YANGON – Myanmar’s powerful army chief congratulated incoming president Htin Kyaw and pledged cooperation on Wednesday, after the ally of Aung San Suu Kyi was elected as the country’s first head of state with no military background in decades.

Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy (NLD) to a landslide election win in November, but a constitution drafted by the former junta bars her from the top office.

She has vowed to run the country anyway through a proxy president, and on Tuesday the NLD-dominated parliament elected Htin Kyaw for the role. He runs a charity founded by Suu Kyi and is a trusted member of her inner circle.

Relations between the armed forces and Suu Kyi will define the success of Myanmar’s most significant break from military rule since the army seized power in 1962.

The armed forces hold a quarter of parliamentary seats and the constitutional right to nominate one of the three presidential candidates. The army candidate, retired general Myint Swe, was elected first vice president on Tuesday.

Dawn of a new era in Myanmar as Aung San Suu Kyi’s party takes over

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“It is hereby announced that the Tatmadaw takes pride in U Htin Kyaw’s being elected as the President at the Second Union Parliament, and it will continue cooperating in every sectors for the emergence of peace, unity and development,” the Office of the Commander-in-Chief, Min Aung Hlaing, said in a Myanmar language post on Facebook.

Tatmadaw is the Myanmar language name for the military.

Min Aung Hlaing, who at the time of the historic vote was at a summit of Southeast Asian defence chiefs in Laos, issued the message several hours after the vote and long after outgoing President Thein Sein and representatives of other countries, including China and the United States, had extended their congratulations.

In the run up to the vote, the military questioned the qualifications of both Htin Kyaw and an NLD candidate for vice president, Henry Van Thio, underscoring tensions that have risen as the two sides started working on the details of the transfer of power.

Sources in Suu Kyi’s camp say she has grown increasingly frustrated with military intransigence on issues ranging from amending the constitution to relatively minor formalities such as the location of the handover of power.

NLD lawmakers also say the military’s choice of Myint Swe, who served the junta as head of the feared military intelligence and is on the U.S. sanctions list, goes against the spirit of reconciliation Suu Kyi is seeking to foster.

NUSA DUA – Tourist taxi driver Nur-ul Aslam watches in hopeful silence as drops of rain begin to cloud his windscreen.

Last year at this time he was farming rice on his two-hectare farm 40 kilometres northeast of Bali’s airport. But a long spell of dry weather, which has lasted since last July, dried up irrigation channels in his village of Tegal Mengkeb.

To survive, the 33-year-old walked away from his farm last December and began driving a taxi in Nusa Dua, a tourist hub with dozens of luxury resorts. He dreams of returning home.

“We need regular good showers, but there is mostly drizzle. Unless the subaks (water channels) are full again, I can’t plant any crop,” he said.

Aslam may have found a way to stay on the farm next year, however. He recently signed up for new government-backed crop insurance, one of 100 farmers to do so in Bali, where rice is grown on about 80,000 hectares of land.

The Bali insurance program, launched last October, promises to pay farmers up to six million rupiah (S$625) for a crop failure caused by disasters such as drought, flooding or pest attacks.

The premium is 180,000 rupiah per hectare, but the state has agreed to pay 80 percent of the cost. That means a farmer like Aslam only has to come up with 36,000 rupiah, or about US$2, per hectare.

The programme is part of a larger Indonesian crop insurance scheme introduced in 2012-2013 with financial support from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

In the first season of the programme, 470 hectares of rice fields were insured in East Java and Sumatra. This year, the government has moved to include Bali and a few other provinces, though delays in the expansion have limited the number of farmers signed up.

“Our previous target this year was 11,000 hectares of rice fields (insured), but only 4,000 hectares can be insured due to limited time,” said Ida Bagus Wisnuardhana, head of the Bali provincial Agriculture and Foodstuffs Affairs office.

Currently, the scheme targets only small-scale farmers growing rice, but the federal government hopes to bring in all 27 million farmers in Indonesia’s 33 provinces by 2019, according to a paper published by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment.

EL NINO AND DROUGHT

In Indonesia, the dry season runs from May to August. But Badan Meteorologi, Klimatologi dan Geofisika (BKMG) – the local official weather mapping organisation – says the island of Bali has seen “extreme” weather since the end of August.

The agency attributes the unusually hot weather to the El Nino phenomenon.

In November, the temperature in the area around Denpasar, Bali’s provincial capital, rose as high as 37 degrees Celsius above the average daily temperature of 31.4 degrees Celsius, said Nyoman Gede Wiryajaya of BKMG.

Bali’s provincial agricultural department says nearly a thousand hectares of farmland are suffering some degree of drought, which threatens the coming harvest. With crops drying, local media have already reported food shortages in several villages.

Buleleng, a north Bali district which has recorded crop failure on 160 hectares, has been declared under “severe drought”.

With no rice available, “we have been living off dried cassava for several weeks,” said Palembang Kaka, a small-scale farmer from Buleleng who now works as a porter in Pasar Badung, Denpasar’s largest community market.

Although globally El Nino is expected to start weakening soon, meteorological service officials in Bali are advising farmers to brace for more dry weather.

Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, of the National Disaster Management Agency, predicted that “rainfall will be extremely low until the end of this year”.

For Aslam, the prediction could mean another missed crop and another season at the wheel – unless his new insurance policy works. “We will see how the insurance (money) is paid. I hope it is enough to recover my losses,” he said.

BANGKOK – Two executives at a fire-fighting system supplier have been charged with negligence after an accident in which eight people were killed at the headquarters of Siam Commercial Bank, Thai police said on Wednesday.

Contractors working on an upgrade to the building’s chemical fire extinguishers late on Sunday accidentally triggered an extinguisher, the bank said, releasing a chemical retardant that may have starved the area of oxygen.

Police charged Napong Suksanguan and Adisorn Poda, executive directors at fire fighting systems firm Mega Planet Co Ltd, with negligence leading to injury and death, said Panudech Sukvong, head of a police station near the accident site.

Both men have denied the charges and have been released on bail, police said. “We will be gathering witnesses, documents and we’ll be investigating further to see who else might be involved in this negligence,” said Panudech.

The pair face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty and a fine of up to 200,000 baht (S$7,883), Panudech said.

Executives at Mega Planet were not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.

Siam Commercial Bank is Thailand’s oldest commercial bank and the country’s third largest lender by assets.

In Feb. 2015, a fire broke out at the bank’s headquarters located in the north of the Thai capital, Bangkok, killing one fireman.