Myanmar’s detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has accepted her food rations for the first time in a month, a government official said yesterday.
“Her maid accepted the food supplies yesterday [Monday] evening,” the official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Nyan Win, the spokesman for her National League for Democracy (NLD) party said he could not confirm the delivery.
“I know that food supplies were sent to her house Monday evening. I do not yet know if she accepted them,” he said.
The 63-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi has been confined to her lakeside Yangon home for most of the last 19 years. Her daily rations are her only source of food.
Her personal physician spent more than four hours with her on Sunday.
Her lawyer Kyi Win said the doctor found her malnourished after she had refused most of her rations from the military regime since Aug. 16.
She and her two maids have been relying on the small stocks of food that she kept in her home, Kyi Win said.
The lawyer said she was not staging a hunger strike but had stopped accepting food deliveries to call for greater human rights in the military-ruled country.
Concerns about her health and diet arose as she was allowed a rare series of meetings with her lawyer to discuss filing an appeal against her detention.
Kyi Win said he had discussed with the military ways to relax the terms of her house arrest, such as permission to receive mail or for her two maids to move freely in and out of the house.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won a landslide victory in a 1990 election, but the junta never allowed it to take office.
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