Yangon - Ibrahim Gambari, UN special envoy to Myanmar,
visited the compound of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi
Friday but she did not come out to greet him, witnesses said.
Gambari, who arrived in Yangon Monday, went to Suu Kyi's Yangon
home at 7:30 am (0100 GMT) and waited at the front gate for an hour
but the Nobel Peace Prize laureate did not come out, witnesses said.
The road outside Suu Kyi's compound has been heavily barricaded
since Thursday evening with four police officers posted outside its
front gate.
Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since May 2003, being kept in
near-isolation by the ruling junta, which recently extended her
imprisonment, adding another six months to a year to it.
On rare occasions, she has been allowed to leave her house under
army escort to meet with visiting UN special envoys, such as Gambari
and his predecessors.
On Wednesday, a government car was seen entering Suu Kyi's
compound, apparently to take her to meet Gambari, but she never got
into the car.
Gambari met with executives of Suu Kyi's party, the National
League for Democracy (NLD), on Wednesday and informed them that one
of his priorities on this trip was to meet with Suu Kyi.
The NLD won the 1990 general election by a landslide but has been
denied power by the country's entrenched military establishment,
which has ruled Myanmar since 1962.
Gambari told the NLD that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was
hoping to visit Myanmar in the last week of December if conditions
are appropriate to discuss the country's political problems.
Ban was last in Myanmar in May when he made an emergency visit to
pressure the country's junta to allow entry of international aid and
relief workers in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which left about
140,000 people dead or missing.
Ban was criticized at the time for concentrating on the aid and
neglecting Myanmar's long-simmering political caldron, such as the
junta's refusal to free Suu Kyi and other political prisoners or to
introduce genuine political reforms.
This week's visit is Gambari's fourth since last year to Myanmar,
also known as Burma, where he has been handed a mandate by the United
Nations to deal with the country's military regime in addressing
international concerns about human rights violations, slow-paced
political reforms and the ongoing detentions of political prisoners.
The State Peace and Development Council, as Myanmar's junta calls
itself, has shown little willingness to comply with Gambari's overall
mission.
On August 7 in Yangon, for example, Myanmar authorities arrested
three members of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions and two
members of the 88 Generation Students, two pro-democracy groups.
Their whereabouts remain a mystery.
Myanmar has been under the equivalent of martial law since 1988
when the army unleashed a brutal crackdown on a nationwide
pro-democracy movement, which left an estimated 3,000 people dead and
thousands more in prison.
Bowing to international pressure, the regime held a general
election in 1990, which the NLD won in a landslide.
Instead of acknowledging the outcome of the polls, the junta has
blocked the NLD from power for the past 18 years, keeping Suu Kyi -
who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 - under house detention
for 13 of those years.
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