Tue 26 Aug 2008
Filed under: News, Inside Burma
The detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has rejected food delivered to her home amid speculation that she is on a hunger strike to protest the government’s refusal to hold talks on democratic reforms.
Nyan Win, spokesman for her National League for Democracy, said Tuesday that Aung San Suu Kyi has refused to retrieve food delivered to her home for about two weeks.
He could not confirm whether Aung San Suu Kyi was refusing to eat, but he said that bags of food delivered Monday to a checkpoint outside her heavily guarded house were not picked up.
Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, and she relies on the NLD’s food deliveries for sustenance.
“We still cannot confirm that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is on hunger strike. We are very much worried about the situation especially because we have no direct contact with her and we don’t know anything about her real situation,” said Nyan Win. “Daw” is an honorific of respect used for older women.
Nyan Win said he had heard that Aung San Suu Kyi had made some demands to the government a few weeks ago but that he did not know what they were.
Nyo Ohn Myint, head of foreign affairs for the National League for Democracy, which is based in neighboring Thailand, said Aung San Suu Kyi has refused food deliveries since Aug. 15 and would continue doing so until her demands are met.
But he could not say whether that constitutes a hunger strike, since his group has no direct contact with the 63-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Aung San Suu Kyi told the regime that she wanted a resumption of talks with the government on national reconciliation, the installation of a satellite dish in her house and the freedom for her personal assistant, Khin Win, to leave whenever she wants, he said, declining to give the source of his information.
“If Daw Aung San Suu Kyi continues to refuse food from her comrades, her health will be of serious concern,” the National League for Democracy said in a statement. It called on the international community to take “immediate action.”
The news came after Aung San Suu Kyi repeatedly canceled meetings with a United Nations special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, during his six-day visit to Myanmar that ended Saturday. He left without seeing her.
Since then, supporters have speculated that Aung San Suu Kyi has grown more frustrated with the UN’s failure to bring about change in the military-ruled nation.
On Sunday, Nyan Win said Gambari had wasted his time in Myanmar. He also criticized the UN envoy for failing to meet the country’s leader, General Than Shwe, and for being unable to get any commitment from the junta to start talks with the opposition on national reconciliation.
Nyan Win also castigated Gambari for offering to help the junta prepare for planned 2010 elections.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s party has criticized the planned polls, which follow a constitutional referendum earlier this year that critics say was neither free nor fair. The new Constitution guarantees 25 percent of parliamentary seats to the military, and allows the president to hand over all power to the military in a state of emergency.
Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has been in a political deadlock since 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s party overwhelmingly won a general election but was not allowed to take power by the military.
The UN has tried with little success to nudge the regime toward talks with the opposition, hoping the top generals would respond to international pressure to embrace national reconciliation following its violent suppression of massive, anti-government protests in Yangon last year.
