AFP
Myanmar’s Election Commission has dismissed reports that candidates contesting in general elections next year will be prevented from campaigning outside their constituencies under new rules that would deal a blow to opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party.
News reports have extensively quoted commission head Tin Aye as telling election officials and political parties at a meeting last month that candidates will only be allowed to campaign within constituencies they are contesting in.
Following the reports, Tin Aye, a former military general, came under criticism from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) and other opposition parties as well as human rights groups which feel that the authorities are moving to clip the wings of the NLD, which many believe will sweep the 2015 elections.
In by-elections in 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi campaigned in her own constituency and traveled across the country to support other NLD candidates, helping the party bag 43 of the 44 seats it contested.
The election victory humiliated the military-backed ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which only two years earlier scored a landslide victory in general elections that many observers said were flawed.
Letter to NLD
In a letter this week to the NLD, the Election Commission distanced itself from reports quoting Tin Aye as saying that the election restrictions will be imposed in the 2015 elections.
He allegedly made the remarks during a meeting on April 7 with election officials and political parties in Pathein city west of Yangon.
NLD spokesman Nyan Win said the party has written to the Election Commission asking it to clarify Tin Aye’s reported remarks.
“Our question [to the commission] was, ‘We heard the commission chief say in Pathein that a candidate can only campaign in his or her constituency for the election and whether this is true or not?'," Nyan Win told RFA’s Myanmar Service.
“And, 'If he had said so, which law did he base [the change] on?'”
“The commission replied that a candidate, his or her representative, and his or her party can campaign freely in the election,” Nyan Win said. “Their reply was different from the reports in newspapers and journals.”
‘Uprising’
Tin Aye was also quoted saying at the April meeting that the NLD campaign in the 2012 by-elections resembled an “uprising.”
“Those campaigns were so free that they looked rather like the '88 uprising revisited,” he said, referring to the 1988 pro-democracy uprising against the dictatorship of Gen. Ne Win, which was brutally crushed by the army, the Irrawaddy online journal reported.
The 2012 by-elections put Aung San Suu Kyi into parliament for the first time after she had spent nearly two decades under house arrest. The polls were acclaimed by rights groups as the first exercise in democracy following decades of military rule.
Aung San Suu Kyi hopes to make a bid to become president in the 2015 elections, but a clause in the constitution currently bars her from doing so because her sons are foreign citizens.
Government leaders have been dragging their feet on efforts to amend the charter.
Reported by Tin Aung Khine for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar and Kyaw Kyaw Aung. Written in English by Parameswaran Ponnudurai.
