It has been more than one year since the military took power again in Myanmar and detained the State Counsellor (de facto prime minister), Aung San Suu Kyi, and many of her cabinet members, student leaders, monks, and dissidents. In November 2020, Suu Kyi's party, the National League of Democracy (NLD) won the parliamentary elections by a landslide, as you predicted in your book (Lubina 2021, p. 135), gaining 83% of the seats-an even a better result than in 2015. The coup prevented democratically elected members of parliament from signing their oaths of office. What was the driving force of the putsch-military dissatisfaction with the political status quo or maybe the personal ambitions of general Min Aung Hlaing (International Crisis Group, 2021)? How would you describe the main reasons for the coup and the circumstances in which it took place? Michał Lubina: I wish I could. Unfortunately, Myanmar is a good example of a rule of thumb in authoritarian countries: "Those who know don't talk, those who don't know, talk." Burma watchers can only speculate about the reasons without knowing for sure about the origins of decisions; these will only emerge with time, if ever. That said, we do
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