Aung San Suu Kyi Meets with Her Democratic Party

A demonstrator holds a mask with a photograph of Myanmar's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi near the Chinese Embassy in central London, October 24, 2007, on a day of protests to mark twelve years of her detention.

REUTERS/Toby Melville

November 10, 2007 -- New York Times

Myanmar Dissident Meets With Party

By THOMAS FULLER

BANGKOK, Nov. 9 — The pro-democracy leader in Myanmar, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, met on Friday with members of her party, the National League for Democracy, for the first time in three years as well as with Aung Kyi, the general appointed as a liaison by Myanmar’s military government, news agencies reported from Yangon.

Nyan Win, a spokesman for the National League for Democracy, said Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi believed that the military government was “serious and really willing to work for national reconciliation,” Reuters reported.

Six weeks after its violent crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks, Myanmar’s military government has telegraphed alternating signs of combativeness and flexibility. Analysts say they are watching to determine whether the ruling generals’ outreach to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi is genuine or whether it falls into a well-established pattern of short-lived concessions toward dissidents followed by a return to a hard-line stance. Myanmar has been under military rule for 45 years.

The state-run newspaper New Light of Myanmar said Friday that the government would continue to carry out democratic change, as promised in a convention in July to set up guidelines for a constitution that the junta said was the first of a seven-stage process to establish what it called a disciplined form of democratic rule. But junta has given no time frame for the overall process.

The government will “continue striving earnestly for national reconsolidation in true cooperation with the U.N. Secretariat,” said the paper, which is closely read by diplomats and analysts seeking hints to the secretive government’s intentions.

Ibrahim Gambari, the United Nations envoy who ended a six-day mission to the country on Thursday, said the government and its political opponents had agreed on a “process” that would “lead to substantive dialogue.”

But it is a reflection of the glacial pace of change in Myanmar that allowing Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi to meet with her colleagues passes for progress.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 62, who has been held under house arrest on and off since 1990, said in a statement released by the United Nations late Thursday that she was willing to “cooperate” with the government in the “interest of the nation.”

She said she would represent “as broad a range of political organizations and forces as possible,” not just her party.

This may be out of necessity, analysts say. The National League for Democracy, which won the 1990 elections that were ignored by the military, has been reduced to a skeletal party after many of its leaders were harassed, jailed or fled the country.

“She’s got a pretty weak hand,” said Sean Turnell, a specialist on Myanmar at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “So many people have been arrested, she’s isolated, she’s been imprisoned for 19 years, her husband has died, her children have grown up without her. That’s got to wear you down.”

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has been called to negotiate with the generals several times over the past 17 years. None of these talks has persuaded the government to begin relinquishing control.

So far there is little to suggest that these negotiations are different, said Win Min, a lecturer in contemporary Burmese politics at Payap University in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

“They are just making procedural concessions,” Mr. Win Min said.

But he noted that the junta had stopped dismissing her as “irrelevant” in state media, the word used to describe her for years.

Anger over the crackdown may have also led to cracks within the government, especially among younger officers in the military. Mr. Win Min said he had heard reports of lenient treatment from recently released leaders of the September demonstrations.

“They thought they would be very hurt,” he said of the released dissidents. Instead, he said, the officers told them: “We are just doing our jobs. We are not going to torture you.”

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