Preparations are under way for the expected release of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, officials said yesterday, after the army’s proxies claimed a landslide election win.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has spent most of the past two decades locked up, is due to be freed on Saturday, almost one week after the widely criticized election that her party boycotted.
“We haven’t got any instruction from superiors for her release yet. But we are preparing security plans for November 13,” a government official said on condition of anonymity.
Photo: AFP
Aung San Suu Kyi’s lawyers say the current period of detention started with her imprisonment on May 14 last year and they expect her to be freed on Saturday.
Yet some fear Myanmar’s military junta, led by Senior General Than Shwe, may still find an excuse to extend her sentence.
Another official, who also did not want to be named, said: “We don’t have the order yet. It will be at the last minute.”
Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention was extended by 18 months in August last year over a bizarre incident in which a US man swam uninvited to her lakeside home, where she is under house arrest.
Her lawyer said yesterday that she would hold a news conference at her party’s headquarters if freed, suggesting she is likely to resist any attempt by the authorities to restrict her political activities.
The daughter of the nation’s founding father General Aung San swept her National League for Democracy (NLD) to power in the country’s last elections two decades ago, but the party was never allowed to take power.
Her likely release is seen by observers as an effort by the regime to deflect criticism of Sunday’s election.
The NLD was disbanded after boycotting the poll.
Some former NLD members left to create the National Democratic Force (NDF), which was weighing its next move after the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) said it had won 80 percent of the seats.
The largest opposition party running, the NDF appeared to have secured only about 10 percent of the more than 160 seats it contested and accused the USDP of cheating through its collection of advance votes.
The Democratic Party, the second-largest pro-democracy group, appeared not to have won a single seat in the national legislature, but chairman Thu Wai said they “cannot do anything.”
“We are planning to discuss with other parties after we collect the data. We will try to work not only with the NDF but also with other parties,” he said.
One quarter of parliament’s seats are already reserved for the military, which together with its political proxy looks set to have a comfortable majority for passing laws and electing the president.
A new Constitution requires parliament to convene only at least once a year.
JAPANESE VIEWPOINT
Meanwhile, Thai officials said yesterday that 20,000 refugees had returned to Myanmar after crossing the border into Thailand following the outbreak of fighting between ethnic rebels and government forces on Monday.
In related news, a Japanese journalist arrested in Myanmar while trying to cover its elections says he was locked up in a room that looked like a pigpen, but shed tears of joy when fellow inmates thanked him for coming to report on the country.
Toru Yamaji, 49, a reporter with the Tokyo-based APF news agency, also said he heard shots fired in skirmishes between ethnic rebels and Myanmar government troops during his three days of detention in the border town of Myawaddy.
Yamaji was detained on Sunday and freed on Tuesday.
Yamaji said he had barely entered the country for an hour when he was surrounded by four men who said they were secret police and took him to a police station.
“I was in a solitary room in what looked like a pigpen covered with bars,” Yamaji said in a statement released by APF.
Inmates in a nearby cell were political prisoners, including a pro-democracy activist who had been imprisoned since 1995, and they thanked him for doing journalistic work that could help their cause, Yamaji said.
“I was so happy I cried,” he said.
Yamaji said officers had threatened to keep him for five or seven years.
He said he didn’t regret his trip because he was able to see for himself that voter turnout on Sunday was low, despite the government’s claims.
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