Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi met with the ruling junta’s liaison officer for the first time in nearly two years on Saturday, according to her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).
Nyan Win, a spokesperson for the NLD, told The Irrawaddy today that Suu Kyi met with Aung Kyi, a retired major general who is also the regime’s labor minister, for nearly an hour at a government guesthouse near her lakeside home.
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| Aung San Suu Kyi (left) and Aung Kyi meet in October 2007. (Photo: AFP) |
It was the first time the two have met since January 2008.
“The meeting started at 1 pm and lasted about 45 minutes,” said Nyan Win, who is also Suu Kyi’s lawyer.
He added that it was unclear if the meeting was related to a letter she sent to regime leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe last week. “We still don’t know if they [Suu Kyi and Aung Kyi] discussed the letter because we haven’t heard any of the details of today’s meeting yet,” he said.
On Sept. 25, Suu Kyi sent a letter to the country’s top general to say she wanted to cooperate with the junta to lift sanctions on Burma. She also asked to meet with envoys from the United States, European Union and Australia to learn more about the sanctions.
NLD sources said that there has been no response to Suu Kyi’s letter so far.
According to Nyan Win, Suu Kyi’s family doctor, Tin Myo Win, was allowed to visit her on Friday from 2 pm to 4 pm. It was his first visit since Sept. 20, when he diagnosed Suu Kyi with low blood pressure.
“As far as I know, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is now well and in good sprits,” said Nyan Win.
Aung Kyi was appointed “Minister for Relations” to coordinate contacts with the detained democracy leader in October 2007, after the junta came under intense international condemnation for its brutal crackdown on Buddhist monk-led mass demonstrations the previous month.
At a press conference held in December 2007, Aung Kyi said his talks with Suu Kyi were proceeding well.
“I have met with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi three times. We have made progress at the meetings. The first meeting was aimed at gaining understanding between us. The second meeting was to discuss frameworks for the future. The third meeting was to discuss the facts that should be included in the framework,” Aung Kyi said at the time.
Two more meetings were held after this, but the talks abruptly ended in January 2008, when Suu Kyi said that they were mostly spent discussing trivial subjects. She said that some of their hour-long meetings were almost entirely devoted to making semantic distinctions between words like “cooperation” and “collaboration.”
Meanwhile, Rangoon remains under tight security today, as the authorities moved to prevent protests by monks demanding an apology from the junta for an incident that sparked outrage two years ago.
The All Burma Monks’ Alliance set Oct. 3 as the deadline for the regime to apologize for violently suppressing a peaceful demonstration by monks in the city of Pakkoku in September 2007. It also demanded the release of all monks imprisoned since the crackdown on the massive uprising that grew out of the Pakokku protests, known as the Saffron Revolution.
“Riot police are position around Shwedagon Pagoda, all major monasteries and the downtown area,” said a Rangoon resident.
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