Myanmar extends Suu Kyi house arrest: Opposition

Myanmar extends Suu Kyi house arrest: Opposition

Aung Hla Tun, Reuters/Yangon

Myanmar police have told democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi she is
being held under house arrest under a law which allows for such
detention for up to a year, an opposition spokesman said on
Monday.

U Lwin, spokesman for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy
(NLD), said police visited her lakeside villa in Yangon, where
she has been under house arrest since Sept. 26, to tell her the
detention had been extended.

No details were available beyond the legal code under which
she can be kept under house arrest for 12 months, but U Lwin said
the NLD took it to mean she could be confined to her home until
September 2005.

"We heard that police vehicles entered her compound last
Saturday. We later heard that they informed her that the house
arrest had been extended," U Lwin told Reuters.

Official comment was not immediately available.

The 59-year-old Nobel peace laureate has been confined to her
home on the capital's leafy University Avenue for much of the
past 15 years, her telephone cut off and requiring official
permission to receive visitors.

Suu Kyi's latest detention began in May last year after a
bloody clash between opposition and government supporters which
Washington said was orchestrated by the junta, a charge it
denies.

Her confinement has outraged the West and embarrassed
Myanmar's neighbors in the 10-nation Association of South East
Asian Nations (ASEAN), which Yangon is due to chair in 2006.

News of her extended house arrest came as ASEAN leaders held
their annual summit in Laos, where Myanmar has tried to allay
concerns about its "roadmap to democracy" following a purge
within the junta last month.

ASEAN has pinned its hopes for reform on the roadmap announced
in August last year while Western governments have dismissed it
as a sham, particularly while Suu Kyi remains under house arrest.

The NLD has boycotted a National Convention, which resumes in
February, to draw up a new constitution and pave the way for
elections while Suu Kyi and her deputy Tin Oo remain confined.

Suu Kyi's NLD won a landslide election victory in 1990 but was
denied power by the army, which has run the country in various
guises since 1962.

U Lwin said Suu Kyi's house arrest had been extended under the
Law Safeguarding the State from the Danger of Subversive
Elements. It allows for a one-year detention of those considered
a threat to the state.

The police visited Suu Kyi's home a day after the junta
completed the release of more than 9,000 prisoners from 41 jails
across the country, U Lwin said.

However, only a handful of the country's estimated 1,300-1,400
political prisoners were among those freed, the opposition says.

Among them was Min Ko Naing -- the now 42-year-old leader of a
student campaign for democracy crushed ruthlessly by the military
in 1988 -- the second most prominent political prisoner after Suu
Kyi.

The military said many of those freed had been jailed
"inappropriately" by the military intelligence headed by former
Prime Minister Khin Nyunt, who was purged last month along with
his National Intelligence Bureau (NIB)

"As you can see, the NIB is gone now, but their instruments
are still there," U Lwin said, referring to the law used to keep
Suu Kyi in confinement.