Burma’s ruling generals are belt and braces guys.The junta announced last week that multiparty elections will be held on Nov. 7 after more than a decade of trying to persuade the international community — so far unsuccessfully — that this will be a shift to a civilian administration after military rule dating back to 1962.

The generals hope this election will prompt the lifting of sanctions and other exclusions from the international community.

But they have no intention of allowing the election results to lead to the military actually losing power.

So they have constructed a charade aimed at pleasing the gullible without putting their power at risk.

It’s a caution the generals learned 20 years ago when they suffered the electoral equivalent of finding their pants around their ankles.

In that election in 1990, the junta expected the voters among the 48 million people of Burma (which the ruling junta calls Myanmar) to show respect for the then nearly 30 years of military rule, and pick the generals’ favoured candidates.

Instead, the voters marked the planned return to civilian rule by voting overwhelmingly for candidates representing the National League for Democracy, whose heroine leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, the generals had already locked up as a precaution. The NLD won 392 of the 492 seats in Parliament, and the generals were so appalled they refused to acknowledge the result.

The 12-member junta, now inaccurately called the State Peace and Development Council and led by former postal clerk Gen. Than Shwe, was shocked into several years of stunned silence.

Suu Kyi remained locked up in her crumbling lakeside villa in the then capital, Rangoon (now Yangon), selling off her furniture to buy food.

In 1995, the generals figured that despite her having been awarded such honours as the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, their persistent campaign of vilification of “the lady” must have eroded her political currency.

They were wrong. When her detention was lifted in July 1995, tens of thousands of people flocked every day to stand outside her house on University Avenue and listen to her speak at her garden gate.

By 2000, Shwe and his boys had lost patience and arranged new excuses to lock her up again.

But the regime felt increasing pressure to respond to international sanctions, which forced Burma into the often uncomfortable investment grasp of China to develop its bounteous natural resources, and the embarrassing demands for political and human rights reform from the junta’s partners in the Association of South East Asian Nations.

From the start, Suu Kyi and the NLD did not believe the generals were sincere in wanting to draw up a new constitution that would bring in genuine multiparty civilian rule.

They therefore refused to take part in years of talks that led to a referendum held in May 2008, and which to no one’s surprise endorsed the new constitution by a margin that was almost mathematically impossible.

This document ensures that the military will remain in power behind a facade of civilian rule.

The head of the armed forces, Shwe, will retain more authority than the president, and will be able to dismiss any government.

All the most important and powerful ministries will be the exclusive preserve of the armed forces, and a quarter of the seats in the 440-seat parliament are assigned to the military.

At the same time, it will require a vote of more than 75 per cent of MPs to change the constitution. So the military has a veto on any changes or reforms aimed at extending civilian rule.

As a result of this sham reform and the accompanying restrictive election rules, Suu Kyi and most of the NLD refused to register to take part in the election.

Not that they would have been allowed any role anyway.

Most of the NLD leaders are ineligible because they have criminal records as a result of the 20 years of intense persecution by the generals.

Suu Kyi is also ineligible to run because she was convicted of breaching her detention order last year after the befuddled American John Yettaw swam to her house to deliver a warning message that had been entrusted to him by angels.

There’s also a cunning little constitutional provision that says people married to foreigners can’t be candidates for parliament, and Suu Kyi is the widow of a British university professor.

Some former NLD members have broken away to form the National Democratic Front in the belief that, as flawed as they are, the new constitution and the elections are a step toward reform.

But most of the 40 parties registered for this election are ethnically or regionally based and will field limited numbers of candidates.

Only the junta’s Union Solidarity and Development Party will contest all non-military constituencies.

If the USDP does not end up with a clear majority, it will be easy to buy or rent enough other MPs to create an unassailable government.

(This page, by the way, will continue to use the name Burma. In 1989, the junta, an illegal government, ordered the name changed to Myanmar, but without any consultation with the people. Burma remains the country’s proper name in English and it is the name Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s legitimate, elected political leader, always uses.)

jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com