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Reuters-Suu Kyi sees Myanmar dialog



Subject: Reuters-Suu Kyi sees Myanmar dialogue ``sooner or later''

Suu Kyi sees Myanmar dialogue ``sooner or later''
08:16 a.m. Feb 25, 1999 Eastern
By Rajan Moses

YANGON, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said
on Thursday that sooner or later the country's military would sit down and
talk to pro-democracy forces.

Suu Kyi told a news conference her National League for Democracy (NLD) party
had come under severe pressure after calling last year for the convening of
a parliament of members elected at the country's last elections in 1990.

The NLD won those polls by a big margin but the military ignored the result,
saying the country was not ready for democracy.

The 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate said she was confident the ruling
generals would eventually agree to a dialogue.

``This will end up in dialogue. There has to be dialogue sooner or later.
Even terrorists sit down and talk...The more intelligent get to dialogue
faster,'' she said.

Since the call for the convening of the parliament in mid-1998 and the
party's subsequent vow to assemble a ``People's Parliament'' on its own, the
NLD has come under sustained attack from the authorities.

Hundreds of NLD members of parliament and supporters have been detained and
held in ``government guest houses.''

Suu Kyi said 153 opposition members of parliament were in detention, nearly
all from the NLD.

Of the party's rank and file members, she said some 600 had been detained,
but the government had also been releasing some of them so she could not
keep count of the number being held.

State-controlled newspapers have reported thousands of resignations of NLD
members in recent months, who they say have turned their back on Suu Kyi and
politics.

But Suu Kyi disputed these reports and said the talk of resignations was
propaganda.

Some of the people who were supposed to have left the party either did not
exist or had been blackmailed emotionally or otherwise and forced to resign,
she said.

Suu Kyi said the military had offered two million kyat ($5,263) to those who
wanted to leave the party.


Suu Kyi declined to discuss the NLD's next move to try to break the impasse
with the government.

``We never discuss our future plans publicly,'' she said.

Asked when Myanmar's universities, closed for much of the past decade in the
wake of a military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy forces in the late
1980s, would reopen, Suu Kyi said she did not think they would open very
soon.

``This regime is very nervous of students,'' she said.