Burma Said to Offer to Fr

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/* Written  2:00 PM  Jul 21, 1994 by wov.central@xxxxxxx in igc:soc.cult.burma */
/* ---------- "Burma Said to Offer to Fr" ---------- */
Subject : Burma Said to Offer to Free Dissident Suu Kyi

   TOKYO (Reuter) - Burma has offered to free dissident leader
Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest if she agrees to leave the
country for at least five years, a Japanese daily reported
Thursday.
   In an interview in Rangoon with the mass-circulation daily
Yomiuri Shimbun, Burmese military intelligence chief
Lieutenant-General Khin Nyunt was quoted as saying:
   "I would be happy to welcome her back if she returned home
(after five years of exile) and worked for the sake of the
nation...
   "When the time is ripe, I want to hold talks with her with
no conditions...I do not consider her an enemy," he added.
   The 49-year-old Suu Kyi, daughter of Burmese national hero
Colonel Aung San and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, has
remained under house arrest without being charged since July 20,
1989.
   She led the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD)
to a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the military junta
ignored the result and refused to transfer power to the elected
representatives.
   The State Law and Order Restoration Council, the political
body of the Burmese military junta, formed in 1988 after the
suppression of a bloody uprising, continues to rule the country.
   "There is no reason to impose Western values on Asian
countries whose history and culture differ from those in Europe
and the United States," the Yomiuri Shimbun quoted Khin Nyunt,
Burma's most powerful general, as saying.
   The Burmese government had originally said her house arrest
could last as long as five years, but a junta official said in
February that her first year of detention was actually an
"arrest period" and she would not be released until 1995 at
the earliest.
   Some Burmese dissidents have said an apparent, recent
softening of the junta's hard-line stance on Suu Kyi is merely a
ploy in advance of this week's meeting of the Association of
South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), which Burma's Foreign Minister
Ohn Gyaw is due to attend for the first time.
   ASEAN groups Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand,
Brunei and the Philippines.


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