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On a patch of rough ground near the Irrawaddy River, aspiring member of parliament and retired Lieutenant-General Tayza Kyaw tries to muster some enthusiasm from his audience with a speech promising them better times.

He is the candidate for the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), backed by Myanmar’s military, in Aungmyaythazan, a constituency in the city of Mandalay.

The crowd of 300-400 clutch the branded hats and flags they’ve been given, but soon wilt in the afternoon heat, some dozing off.

Children run and play in between the rows of chairs. Many of these families are victims of the earthquake which badly damaged Mandalay and surrounding areas in March, and are hoping for a handout. They disappear the moment the rally finishes.

On Sunday the people of Myanmar get their first opportunity to vote in an election since the military seized power in a coup nearly five years ago, setting off a devastating civil war.

But the poll, already delayed many times by the ruling junta, is being widely condemned as a sham. The most popular party, the National League for Democracy, has been dissolved, and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is locked up in an undisclosed prison.

Voting, which will happen in three stages over a period of a month, will not even be possible in large parts of the country still consumed by war. Even where voting is taking place, it is marred by a climate of fear and intimidation.

When the BBC tried asking people at the rally in Mandalay what they thought of the election, we were told not to by party officials. They might say the wrong thing, one man explained – they don’t know how to speak to journalists.

The number of plain-clothes military intelligence officers present there helps explain their nervousness. In a dictatorship which has criminalised liking Facebook pages criticising the election, or using the word revolution, even these staunchly pro-military party activists feared the consequences of allowing a foreign journalist the chance to ask uncensored questions.

The same fear lingers on the streets of Mandalay. At a market stall selling fresh river fish the customers all refused to answer what they thought of the election. We have no choice, so we have to vote, one said. The fish seller shooed us away. “You will bring me trouble,” she said.

Only one woman was brave enough to speak frankly, but we needed to find a private place to meet, and to conceal her identity, just to hear her view of the election.

“This election is a lie,” she said. “Everyone is afraid. Everyone has lost their humanity and their freedom. So many people have died, been tortured or fled to other countries. If the military keeps running the country, how can things change?”

She would not vote, she said, but she knew that decision carried risks.

The military authorities imposed a new law in July criminalising “any speech, organising, inciting, protesting, or distributing leaflets in order to destroy a part of the electoral process”.

Earlier this month Tayzar San, a doctor and one of the first to organise a protest against the 2021 coup, was also among the first to be charged under the law, after he distributed leaflets calling for a boycott of the election. The junta has offered a reward for information leading to his arrest.

In September three young people in Yangon were given sentences of 42 to 49 years each for posting stickers showing a bullet and a ballot box together.

“Co-operate and crush all those harming the union,” commands a large red poster looming over the families and couples enjoying a late afternoon stroll under the old red-brick walls of the royal palace in Mandalay.

In this menacing climate anything approaching a free vote is unimaginable.

Yet the junta leader Min Aung Hlaing has a spring in his step these days. He seems confident this extraordinary election, where there will be no voting at all in as much as one half of the country, will give him the legitimacy he has failed to acquire during his five catastrophic years in power.

He even attended a Christmas mass in Yangon’s cathedral and condemned the “hatred and resentment between individuals” which led to “domination, oppression, and violence in human communities”.

This, from a man charged by the UN and human rights groups with genocide against Muslim Rohingyas, whose coup set off a civil war which, according to the data analysis group ACLED, has killed 90,000 people.

Min Aung Hlaing’s election gambit has the full diplomatic support of China, which, bizarrely for a one-party state, is giving technical and financial support for this multi-party exercise. It is likely to be reluctantly accepted in the rest of Asia too.

His army, newly equipped with Chinese and Russian weapons, has been regaining ground lost over the past two years to the various armed groups opposing the coup. He is clearly hoping to include more reconquered territory in the third stage of the election at the end of January.

With Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD out of the picture his USDP is all but guaranteed to win. In the last, free election in 2020, the USDP won only six percent of parliamentary seats.

Some observers have noted that Min Aung Hlaing is not popular even within his own regime, or his own party, where his leadership qualities are questioned. He will probably keep the presidency after the election, but his power will, to some extent, be diluted by the resumption of parliamentary politics, albeit without most of the parties that won seats in the 2020 election.

The election is clearly viewed by China as an off-ramp, a way for the military to get out of the destructive deadlock caused by its ill-judged coup.

Even a short distance from the apparently peaceful city life of Mandalay, the deep scars left by Myanmar’s civil war, which is still far from over, are visible.

On the opposite side of the Irrawaddy River lies the spectacular temple complex at Mingun, once a popular tourist attraction. Getting there requires a short drive along a riverside road, but for the past four years this, like much of the area around Mandalay, has been contested territory, where volunteer People’s Defence Forces control many villages and launch ambushes against army convoys.

To reach Mingun we needed to get through several checkpoints. We sat in a tea shop with the local police commander to negotiate our passage.

He was a young man, wearing the huge strain of his job on his face. He had a revolver stuck in the back of his trousers, and two even younger men – boys, perhaps – carrying military-issue assault rifles sat close by as his bodyguards.

He said he had to carry these weapons just to move about the village.

On his phone were images of his opponents: young men, raggedly dressed, with an assortment of weapons they may have smuggled from border regions of Myanmar or obtained from dead soldiers and police officers. One group, calling itself the Unicorn Guerrilla Force, was his toughest adversary. They never negotiated, he said. “If we see each other we always shoot. That’s the way it is.”

The election, he added, would not be taking place in most of the villages to the north of him. “Everyone here has taken sides in this conflict. It is so complicated and difficult. But no-one is ready to compromise.”

After an hour we were told it would be too dangerous to reach Mingun. The PDFs might not know you are journalists, he said.

There is little sign of compromise either from the military men who overturned Myanmar’s young democracy, and who now want to revamp their regime with a veneer of quasi-democratic respectability.

Asked about the appalling civilian casualties since the coup, and the air strikes against schools and hospitals, General Tayza Kyaw blamed them entirely on those who opposed the military takeover.

“They chose armed resistance,” he said. “Those who are with the enemy cannot be viewed as the people, according to the law. So, they are just terrorists.”

People in Mandalay say this election has none of the colour and energy of the 2020 election. There have been few rallies. Only five other parties are being allowed to challenge the USDP nationwide, and none has its resources and institutional backing. Turnout is not expected to be high.

And yet such is the fear of possible retribution, or just exhaustion from the civil war, many Burmese people will still go to the polling stations, whatever their views of the election.

“We will vote” one woman said, “but not with our hearts.”

Additional reporting by Lulu Luo

When Susanna Liew stepped in front of the TV cameras at Kuala Lumpur’s High Court last month, she called the moment a “historic and emotional milestone”.

“Today… the High Court has delivered a judgment of what we have long believed: that Pastor Raymond Koh was a victim of a grave injustice,” the 69-year-old said in a shaky voice that evening.

It was a hard-won but stunning legal victory in a case that became one of Malaysia’s biggest mysteries.

Nearly nine years earlier, her husband had been snatched by masked men in broad daylight. The abduction was captured on CCTV and gripped the nation for years.

The high court ruled that the elite Special Branch of the police had taken Raymond Koh, and held both the police and the Malaysian government responsible for the country’s first-ever enforced disappearance case to be heard in a court.

For years Ms Liew fought to find out what happened to her husband, transforming from an ordinary pastor’s wife to a fierce campaigner.

She may never know for sure why her husband was taken, but two independent official investigations found that the police saw the pastor as a threat to Islam, Malaysia’s majority religion.

Speaking to the BBC shortly after her court victory, Ms Liew said she was driven to pursue justice.

“A voice [inside me] said… ‘So they took him in secret – I will let the whole world know’.”

On 13 February 2017, shortly after 10am, Mr Koh left his family home to meet friends.

As the 63-year-old drove out of his house in a quiet Kuala Lumpur suburb, a convoy of SUVs and motorcycles roared up to his vehicle.

Masked men in black clothing sprang out. Glass shards flew everywhere as they smashed a window of Mr Koh’s car and dragged out the pastor. They bundled him into one of their vehicles and drove off, taking his car with them.

The abduction took place in seconds. It was so dramatic that one eyewitness driving behind Mr Koh later testified that he thought it was a movie shoot.

In the following days Mr Koh’s children went door to door looking for clues to their father’s disappearance – and discovered that two homes’ CCTV cameras had captured the entire incident.

Watching the footage, the family realised it was no ordinary abduction. It was meticulous and well-co-ordinated. They had also not received any ransom note or been contacted by kidnappers.

A few months before, in November 2016, an activist named Amri Che Mat from the northern state of Perlis had been abducted in almost exactly the same way.

Mr Koh’s family went to the media, and the CCTV footage instantly went viral when it was published online by a local newspaper.

The public demanded answers, and Malaysia’s human rights commission – an independent body set up by parliament – launched an investigation. Later, there was also a separate investigation by the government.

Many speculated that the Special Branch was responsible. But the police denied involvement, its chief telling the public to “please shut up” so they could investigate the disappearance in peace.

Months later, after conducting their investigations, the police claimed a drug trafficking ring had taken Mr Koh. Separately, they arrested an Uber driver for kidnapping him – a charge that was eventually dropped. Both these leads were later ruled as not credible by the rights commission in the final report of their investigation.

Meanwhile, Mr Koh’s disappearance took a toll on his family.

Ms Liew sold handcrafted jewellery to make ends meet, while relying on her savings and donations to put her youngest daughter through university.

She said she had expected sympathy from the police. Instead, on the night she reported her husband’s disappearance, she said she was questioned for five hours about whether Mr Koh had tried to convert Muslims to Christianity. “I was very traumatised.”

Her interrogator later testified during the rights commission’s investigation hearing that he had been instructed by his supervisors to pursue this line of inquiry because Mr Koh was a pastor.

In 2011 Mr Koh had been accused of apostasy – a crime in Muslim-majority Malaysia – when he organised a party at a church which some Muslims also attended. He was investigated by Islamic authorities but no action was taken. He and his family have always denied that he was trying to convert Muslims.

In the years after Mr Koh’s disappearance, Ms Liew said, she felt that “the police were not forthcoming with their investigation and even, at times, they were hindering us from finding out the truth and produced red herrings”.

The family has long maintained the police’s theories were attempts to cover up their role in his abduction.

The BBC has asked the Malaysian police for a response to these allegations. They have yet to reply.

As the search for answers dragged on, everyone in the family began experiencing depression, Ms Liew said. She still suffers from panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder.

But then, there was a breakthrough.

Late one night in May 2018, a man showed up at the house of Norhayati, the wife of Amri Che Mat, the activist who had been abducted in 2016.

Identifying himself as a police sergeant, he delivered shocking information: the Special Branch had indeed kidnapped her husband and Raymond Koh.

The police believed Mr Koh was trying to convert Muslims to Christianity, he said, and that Amri Che Mat was spreading Shia Islam, which is banned in Sunni-dominant Malaysia.

The police sergeant said he wanted to tell Ms Norhayati what happened, as he felt what the Special Branch did was wrong.

Ms Norhayati’s account of this confession was investigated by the human rights commission and eventually ruled as credible. While the sergeant later denied he made the confession, the commission found his denial to be full of inconsistencies.

Then, there was the gold-coloured car.

A witness to Mr Koh’s abduction recalled seeing a gold-coloured Toyota Vios – a similar car was spotted near Amri Che Mat’s house prior to his disappearance. The police sergeant also mentioned a gold-coloured car’s presence in both abductions.

Investigators for the rights commission traced that car to a man in Kuala Lumpur who worked for the Special Branch.

In April 2019, the commission concluded the Special Branch was responsible for the abductions of Raymond Koh and Amri Che Mat. It said the two men were “targeted by religious authorities and the police over allegations that they were involved in matters against Islam in Malaysia”.

The report stunned the Malaysian public, with some demanding accountability. Months later, the government launched its own investigation, which was made public only after Ms Liew and Ms Norhayati sued for access.

The government’s investigation came to a similar conclusion, blaming “irresponsible rogue cops”.

Its report also named a “main person of interest” – a senior Special Branch official, Awaludin bin Jadid, who headed the unit tackling social extremism. It noted he had “extreme views” against Shia Islam and Christianity and, in public speeches, portrayed them as threats to Islam.

The BBC has attempted to contact Mr Awaludin, who is now retired, for his response to these findings. We have yet to receive a reply.

Mr Awaludin previously denied he had anything to do with Amri Che Mat’s disappearance, and also alleged the government task force that produced the report was “biased” against him.

In 2020, Ms Liew launched a civil lawsuit on behalf of herself and her missing husband against several top police officers, the Royal Malaysian Police and the Malaysian government.

She held them responsible for the forcible disappearance of Mr Koh – which is the abduction and concealment of his whereabouts – and demanded they reveal his location.

Last month, a High Court judge found that among the named police officials and the Royal Malaysian Police, “one or more” of them were responsible for Raymond Koh’s abduction and a “conspiracy resulting in harm”.

Since these were public officials acting under the state’s authority, “the government must answer for the resulting harm” and thus was “vicariously liable”, the judge said.

Besides awarding several million ringgit to Ms Liew for emotional distress, the judge ordered that 10,000 ringgit (£1,830; $2,385) be paid to a trust for each day of Mr Koh’s disappearance until his whereabouts are disclosed.

To date this sum has surpassed 32m ringgit, and the final figure is expected to be the largest payout in Malaysian history. The trust’s money, which will be paid out only once Mr Koh’s whereabouts are disclosed, will likely go to Ms Liew and her children.

Ms Norhayati, who also launched a lawsuit, won her case and received several million ringgit in compensation.

But the government is appealing against these verdicts, arguing there are “issues related to financial obligations” and that it needs to “uphold the principle of universal justice”.

It has also said the police are continuing to investigate the abductions.

The BBC has asked the police for comment on the verdict. They have yet to reply.

Ms Liew hopes the government will drop the appeal. “I would feel very tired if I have to do this all over again,” she told the BBC.

The family is already worn down from “the uncertainty of not knowing where Pastor Raymond is… it’s like we are frozen in grief and we can’t move on”.

“If we know that he’s dead and have his body, at least we can bury him and we can move on. But right now, we are in a limbo. We don’t know – is he dead or alive? – and this takes a toll on us.”

Ms Liew choked up at the thought that her husband may be dead. “It’s going to be very hard to accept that,” she said, adding she “wants to hope” that her husband is alive.

But time is helping the family to heal. Inspired by counsellors who helped her through her depression, Ms Liew has been training to become one herself.

Telling her story has also been a “catharsis”, she said. Over the years, as she travelled the world to raise awareness of her husband’s case, she became an outspoken critic of enforced disappearances. In 2020 the US awarded her an International Women of Courage medal.

“I never expected that I would be at this place. Eight years ago, I was just a housewife and a quiet person,” she said.

Ms Liew has also reached a turning point on a more personal level – she has forgiven the men whom she believes took her husband.

During the trial, as she watched the lawsuit’s defendants take the stand, at first “I felt like squeezing their necks. I was angry with them”.

“But I noticed that when I came face to face with the main suspect – I felt no hatred… I want to be really right and pure before God, and not have any shadow or darkness in my life.”

Forgiveness, however, does not mean she will stop her pursuit of justice.

She is now calling for the authorities to set up a disciplinary body to monitor police conduct, as well as a commission of inquiry and a task force to track down every single person involved in her husband’s abduction.

Until now, none of the police officials named in her lawsuit have been arrested or punished. One of them has been promoted.

“What we really want is for the truth and justice to prevail, for the perpetrators to be brought to justice, and for us to have good closure,” she said.

“That means, we want to know where Pastor Raymond is.”