Myanmar Junta’s 3-Phased Elections
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 5 Jan 2026
Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service
Myanmar’s widely reviled military junta is holding “phased general elections”, amidst the ever expanding military and political conflicts triggered by its coup in February 2021.
31 Dec 2025 – The poverty-stricken and war-fatigued public show indifference while the anti-junta armed resistance organizations dismiss the elections as “a sham”.
Russia, China, India and some member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) support the junta-sponsored elections as a step in the right direction to restore some political stability.
Source: A newspaper clipping from San Francisco Chronicle, May 1990.
On these Myanmar elections, FORSEA co-founder and Burmese exile Maung Zarni shared his honest analyses in various media outlets.
On the TRT World Newsmakers (broadcast 29th December, 2025), he joined the two Rohingya activists Nay San Lwin and Tun Khin.
He contextualized Myanmar’s elections against the backdrop of major anti-democratic trend worldwide and made a point of calling attention to Israel being portrayed in the mainstream Western narratives as “democracy”, despite its savage wars, apartheid and settler colonial landgrab in Palestine.
His country of birth continues to be a living hell on earth: deepening and widening poverty, nearly 4 million war refugees (Internally Displaced Persons), the junta’s daily airstrikes against civilian residential neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and places of worship.
He pointed out that internal racism and religious bigotry among pro-democracy and pro-human rights movements has been Myanmar resistance’s Archille’s heel since the 1960’s.
Myanmar today is an internally fragmented or “Balkanised” country with no prospect for peace, human rights or federalist democracy in the near future.
Watch the TRT World Newsmaker program below – (YouTube)
On 23 December Zarni spoke to the Greek language newspaper –
Interview highlights
- Dimitris Givissis talks to iconic human rights activist Maung Zarni: “Junta elections in Myanmar will not be free and fair”
- The upcoming elections have been heavily denounced by all the armed anti-junta groups at home, who are calling the population to boycott,
- the UN Human Rights Deputy Commissioner in Geneva has also dismissed the election as a travesty.
- Myanmar’s major political parties, such as the National Union for the Republic of San and the National Union for The Republic of Aung San SuQi have been excluded from participating in the elections,
- 30,000 protesters, who could vote or be candidates, have been jailed since the resistance against the coup began in February 2021.
Finally, Zarni spoke to the TRT World News on 16 December on the worrying signs of the protracted conflict – already in its 8th decade! – in his native country. https://www.trtworld.com/article/d92dd3e2f669
“This process of internal balkanisation was triggered (as) the armed resistance against the junta spread throughout the mainstream Myanmar or Burmese society in the form of hundreds of operationally autonomous armed groups called people’s defence forces.”
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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.
Tags: Asia and the Pacific, Burma/Myanmar, Elections, Military, Violent conflict
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