Ailing Suu Kyi offers to end roadside protest

Ailing Suu Kyi offers to end roadside protest

YANGON (AP): Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi offered to end her roadside standoff with the military regime yesterday if the government agrees to free jailed members of her political party.

Suu Kyi's health was "failing" nine days into the standoff but she was in "high spirits," according to a statement released by the National League for Democracy, her political party.

The offer came on the eve of today's deadline set by Suu Kyi for the government to finally convene a parliament elected in 1990 but never allowed to meet, part of her renewed campaign against the government.

Citing her personal physicians, who have visited Suu Kyi, 53, twice in her van 32 kilometers outside Yangon, her eyes are turning yellow and she has low blood pressure, the statement said.

Doctors took blood samples, fearing she may have contracted jaundice or another disease after spending nine days in the van with three colleagues on a small country bridge.

Suu Kyi is engaged in her fourth confrontation in two months with the military government over her right to travel freely within Myanmar, also known as Burma. She was stopped last Wednesday as she attempted to drive to the city of Bassein to meet members of parliament from her party.

The NLD said the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner was willing to return to Yangon if the government released jailed members of parliament and other members of her party imprisoned since May.

There are 42 NLD members of parliament in Myanmar's prisons, according to the All Burma Students Democratic Front, an exile group.

The number of NLD members arrested since May is unclear. Suu Kyi has said in the past that when people are arrested in far- flung provinces, the party sometimes doesn't hear about it.

There was no immediate response from the government to Suu Kyi's demand. In the past, they have never met her calls to release political prisoners or begin a dialog.

Suu Kyi's offer to end her protest comes one day before her party's deadline for the government to convene the parliament.

The military said yesterday it has no intention of meeting the demand.

"The question is how does one call a parliament if there exists no constitution," a government spokesman, on condition of anonymity, said in a faxed statement. "The demand to convene one sounds like forcing a bald person to dye his hair."

Several ethnic insurgent groups, exiled democracy activists and Western governments have supported the NLD's call.

The party won 82 percent of the seats in the assembly in a 1990 election, but the military refused to honor the results. After the NLD victory, it denied the election was for a parliament, but instead for delegates to a convention to write a new constitution.

Two years later, the government called a constitutional convention but the NLD had only 15 percent of the delegates. The rest were appointed by the military. In November 1995, the NLD pulled out of the convention.

The constitution is not complete and the draft being worked on gives the military the leading role in politics. It also bars Suu Kyi, daughter of independence hero Aung San, from holding office.

The military has ruled Myanmar since 1962. In 1988, the military gunned down thousands of protesters during a nationwide uprising.