Suu Kyi Says Myanmar Repression Worsens
Interview- 24-MAR-99 BANGKOK, March 24 (Reuters) -
Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi says the military government has imposed on her party and its members their worst sufferings over the past year.
"What we have suffered over the last year is far more than we have suffered over the last six or seven years. What is happening is that the authorities are trying their best to crush the party," she said in a recent video-taped interview obtained by Reuters.
"But they have not succeeded. As you can see we are quite active here," she added.
The leader of the National League for Democracy party (NLD) said about 150 NLD members of parliament elected in the 1990 general election remained under detention by the military.
She also estimated that about 300-400 party members were being detained by the authorities.
"The human rights situation in Myanmar has deteriorated very badly indeed. It has come to the point where the activities of the regime are tantamount to criminal activities."
The ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) stepped up action against the party late last year after Suu Kyi demanded that the government convene a People's Parliament of MPs elected in the 1990 polls.
The NLD swept that election but the military refused to acknowledge the result.
The People's Parliament proposal infuriated the military which told the NLD that there could not be dialogue between the two sides unless the demand was withdrawn.
The SPDC says most NLD detainees are being held in government guesthouses to prevent them from fulfilling their party's call for the assembly of parliament. They will be released if they rejected the proposal, it says.
"The repression is on a very large scale but the world has not grasped the extent of the repression because it has been drawn out over a number of months," Suu Kyi said.
"If what the military has done in the last eight to nine months had been done in a few weeks then the world would have sat up and taken notice," she added.
Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Peace prize winner, said the world did not hear about the atrocities in her country because the foreign press had not been allowed to visit her or the country to investigate and report it.
"We cannot spread news of our activities very widely...foreign journalists are not allowed to come and see what is going on," she added.
Suu Kyi said the party had filed law suits in courts against the home ministry and the military intelligence division complaining about their repression.
"But the authorities have taken no action whatsoever," she said.
Close aides to Suu Kyi said she was very upset about the condition of her gravely ill British husband but has declined to talk about him publicly.
Suu Kyi has vowed to stay put in Yangon, fearing that if she goes to Britain to see her cancer-stricken husband, Michael Aris, she might not be allowed to return to Myanmar, they told Reuters.
Family sources say Aris, 52, an Oxford academic who has been denied a Myanmar visa for the past three years, is dying from prostate cancer that has spread to his spine and lungs. Aris has requested a visa to travel to Yangon, but Myanmar's military government has said Suu Kyi, who is in good health, should visit her terminally ill husband instead.
