Burma junta tells Suu Kyi: You're staying under arrest

BURMA'S junta yesterday extended the house arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Officials drove to the Nobel laureate's lakeside home in Rangoon to read out a six-month extension order in person, a government official said. However, one Rangoon-based diplomat claimed it was for a year.

The extension was issued despite a Burmese law that stipulates no-one can be held longer than five years without being released or put on trial.

Ms Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) party won a 1990 election landslide only to be denied power by the army, has now spent nearly 13 of the past 18 years under some form of arrest.

Her latest period of detention started on 30 May, 2003 "for her own protection" after clashes between her supporters and pro-junta thugs in the northern town of Depayin. The last of a series of year-long extensions expired yesterday.

Although few expected Ms Suu Kyi, 62, to be freed, the extension is a timely reminder of the military's refusal to make any concessions on the domestic political front, despite its grudging acceptance of foreign help after Cyclone Nargis hit on 2 May.

Hours before the extension, order was delivered, police arrested 20 NLD members trying to march to Ms Suu Kyi's home.

Activists criticised Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, for not speaking out about her detention during his recent visit to Burma, which he said was purely a humanitarian mission.

"It is shameful that Ban Ki-Moon went to Burma and failed even to utter her name," Mark Farmaner, the director of the Burma Campaign UK, said.

"He is playing into the regime's hands. The UN is crawling on its knees before the regime, afraid to speak the truth in case it affects aid access deals, which the regime is already breaking in any case."

Meanwhile, state-controlled media yesterday praised the United Nations for the help it has given to the 2.4 million people left destitute in the Irrawaddy Delta, suggesting a thaw in the junta's frosty relationship with the outside world. The English-language newspaper New Light of Burma, the generals' main mouthpiece, said UN agencies had taken "prompt action" to provide relief supplies after the cyclone, which left 134,000 people dead or missing.

Three weeks after the cyclone's 120mph winds and sea surge devastated the delta, the UN says fewer than one in three of those most in need have received any aid.

Thousands of beggars line the roads, with children shouting "Just throw something" at passing vehicles. Witnesses say many villages have received no outside help, and the waterways of the Burma's former "rice bowl" remain littered with animal carcases, either grotesquely bloated or rotting.

Much of the blame for the aid delay rests with the junta, which has been reluctant to admit a large-scale international relief effort for fear of loosening the vice-like grip on power the army has held since a 1962 coup.

But diplomats who helped co-ordinate a donor conference in Rangoon on Sunday said there were small signs of the generals gradually overcoming their paranoia and admitting outside help. "I can sense that there is a sense of urgency, a sense of appreciation that the world, after all, is not all that hostile on some issues, particularly on humanitarian issues," Surin Pitsuwan, secretary-general of the Association of South-east Asian Nations, told a news conference yesterday.

And after the junta told Mr Ban that all aid workers would be given full access to the delta, foreign experts have started heading out of Rangoon to test whether anything has changed on the ground.

The United States told the aid conference it was ready to raise its $20.5 million (£10 million) offer if the junta opened up but was "dismayed" that it went ahead with a constitutional referendum in the middle of the disaster. The result – 92.5 per cent in favour on a turn-out of 98.1 per cent in a poll held with no neutral monitoring – is unlikely to enhance the credibility of the junta's "roadmap to democracy", that is meant to culminate in elections in 2010.

PROFILE

AUNG San Suu Kyi was born in Rangoon on 19 June, 1945. Her father, a national hero, was assassinated when she was two. His death came six months before Burma achieved the independence from Britain he helped negotiate.

After university in New Delhi, Suu Kyi studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. In 1972 she married British academic Michael Aris. Suu Kyi returned to Rangoon in 1988 to look after her mother, just as resentment of military rule boiled over.

Named secretary-general of the National League for Democracy the same year, she called for an end to the military rule. She was put under house arrest in July 1989 for "endangering the state" and has been in prison or under house arrest off and on since.