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AP-Suu Kyi Discusses Embassy Intrud



Reply-To: "TIN KYI" <tinkyi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: AP-Suu Kyi Discusses Embassy Intruders

Thursday October 7 8:04 AM ET
Suu Kyi Discusses Embassy Intruders

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has expressed
sympathy with the student rebels who stormed Myanmar's Bangkok embassy with
guns, saying people in her country experience the feeling of being under
siege day-to-day.

``We understand why these young students felt they had to do something like
this,'' the Nobel Peace laureate said in a videotaped interview smuggled out
of Myanmar and released today to Associated Press Television News.

``It's because of a sense of frustration. It's because they have been
subjected to great injustice and because they want democracy to come to
Burma,'' she said. Myanmar is also known as Burma.

Five rebels calling themselves the ``Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors''
took 38 hostages, including Myanmar diplomats, at the nation's mission in
Bangkok last week.

The hostages were released after 26 hours, when Thai authorities agreed to
give the rebels safe passage by helicopter back to Myanmar.

They were demanding the release of political prisoners in their homeland and
a convening of Parliament in accordance with the result of the 1990 general
elections swept by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. That parliament
has never been allowed to take power.

Suu Kyi, whose movements are heavily restricted by the Yangon authorities,
compared the embassy siege to the situation in Myanmar, which has been ruled
by the military since 1962.

``We have to face this kind of situation in Burma from day to day. Our
people are arrested, harassed, bullied, tortured,'' she said. ``Why do
people put up with it? Because the people who are doing it have guns in
their hands.''

But while Suu Kyi expressed sympathy for the aims of the rebels, she said
her party ``cannot support such acts where people with arms (weapons) force
people without arms'' to press for political demands.

``We want to show that the human spirit can prevail over the might of arms
and bring about the change that we want through the strength of our
convictions,'' she said.