the ethnic front, the prospect of returning to business as usual looked less promising. As the rest of the country was going through the motions of an election designed to maintain the status quo, Brigade 5 of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) livened things up by seizing control of Myawaddy, a major crossing-point on the Thai-Burmese border. The next day, the Burmese army moved in to reclaim its lost territory, and the ensuing clashes forced about 200,000 refugees to flee to safety in Thailand.
The flare-up of hostilities in Myawaddy came after months of tensions in the area. The border crossing had been closed for months by the time fighting broke out, following a June 8 visit to Myawaddy by Brig-Gen Zaw Min, the chairman of the Karen State Peace and Development Council. Although the regime claimed that the closure was due to the construction of an embankment on the Thai side of the Moei River separating the two countries, many observers saw it as an exercise in muscle-flexing by the junta, aimed at forcing the DKBA to transform itself into a border guard force (BGF) under Burmese military command. Although the main body of the DKBA complied, Brigade 5 refused, joining the ranks of other ethnic cease-fire groups that continue to resist the BGF scheme. As 2011 approaches, the possibility of resumed hostilities along Burma's borders remains the greatest immediate threat facing the country.
But the specter of an imminent outbreak of all-out war was not the only thing that darkened the horizon in 2010. On Oct.
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