Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi will be released next month, just days after Myanmar’s first election in two decades, officials in the junta-ruled country said.
The Nobel Peace laureate, who has been detained for most of the past 20 years since winning the country’s last poll in 1990, will be freed when her current house arrest expires on Nov. 13, the unnamed sources said. The election is on Nov. 7.
“November will be an important and busy month for us because of the election and because of Aung San Suu Kyi’s release,” a Myanmar official said on Thursday.
A second Myanmar official, who also declined to be named, confirmed the Nov. 13 date, adding: “She will be released on that day according to the law.”
Neither Aung San Suu Kyi nor her National League for Democracy (NLD) party will participate in the upcoming vote, which opponents have dismissed as a sham.
Uncertainty over whether the military regime will indeed release the 65-year-old, known reverently among Myanmar’s people as “The Lady,” will remain until the moment she appears in public.
The junta, humiliated by its crashing defeat in the last election, has prolonged Aung San Suu Kyi’s confinement almost continuously ever since. She has been detained since May 2003 and has only enjoyed fleeting periods of freedom since 1990.
Thailand-based analyst Aung Naing Oo said any release would come with conditions and she “won’t be free to go out.”
“It’s a military dictatorship. No matter what the legal background of the issue — if they don’t want to release her, she won’t be released,” he said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
US lawmaker Joseph Crowley, who has championed US sanctions against the regime, was skeptical.
“We’ve seen this ‘catch and release’ game by the Burmese junta before — they release Aung San Suu Kyi to create a facade of change and then turn around and unfairly arrest her again,” he said.
“Unfortunately, the claim that they may release her is a ploy to legitimize these unfair elections, and further proof that the junta will do or say just about anything to maintain power,” he said.
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