国际英语新闻:Vote Counting Underway in Myanmar

Several diplomatic missions, including the United States, joined the United Nations in issuing a statement Friday calling “on all stakeholders to ensure that these elections are conducted peacefully, transparently, and in accordance with the will of the people.”

Britain's ambassador to Myanmar, Julian Braithwaite, said "a vote that is credible, inclusive and transparent and which represents the will of the people would stand as a lasting legacy" for the current government.

At the U.S. State Department, spokesman John Kirby has said key U.S. officials are closely watching the elections as an index of Myanmar's progress from military dictatorship to democracy.

Amnesty International said the jailing of peaceful activists, restrictions on free speech and other discrimination against minority groups are a serious problem undermining the electoral process in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

Huge victory needed

Myanmar political experts say the NLD needs to capture 67 percent of the parliamentary seats in Sunday’s election to overcome the military’s veto in the bicameral legislature, known as the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, which selects the president.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who has urged everyone participating in the general election to ensure a fair, free and smooth vote, is prevented from becoming president even if her party is victorious. The military junta governing in 2008 placed a clause in the constitution barring anyone with a foreign spouse or children from holding the highest office. Aung San Suu Kyi’s late husband was British, as are her two children.

“I don’t believe Aung San Suu Kyi can help us. She married a foreigner. That’s why foreigners might govern our country if she wins this election,” Ma Win May, a villager from Sake Gyi on the outskirts of Yangon, said at a rally held Friday by the government-organized USDP.

Speaking to reporters Thursday at her residence, Aung San Suu Kyi said if the NLD prevails she “will be above the president.”

Her comment has some observers, not only in Myanmar, apprehensive. She did not explain her remarks.

“The president should be under the law. Everybody should be under the law,” David Steinberg, distinguished professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University in Washington, told VOA. “All of a sudden I think she is saying she would not be subject to that law. So this is a very important deviation from what she has said in the past and her beliefs.”

Nearly 7,000 candidates from 91 parties are running for posts in both houses of parliament.

Myanmar, a former British colony, was isolated from most of the world for decades after General Ne Win in 1962 staged a coup, abolishing the Buddhist-majority country’s constitution and its democratic government.