Myanmar, a southeast Asian country that was formerly known as Burma, has been under military rule in one form or another since 1962, when General Ne Win staged a coup that toppled a civilian government. The current junta, formed in 1988, threw out the results of a democratic parliamentary election in 1990 that was overwhelmingly won by the party led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, one of the heroes of the nation’s independence from the British Empire in 1948.