AUNG SAN SUU KYI

Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has now spent a decade under house arrest.

Suu Kyi has spent a total of 10 years in three separate periods of house arrest—from 1989-1995, 2000-2002 and from May 2003 until today. In June she turned 60, alone and cut off from the outside world.

"The pattern of detaining, releasing and detaining Aung San Suu Kyi is symbolic of the one step forward, two steps back strategy the regime has perpetrated on the entire country," Debbie Stothard, co-coordinator of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, said in Bangkok.

Demonstrations were held Monday in front of United Nations buildings in New York City, Canada, Sweden, Australia, South Korea, and the Netherlands, as well as outside the House of Commons in London.

While there was no public recognition or demonstration on the streets of Burma where security remained tight, 67 members of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) began a three-day meeting on Monday with an appeal to the military junta to release her and all other political prisoners. Aung San Suu Kyi is the secretary general of the NLD. The NLD scored a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the military - which has run the country since 1962 - ignored the result.

In the Netherlands, Burmese exiles gathered in front of the UN office in Rotterdam urging Dutch support for the report by retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Czech President Vaclav Havel, appealing for UN action on Burma. Their report recommended that the UN Security Council adopt a resolution compelling Myanmar to work with Secretary General Kofi Annan in implementing a national reconciliation plan that would bring a democratically elected government.

In addition to the rally outside of Parliament, London's Burma Campaign also released an 83-page report, "Ten years of detention: too many years of empty words", which said that although the United Nations had passed 27 resolutions on Myanmar, all had failed and the world body needed a coherent strategy. "The repetitive words of fourteen years' worth of UN reports, resolutions and statements, and the efforts of a sequence of UN Special Envoys and Rapporteurs have failed to affect any positive change in Burma whatsoever," it said. "Instead, at each turn, Burma's generals have opted to reject, snub and embarrass a UN system whose approach to Burma has been mired by an absence of both strategy and sense of urgency."

Last Friday Canada condemned Myanmar’s detention of Aung San Suu Kyi and demanded her immediate and unconditional release. “Canada reiterates its call for Burma (Myanmar) to immediately and unconditionally release Aung San Suu Kyi and the members of her party,” Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew said in a statement. “For most of the past decade and a half, Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained under house arrest by the Burmese authorities. When these periods of detention are viewed cumulatively, October 24, 2005, marks the completion of her 10th year of detention,” Pettigrew noted. The Canadian foreign minister urged the Myanmar regime to recognize the 1990 election results and lead the country towards democracy. “The Burmese authorities should also abandon their ongoing efforts to entrench and legitimize military rule, and instead recognize the 1990 national election results and take steps to initiate genuine democratic reform,” he said. “The people of Burma have languished far too long under authoritarian rule, and continue to suffer human rights abuses.”

Aung San Suu Kyi's cousin and a former prime minister in exile, Sein Win, told the BBC on Monday that Myanmar's rulers had only partly succeeded in limiting her influence. "On the whole, Aung San Suu Kyi is still the leader of the people," Sein Win said. "And nothing can be done - national reconciliation, or development of the country, what we wanted - without Aung San Suu Kyi's participation and role." Sources: Irrawaddy News Magazine (Thailand), BBC, Voice of America, Daily Times (Pakistan), Democratic Voice of Burma, SAPA, AFP