The polls started across Myanmar on Sunday, after decades of democracy protests and a spluttering reform process that the Burmese hope will finally give them sway paid a repressive military elite that took control in 1962.

The polls started across Myanmar on Sunday, after decades of democracy protests and a spluttering reform process that the Burmese hope will finally give them sway paid a repressive military elite that took control in 1962.

The army has preserved much of this power through constitutional provisions that reserve the most necessary cabinet posts for the military.And most of the country’s persecuted minority Muslim population and others displaced by conflict are ineligible to vote. Nevertheless, the historical poll is being touted by foreign governments as the 1st credible election in half a century.

Competing rallies have barged through cities and villages paid the past two months, with screaming music from loudspeakers hitched on to the sides of trucks. they waving red flags back the long-time democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi, while those with green support former general and same president Thein Sein, who came to power after a internationally condemned 2010 election.

people information cartoons of how people can vote were slapped on walls across the country months ago. Indelible ink pots have been pair out to 46,000 polling stations.

“One of the things that is different this year is that the government has welcomed international espial,” Britain’s ambassador, Andrew Patrick, said the Observer in the ancient colonial capital of Rangoon, now the country’s biggest city and renamed Yangon.We have 25 embassy teams around this country.

But critics of the former junta & their handpicked civilian government say that, while the economy has opened up, the rewards have not been shared & political freedoms are few.

Many people interviewed by the Observer in Yangonin the run-up to the polls were disagreeing to talk about politics openly, suggesting they are still fearful of saying out against the regime.

Advertisement

Khine Thay, 35, a former secondary school teacher who set up a newspaper stand in Yangon 4 years ago, she said voting for Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD. Thay has more than two dozen papers and magazines on a timber stand, shaded by a plastic tarp on the side of the road.

Under the 2008 military-drafted constitution,woodenAung San Suu Kyi can never be president. Burmese with exotic children are barred from the country’s top post and her two sons hold British citizenship.