After Myanmar’s generals seized power in a coup, state television broadcast a statement in which the military tried to justify its extreme steps. It contended that there had been voter fraud in elections in November, when Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, won in an even bigger landslide than it did five years ago.
The coup returns the country to full military rule after a short span of quasi-democracy that began in 2011, when the military, which had been in power since 1962, instituted parliamentary elections and other reforms.
From our correspondent: “The mood in Myanmar seems to be one of shock,” Hannah Beech, The Times’s Southeast Asia bureau chief, said. “The muscle memory of how to cope with a military dictatorship lives in everyone who survived the bad old days, but few expected another coup and full imposition of military rule.”
Simmering tensions: Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s relationship with the military had been fraying. Her detention on Monday brought an abrupt end to the theory that she might strike a workable balance between civilian and military power. In the end, she could not protect her people, nor could she placate the generals.