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Activists decry Suu Kyi's 10 years in detention

Myanmar's pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday marked what her supporters said is a total of 10 years in detention, as campaigners overseas pushed the UN to take strong action.

While there was no public recognition or demonstration on the streets of the capital where security remained tight as usual, events were to take place in London and New York, pro-democracy groups and supporters said.

Supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi, secretary general of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), estimate that adding three periods of detention and house arrest -- 1989-1995, 2000-2002 and May 2003-yesterday -- equals 10 years.

Aung San Suu Kyi, whom some locals call "The Lady," also spent her 60th birthday on June 19 under house arrest at her lakeside compound in suburban Yangon. Her only visitor is a doctor. Her phone line has been cut.

The NLD scored a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the military, which has run the country since 1962, ignored the result.

Ex-Myanmar prime minister Khin Nyunt, the most senior general willing to hold discussions with Aung San Suu Kyi, was purged in October last year and is himself now under house arrest in Yangon.

"The pattern of detaining, releasing and detaining Aung San Suu Kyi is symbolic of the one step forward, two steps back strategy the regime has perpetrated on the entire country," Debbie Stothard, coordinator of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, said in Bangkok.

The military rulers of Myanmar, formerly called Burma, are afraid of releasing the Nobel peace laureate because "they fear the immense influence she has on the people in Burma and in the international community," Stothard added.

NLD officials in Yangon could not be reached for comment.

The London-based Burma Campaign UK was to demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London yesterday.

It also released an 83-page report, Ten Years of Detention: Too Many Years of Empty Words, which said that although the UN had passed 27 resolutions on Myanmar, all had failed and the world body needed a coherent strategy.

"The repetitive words of 14 years' worth of UN reports, resolutions and statements, and the efforts of a sequence of UN special envoys and rapporteurs have failed to affect any positive change in Burma whatsoever," it said.
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