Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia Editor
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy leader and Nobel Prize winner, was permitted a rare respite from her house arrest this morning for a brief meeting with a United Nations envoy dispatched to mediate with the country’s repressive military dictatorship.
Ms Suu Kyi, who has spent 13 of the past 18 years in detention, met for 90 minutes with Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser on Burma to the UN secretary-general, in his latest effort to foster political dialogue between the Burmese junta and its political opponents. Details of their discussions have not yet been revealed, but there is little chance of an immediate breakthrough in a country which has been in the grip of generals for close to half a century.
The fact that the meeting took place at all is a small success – the last time Mr Gambari visited Burma’s biggest city, Rangoon, Ms Suu Kyi refused to see him, apparently out of disgust at his failure to bring meaningful pressure to bear against the regime. Both Mr Gambari – and his boss, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon – have become the objects of cynicism among many in the Burmese opposition because of their lack of robustness in dealing with the State Peace and Development Council, as the junta styles itself.
Governments around the world condemned the SPDC after it violently suppressed a peaceful uprising of Buddhist monks and ordinary Burmese in September 2007, killing dozens of demonstrators and locking up thousands more. Since then the human rights situation in Burma has got worse and worse.
continue http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5639120.ece
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