But the coming year also looks set to reveal just how far Myanmar and its ever-present generals still have left to go down that path.
The country is set to hold parliamentary elections in the fall, with Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) expected to handily win a majority of the seats up for grabs.
The question that remains unanswered is what kind of role the 69-year-old democracy icon will be allowed to play in the government that results from that vote.
While a parliamentary majority should allow the NLD to choose the next president – a job Ms. Suu Kyi has publicly said she wants – a bizarre clause in the country’s constitution bars anyone with foreign family members from holding the post. (The clause is widely seen as specifically targeted at Ms. Suu Kyi, whose two sons have British citizenship, as did her late husband.) The same document also reserves a quarter of the seats in parliament for military officers, effectively ensuring that the army can block any changes to the constitution with which it doesn’t agree, since a supermajority of three-quarters of parliament is required to pass any constitutional amendments.
What happens next is very much up to Ms. Suu Kyi. She can let the military have its way – and allow it to retain some of its influence over the political system – by stepping aside as the NLD’s candidate for president. Or she can call on her followers to defend her right to rule, and their right to choose the president they want. But that could prompt the military to suspend the elections and perhaps roll back other democratic reforms.
Ms. Suu Kyi and the NLD won by a landslide in 1990, the last time they were allowed to contest a general election. She was thwarted from taking power then (the ruling junta never recognized the outcome of the vote), and Ms. Suu Kyi, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, spent most of the next two decades forcibly confined to her family’s crumbling Rangoon mansion.
Her story has always sounded an echo of Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom in South Africa. Should she be cornered into again giving up her ambition to become president, it would be an acknowledgment that Myanmar’s military-steered journey isn’t necessarily a path to full-fledged democracy at all.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-world-in-2015-mark-mackinnon-on-myanmars-icon-of-democracy/article22278180/
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