When the soldiers came knocking in the middle of the night, some ministers had already packed a bag. After days of hushed rumours, Myanmar awoke to a crushing new reality: its decade-long experiment in democracy, for all its flaws, was over.
The 1 February coup forced the nation of 54 million back under military rule. It marked the latest slide to autocracy in Asia, where democratic freedoms have been in retreat from Thailand and Cambodia to Hong Kong. In Myanmar, though, the generals had never even left the chamber.
