7 Nov 2020
Anti-Muslim sentiment intensify across the majority Buddhist country ahead of November 8 vote, threatening to disenfranchise minority groups.
In 2015, the National League for Democracy won Myanmar’s first democratic election in decades in a landslide, catapulting Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi to de facto head of state and heralding a new era of anticipated democratic reforms.
The heady optimism all came crashing down in 2017, when some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were driven out of the country in a brutal campaign of arson, rape and murder which has since been described as a genocide. Shockingly, to some, Aung San Suu Kyi refused to condemn the atrocities and even defended the Myanmar military.
