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.