Myanmar bars Suu Kyi from elections under new charter

By Hla Hla Htay
Yahoo News - AFP

YANGON, Feb 20, 2008 (AFP) - Aung San Suu Kyi will not be allowed to run for election under Myanmar's proposed constitution, which has now been drafted ahead of a referendum in May, the military government said Tuesday.

The junta says the referendum -- if approved -- will clear the way for democratic elections in 2010, the first since Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party scored a landslide victory in 1990 polls.

The junta never recognised the result and late Tuesday on state television announced that a special commission had finished the final draft of the charter.

Foreign Minister Nyan Win told a regional gathering in Singapore that the document would bar Aung San Suu Kyi from running because she had been married to a foreigner.

Her party denounced his remarks as "unjust," saying the military appeared to be making plans for the elections before knowing the outcome of the referendum.

"There is not yet a law to govern the elections which are to be held in 2010. It's unjust for the authorities to talk in advance about the elections," NLD spokesman Nyan Win told AFP.

Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said his Myanmar counterpart had explicitly told a gathering of regional ministers that Aung San Suu Kyi would not be allowed to run because she married Michael Aris, a British citizen who died of cancer in Britain in 1999.

They have two children who are also British nationals.

"He (Nyan Win) was quite clear that in the new constitution, a Myanmar citizen who has a foreign husband, who has children not citizens of Myanmar would be disqualified as was of the 1974 constitution," Yeo said.

Nyan Win made the remarks during a dinner cruise off Singapore's waters involving Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers.

Yeo said the foreign ministers expressed their views that the exclusion was "not (in) keeping with the times" and "that certainly such a provision would be very odd in any other country in ASEAN."

But Yeo also said "it is their own country, that is their own history and what can we do about it?"

Myanmar's current junta scrapped the 1974 charter when it seized power in 1988, crushing a pro-democracy uprising as soldiers opened fire on protesters and killed at least 3,000 people.

Two years later, the regime organised elections that the NLD won. The junta ignored the result and instead has kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years.

The NLD had warned Monday that in order to achieve democracy, Myanmar's rulers must first respect their victory in the 1990 elections.

Myanmar still has not released the final version of its proposed charter, but the head of the drafting commission, Supreme Court chief justice Aung Toe, indicated in state media that not many changes had been made from guidelines already made public.

In addition to barring Aung San Suu Kyi from office, those guidelines imposed stiff limits on the activities of political parties and reserved one quarter of seats in parliament for serving military officers.

The regime announced its timetable for elections amid mounting international pressure over its crackdown on peaceful demonstrations led by Buddhist monks in September, when the United Nations says at least 31 people were killed.

A group of Nobel laureates called Wednesday for an arms embargo against Myanmar, dismissing elections planned for 2010 as flawed if Aung San Suu Kyi is barred.

The seven laureates, including Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and South Africa's anti-apartheid cleric Desmond Tutu, said the junta should face sanctions for its crackdown on monks.

Myanmar's generals have ignored calls to free Aung San Suu Kyi and open a political dialogue, instead sticking to their own "road map," which critics say will enshrine the military's rule.

The UN special envoy for Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, has visited Myanmar twice since September in a bid to open talks between Aung San Suu Kyi and the military.

The junta had told him that he would not be allowed to return to the country until April 15, but Gambari said Tuesday in Beijing that he expected to be allowed to return to the country "way before" then.