The daily death toll amongst protestors in Myanmar is continuing to rise while the response of the Australian government has been ambivalent. The impoverished nation of 60 million people is remote from Australia and our economic links are relatively minor, but strategically it is a key part of Asia. The country has also become part of a broader struggle for influence between the West on one hand, China on the other - and ASEAN somewhere in the middle. The military seized power on February 1, despite numerous international warnings to them not to do so. The flimsy pretext was that the election of November 8 last year was fraudulent - which it most certainly was not. What appears to have prompted the coup was, if anything, the magnitude of the win of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. This placed her and her party close to having a sufficient majority in Parliament to be withing striking distance of the 75% of seats needed to amend the constitution - something that would have set alarm bells ringing in the Tatmadaw, the cover-all name of the country's military.
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