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Wired News: Suu Kyi on Burmese TV



Subject: Wired News:  Suu Kyi on Burmese TV (Reuter)

     RANGOON, July 19 (Reuter) - Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was shown in
public on Wednesday for the first time since she was released from house arrest last week
when she appeared on state-run television.
     The official Myanmar TV showed Suu Kyi laying flowers at the Martyrs Day ceremony,
which commemorates the deaths of her father, independence hero General Aung San, and
eight others who were assassinated while planning Burma's independence from Britain.
     Although Suu Kyi has held several news conferences since she was released from six
years of detention on July 10, there has been a domestic blackout on the new of her release,
which has never been officially announced in Burma.
     Suu Kyi was arrested in 1989 on charges of endangering the state after making outspoken
attacks on the military for their bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations the
previous year.
     Earlier on Wednesday some 100 foreign reporters, photographers and cameramen drank
tea and ate cakes in the garden of her Rangoon home where the 50-year-old Nobel Peace
Prize winner spent her detention.
     After asking that all cameras be turned off and no pictures be taken, Suu Kyi mingled,
signing autographs and asking reporters about their visits to Rangoon.
     One close adviser to Suu Kyi said she held the tea because "she thought most of you
would be going home soon."
     Suu Kyi's release sparked a flood of visa applications from reporters to enter the country
but more than a dozen missed out, prompting Thailand's Foreign Correspondents' Club to
urge Burmese Minister of Information Major-General Aye Kyaw to drop an apparent blacklist.
     Club president Panadda Lertlum-ampai said in a letter that recent applications had either
gone unanswered or had been rejected.
     Burma's ruling military has had an uneasy relationship with the foreign media and no
reporters were allowed in to the country for several years after the military suppressed the
1988 democracy uprising.
  REUTER