The Durian: the blog of the Center for Asian Democracy

 As international condemnation continues in response to the military coup in Myanmar, frustration grows with the United Nations Security Council's inability to take decisive action.  Yet despite renewed calls for the UN to approve sanctions against the military leadership and military-owned economic holding companies, it remains unlikely that the Council will be able to void China's veto. FDR and Churchill meet with Chaing Kai Shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling in 1942 (Source: Wikimedia Commons) When the United Nations was first created in 1944, the architects designed its highest body, the Security Council, with unique veto powers for the wartime allies. At that time, this meant, alongside the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union, China was accorded the same great power status. However, at that juncture, China was officially under the authority of the nationalist Kuomintang party led by General Chiang Kai Shek, and much of it under Japanese occupation

Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images The coup in Myanmar has rightly been greeted with almost universal condemnation. The few exceptions Russia, China, Cambodia, Thailand, are governed by authoritarian leaderships and have little appetite for democracy and civil rights.  Once again, Myanmar’s National League for Democracy’s leadership is under arrest, and students and civil rights activists fear military reprisals if they openly defy the Junta. Naturally, the latest iteration of military rule has once again thrust Daw Aung San Suu Kyi into the spotlight. Once again, she has become the personification of the struggle against military rule, a role she has spent almost half her life dedicated to. Under house arrest for fifteen years, she became an international icon for the struggle for democracy worldwide, winning the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Once more, the coup has thrust her into the global spotlight, and her image adorns everything

It was not supposed to be like this. On February 1st Myanmar woke to find that the country's military had taken power, its democratically elected leaders arrested, and access to the Internet cut in vast swathes of the country. These actions marked a sharp reversal to the decade of democratic progress that Myanmar had made since its leading political activist Aung San Suu Kyi, was released in November 2010. In the intervening period, the country had enjoyed economic and political liberalization, with Suu Kyi elected to the de facto head of government as State Counsellor following her party's landslide victory elections in 2015. Five years later, Suu Kyi and her party repeated the victory with an increased majority dealing the country's military a stinging rebuke. It was not supposed to be like this. When the country's military Junta drew up a new constitution for a disciplined democracy in 2008, they thought they had ensured their continued dominance of the country's