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NEWS - Aung San Suu Kyi Urges Dial
- Subject: NEWS - Aung San Suu Kyi Urges Dial
- From: Rangoonp@xxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 21:48:00
Subject: NEWS - Aung San Suu Kyi Urges Dialogue, Honors Assassinated Father
Aung San Suu Kyi Urges Dialogue, Honors Assassinated Father
AP
19-JUL-99
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Wrapped in black mourning
attire, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi paid
tribute
to her father on the 52nd anniversary of his
assassination
Monday while the military regime urged her party to
unseat
her.
For the third straight Martyrs Day holiday, official
newspapers balked at publishing what had once been a
traditional special page on the life of Gen. Aung San,
Suu
Kyi's father and hero of Myanmar's independence from
Britain.
The official press -- the only kind allowed in Myanmar --
claimed that the people "loathe" Aung San's daughter,
winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, as a traitor.
Newspapers urged her party, the National League of
Democracy, to drive her out of politics.
Martyrs Day commemorates the assassination of Aung San,
six ministers and two others who were machine-gunned
during a Cabinet meeting July 19, 1947, in an attack
orchestrated by a political rival and aided by renegade
British intelligence officers.
In the only event of the year in which Suu Kyi is allowed
to
take part in official ceremonies, she arrived in a black
sedan
at the concrete Martyrs Mausoleum at the foot of the
capital
Yangon's gilded Shwedagon Pagoda.
Dressed in a traditional black longyi, or sarong, a white
jacket and black shawl, Suu Kyi, 54, bowed in front of
her
father's tomb and placed three baskets of purple and
white
orchids there. She then knelt and paid respects in the
Buddhist tradition.
None of the top ruling generals of the ruling State Peace
and
Development Council attended. Culture Minister Win Sein
represented the government.
Afterwards, some 400 supporters greeted Suu Kyi at her
party headquarters with chants and cheers. Tin Oo, the
party vice chairman, read a statement urging the military
to
engage the party in dialogue.
Under 37 years of military rule, Myanmar, also known as
Burma, has gone from being one of the richest countries
in
Southeast Asia to one of the poorest. The regime crushes
dissent, and thousands of dissidents are in prison or
otherwise detained.
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy overwhelmingly
won 1990 elections, but the military never let the
parliament
meet.
She was freed from six years of house arrest in 1995, but
has since made no headway in her requests for a dialogue
to put the country on a more democratic course. The
generals refuse to speak to her and denied her English
husband a visa to see her before he died in March.
The military, which respects her father as a hero, calls
Suu
Kyi a traitor, saying her success in getting foreign
nations to
impose economic sanctions to force change have retarded
development.