The military has declared a one-year state of emergency following the arrest of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior government officials, as well as prominent activists such as 8888 veteran Mya Aye.
Myint Swe , a former general who had been serving as Vice President, has been installed as acting President, the military-owned Myawaddy television channel announced on Monday morning.
He has transferred state power to commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing, the statement said, adding that irregularities on voter lists from November’s election would now be scrutinized.
Soldiers began swooping upon the houses of top government officials and National League for Democracy (NLD) leaders not long after midnight, just hours before a new parliament was due to convene in Naypyitaw.
Initially, it was thought to be a Thai-style coup targeting only a few leaders of the ruling party.
But as well the State Counsellor, President Win Myint, and the chief ministers of 14 states and regions, the military has reportedly also detained NLD leaders from township level positions along with most of the country’s prominent activists.
Mya Aye, another 8888 generation leader, has also been detained.
The NLD won a massive landslide victory in the November general elections while the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), led by former army generals, suffered an astounding defeat much as it did five years ago.
The military occupied state-owned television stations in Yangon and Naypyitaw as well as a radio station owned by Yangon’s municipal government. Army trucks and soldiers lined the entrance to City Hall in Yangon.
As people awoke to news of the coup, the military began cutting off all major mobile phone and internet services. Only a smaller internet services such as 5BB, Myanmar Net and Fortune were working at the time of writing.
Many civil society activists are said to be on the run.
The signs of an impending coup were visible even before the elections were held last year, when the army began questioning the credibility of the upcoming poll.
Min Aung Hlaing called a meeting in August with the heads of 43 political parties, most of them allies of the military-backed USDP.
“There is nothing I dare not do,” he said in the meeting, during which party leaders asked him “for assistance” in the event of electoral fraud.
The day before the elections were held on November 8, the military aired an old propaganda movie which said previous coups in Myanmar were due to internal chaos that obliged the army to step in, a line pushed by former dictatorships.
But Min Aung Hlaing tampered fears of a coup when he said on election day that the military would “honor the will of the people.”
After the NLD’s victory the USDP and several proxy began nationwide protests denouncing the results.
The military echoed these sentiments in a series of statements, and finally claimed that it had found more than eight million errors on voter lists.
As the news of the coup spread, people flocked to banks and markets to withdraw money and buy supplies.
