. About 16 members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) held a brief demonstration in Rangoon on Tuesday asking for the release of Aung San Su Kyi. (Photo: PDC)

NLD Members Arrested; Suu Kyi’s Sentence Extended

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By WAI MOE

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

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At least 15 members of Burma’s main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), were arrested as they marched towards the home of NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday in a demonstration marking the 18th anniversary of the 1990 general election.

The demonstrators, mostly young members of the party, shouted slogans demanding the release of Suu Kyi from house arrest and calling on the regime to allow international relief workers to help bring aid to cyclone victims. They held up a picture of Suu Kyi.

NLD members are driven away in three trucks, left center, after their arrest by security forces. Security personnel on motorcycles follow behind. (Photo: PDC)

Meanwhile, on Tuesday afternoon, the government announced that Suu Kyi’s detention had been officially extended. It was not immediately clear if the extension was for six months or one year. The extension became official when she was informed of it.

Suu Kyi was due to complete five years of house arrest this week. The conditions of her detention, under Article 10 (b) of the State Protection Act, provide for a maximum of five years.

But analysts were doubtful that she would be freed in the near future and suggested her detention could continue until 2010, when the junta plans to hold a general election.

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The extension of Suu Kyi’s house arrest was also linked to the sensitive issue of the regime’s handling of the relief effort in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. After more than three weeks of blocking foreign aid workers, the junta has tried to appear more receptive to a role for outsiders as it seeks some US $11 billion in aid.

“The junta wouldn’t release her while it is facing a critical situation after the cyclone,” Win Naing, a member of the NLD’s information committee told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday.

The NLD also said a high-ranking police officer went to Suu Kyi’s lakeside residence on Thursday afternoon.

“We got information that she was visited by Police Col Win Naing Tun this afternoon,” said Win Naing.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda called on Tuesday for her release, saying it would be way of thanking the international community for its generosity after the cyclone, according to a report by Associated Press.

"I hope for the best but, to be frank, I'm not optimistic," he said.

Tuesday’s demonstration calling for Suu Kyi’s release began near the NLD headquarters. Plainclothes police and members of the junta-backed Swan Ah-shin militia intercepted the demonstrators near the junction of Gabaraye Pagoda Road and University Avenue, the lakeside road where Suu Kyi lives.

The NLD held a formal ceremony on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the 1990 election. Police tightened security around the party headquarters during the ceremony.

Aye Thar Aung, secretary of the Arakan League for Democracy which won 11 seats in the election, said he never expected the vacuum left by the regime’s refusal to recognize the election result to last 18 years. “The situation gets ever worse for the people of Burma,” he said.

Aye Thar Aung said the cyclone crisis indicated how important good governance was in times of natural disaster. “Until there is a good government in Burma we will see people suffer.”

The Burmese regime has been condemned by governments around the world for its handling of the crisis.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has just returned to New York after meeting members of the junta to discuss the crisis and appeal for greater access by international aid workers.

The UN chief said he had not raised the issue of Suu Kyi’s detention because the broader humanitarian concerns of bringing aid to the cyclone victims were more pressing.

“We must think about people just now, not politics,” he said.

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးဆႏၵျပသည့္ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီပါတီ၀င္မ်ား ဖမ္းဆီးခံရ ပီတာေအာင္/ ၂၇ ေမ ၂၀၀၈

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး ဆႏၵျပသည့္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္္ (အန္အယ္လ္ ဒီ) ပါတီ၀င္ (၁၅) ဦးကို ယေန႔ ေန႔လယ္ပိုင္းက လံုထိန္းရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕က ဖမ္းဆီးသြားေၾကာင္း အန္အယ္လ္ဒီ ဗဟိုဌာနခ်ဳပ္မွ ပါတီ၀င္တဦးက ေျပာသည္။ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္၀င္မ်ားသည္ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္႐ံုးေရွ႕၌ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ခ်က္ခ်င္းလႊတ္ေပးရန္ ေႂကြးေၾကာ္သံမ်ား ေအာ္ဟစ္ ဆႏၵျပၾကၿပီးေနာက္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ေနအိမ္ဘက္သို႔ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ ဆႏၵျပစဥ္ ဖမ္းဆီးခံရျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ အန္အယ္လ္ဒီပါတီ၀င္တဦးက “ေန႔ခင္း (၁) နာရီခြဲေလာက္မွာ ကေလးေတြက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္း စုၾကည္ ခ်က္ခ်င္းလႊတ္ဆိုတဲ့ ဆိုင္းဘုတ္ရယ္၊ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ပံုရယ္ ကိုင္ၿပီး အန္တီစု အိမ္ဘက္ကို ေလွ်ာက္သြားၾကတယ္။ အဲဒါကို ကမၻာေအးဘုရားလမ္း ျမရိပ္ညိဳဟုိတယ္နား ႏွင္းဆီကုန္းနား အေရာက္မွာပဲ သူတို႔ကို ဒိုင္နာကားနဲ႔ ဆြဲတင္သြားတယ္။ အန္တီအိမ္နား မေရာက္ခင္မွာဘဲ ဒိုင္နာကားနဲ႔ တင္ခံရတယ္” ဟု ေျပာသည္။ ဖမ္းဆီးခံရသူတို႔မွာ ဒလမွ ေစာျပည့္ၿဖိဳးေအာင္ႏွင့္ ထက္စိုးလင္း၊ မဂၤလာဒံုမွ ထြန္း၀င္းသိန္းႏွင့္ လွမ်ဳိးႏိုင္၊ တြံေတးၿမိဳ႕မွ ဆရာဦးေအာင္ေဖ၊ စမ္းေခ်ာင္းမွ ထြန္းထြန္း၀င္းႏွင့္ ျပည့္ျပည့္၊ တာေမြမွ ေက်ာ္မ်ဳိးႏိုင္ႏွင့္ ၾကည့္ျမင္တုိင္မွ ရန္ႏိုင္ထြန္း၊ ေရႊျပည္သာမွ ထက္ထက္ဦးေ၀နွင့္ ၎၏ သမီး (၁၂) ႏွစ္၊ လိႈင္သာယာမွ ေမာင္ဆန္း (ေခၚ) ဆန္းႏိုင္၊ ေက်ာ္ႏိုင္၊ မ်ဳိးေက်ာ္ဇင္၊ သက္ႏိုင္ထြန္း၊ ခရမ္းမွ ၀င္းျမင့္ေမာင္တို႔ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ၎တို႔အား မည္သည့္ေနရာသုိ႔ ေခၚေဆာင္သြားသည္ကို မသိရေသးေသာ္လည္း မရမ္းကုန္းဘက္သို႔ ေခၚေဆာင္သြားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ယေန႔မြန္းလြဲပိုင္း၌ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္က ၁၉၉၀ ျပည့္ ပါတီစံုဒီမုိကေရစီ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အႏိုင္ရသည့္ (၁၈) ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ အခမ္းအနားတခု ဗဟိုဌာနခ်ဳပ္တြင္ က်င္းပၿပီး ယမန္ေန႔က စစ္ အစုိးရ ေၾကညာသည့္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုမူၾကမ္း ဆႏၵခံယူပြဲရလဒ္ကို လက္မခံေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို အျမန္ဆံုးလႊတ္ေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုေၾကာင္း ေၾကညာသည္။ ။