The Military Junta ruling Burma with iron fist will keep Aung San Suu Kyi under arrest another year by extension of a special law created just to detain her. Meanwhile the planned economy is crumbling, an estimated 700,000 refugees are living in camps outside the country, there’s a continuing assault on the Karen tribes in the back-country, and now a polio outbreak. The Junta also arrested 25 more advocates for democracy who went to temples to pray for her release. There are an estimated 1,100 political prisoners from Suu Kyi’s party in Burma / Myanmar.
More from Aung Hia Tun at Reuters:
YANGON (Reuters) – Myanmar’s military junta extended the house arrest of opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for yet another year on Friday, ignoring international pleas for her release, a government source said.
“Home Ministry officials went to her residence and read it out to her,” the source said of the order issued two days before her detention was set to expire.
The decision to keep Suu Kyi, 61, confined in her lakeside home in Yangon had been widely expected despite appeals from the White House, United Nations and fellow Nobel winners to the generals ruling the former Burma.
She has now been in detention for more than 11 of the last 17 years and United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, called her confinement “cruel and unacceptable.”
Debbie Stothard, a member of the activist Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, said in neighboring Thailand: “The regime is obviously more afraid of Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularity than international opinion.”
“If they had released Suu Kyi, it would have been an hasty end for the regime. There is increasing resentment over its mismanagement of the economy,” she said, referring to small public protests in Yangon this year against worsening living conditions.
I find it interesting that while the left has an affection for murderous Che Guevara with ubiquitous, leering, face plastered everywhere on their clothing and bags, none of them seem to know who Aung San Suu Kyi is.
Suu Kyi is a true advocate for freedom and democracy, and she’s not a murderer and torturer as Che was — perhaps she should say something bad about America, then she could becomes a cause celebre’ of the left as well. More here
