Aung San Suu Kyi demands prisoner release
Pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi says she will refuse being released from house arrest until Myanmar’s rulers release her jailed colleagues.
UN rights envoy Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, visiting the Myanmar leader on Thursday, said she was in high spirits but unwilling to accept any “privileges” from the junta unless other political prisoners arrested after May’s unrest were released.
The envoy spent six days in the military-ruled state looking into alleged rights abuses, including a May 30 attack on Suu Kyi’s entourage by a pro-junta mob during her political tour of northern Myanmar.
The Nobel peace laureate, has been detained since the incident and remains confined to her home despite the
government’s insistence that there are no legal restrictions on her movement.
Several local contacts and foreign diplomats have been turned away at the gates of her guarded lakeside villa in recent weeks. Suu Kyi was put under house arrest after more than three months of secret detention.
Denied
Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) party won a landslide victory in 1990 elections that were never recognised by the junta has spent more than seven years under three different stints of house arrest, the previous period ending in May 2002.
The unrest and subsequent detention of the entire NLD leadership brought an end to the national reconciliation negotiations between Suu Kyi and the generals that had been brokered by the United Nations.
Suu Kyi stressed that political dialogue should move forward despite the May 30 setback but demanded an investigation into the attack, which witnesses and rights groups say may have left dozens of her supporters dead.
“She says there should be justice and accountability, not revenge,” said Pinheiro.