Suu Kyi's Myanmar democracy party marks 20-year anniversary

NLD လဲ အႏွစ္ ၂၀ ျပည့္ျပီ-ျပည္တြင္းက NLDအပါအဝင္ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရးလွဳပ္ရွားသူ မ်ားအားလုံးကို အာဇာနည္ေတြလို ့ေလး
စားဂုဏ္ယူစြာဂါရဝျပဳပါတယ္-ဆိုေတာ့ကာ -တို ့ျပည္ပကနိုင္ငံေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ား ျပည္တြင္းကအာဇာနည္မ်ားက ခင္ဗ်ားတို ့လဲ
အာဇာနည္ေတြဘာဘဲလို ့အျပန္အလွန္အသိအမွတ္ျပဳခံရေအာင္ တကယ္ႀကိဳးစားမွ တကယ္လုပ္မွျဖစ္မွာေနာ္------
ဘုန္းလိွဳင္-fwubc


Sat Sep 27, 7:06 AM ET

YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar police kept guard outside the headquarters of Aung San Suu Kyi's pro-democracy party Saturday as it marked its 20th anniversary, joined by the regime's longest-held prisoner.


Plain clothes officers took pictures of people arriving for the ceremony, attended by some 200 members of the National League of Democracy as well as Western diplomats.

Tight security surrounded 79-year-old Win Tin, who was only released on Tuesday after spending 19 years in jail for acting as an adviser to Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.


"While I was in prison I always kept three main things in mind -- to support the NLD, to support the People's Parliament and to support the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi. That is how I survived," Win Tin told AFP at the event.

The NLD called for the release of its leader, who has spent most of the last two decades imprisoned in her lakeside home.

Shortly before the ceremony, a small group of NLD members shouted, "May Daw Aung San Suu Kyi be free. May all political prisoners be free," as they released sparrows into the air as a symbol of freedom.

The NLD also issued a statement calling for the ruling junta to release all political prisoners, reopen NLD offices and convene a People's Parliament.

"An indelible black stain will be tainted in the political history of Burma by the omission of the authorities to perform according to the laws enacted by themselves," it said, referring to the country by its former name.

The two-hour ceremony passed off peacefully, witnesses said, although the NLD's spokesman Nyan Win said authorities detained nine people, and it was not known whether they had been released.

The NLD was set up on September 27, 1988, after a pro-democracy uprising in the country.

Its 20th anniversary comes a year after a bloody crackdown on street protests led by monks in which 31 people were killed, with 74 more missing, and thousands more arrested. A Japanese journalist was also shot dead at close range exactly a year ago as he covered the protests.

Myanmar authorities cancelled the NLD's annual anniversary ceremony last year citing security reasons.

The ceremony came as ministers from the UN Security Council permanent member states and mostly Asian nations prepared to hold their first meeting aimed at pushing for reforms by the Myanmar government.

UN Secretary Genereal Ban Ki-moon called for the informal talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York amid criticism of UN diplomacy on Myanmar.

UN Special Advisor on Myanmar Ibrahim Gambari has secured little progress in four visits, leading Human Rights Watch to denounce his discussions as "fruitless dialogue".

Aung San Suu Kyi refused to meet Gambari on his last visit to the country, apparently in protest at the lack of progress.

This year's NLD anniversary comes amid worsening relations between the junta and the party, which won 1990 polls by a landslide but was never allowed to take office.

On Thursday, the national police chief, Khin Yee, met for the first time with members of the NLD's executive committee to ask for a retraction of their latest statement, spokesman Nyan Win said, adding that the request was refused.

The statement, reiterated on Saturday in the NLD's anniversary release, called for a review of the junta's new constitution, which was issued after a referendum held in May.

Myanmar's junta, which has ruled the country since 1962, was criticised for holding the referendum just days after a cyclone left 138,000 people dead or missing across the country.

Pro-democracy activists said the vote was neither free nor fair. The junta says it paves the way for multi-party elections in 2010, but it renders Nobel prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi ineligible to stand.

Win Tin did not reveal whether he would accept an invitation to rejoin the NLD's central committee, saying only, "I will do as much as I can but I have to take a while to make a clear decision."

The former journalist, was imprisoned in 1989 and released in an amnesty of 9,002 prisoners.

Seven political prisoners were among those released, but one has since been rearrested, and New-York based Human Rights Watch estimates 2,100 remain behind bars.