Myanmar Political Prisoner Rejoins Suu Kyi's Party

YANGON (AFP)--Myanmar's longest-serving political prisoner Win Tin has rejoined the ruling committee
of Aung San Suu Kyi's party, two weeks after being freed from jail, a party spokesman said Tuesday.
The 79-year-old former journalist, imprisoned for 19 years, will return to the National League of
Democracy's Central Executive Committee, Nyan Win said.
"He started coming to the headquarters on Monday to start his duties as a member (of the committee).
We are very glad he is rejoining," Nyan Win said.
Win Tin was released along with more than 9,000 inmates on September 23 in an amnesty ahead of
national elections promised for 2010.
He was one of the founders of the NLD party together with Nobel peace laureate Suu Kyi, who remains
detained at her lakeside home in Yangon.
Win Tin never witnessed his party's landslide victory in 1990 elections - a win never recognized by the
junta - because he was imprisoned in July 1989 for his role as Aung San Suu Kyi's advisor, and for his
letters to the then-United Nations envoy to Myanmar.
Win Tin was officially invited by the NLD leadership to rejoin the party's ruling committee on the 20th
anniversary of its founding on September 27.
Two days after Win Tin's release, Myanmar's police chief held his first meeting with six NLD leaders,
asking them to retract their latest statement calling for a constitutional review - a move they refused.
A new constitution was brought in after a much-criticized May referendum held in the wake of a
massive cyclone that swept across the country, leaving 138,000 people dead or missing.
The junta's constitution paves the way for multiparty elections to be held in 2010 but bars Aung San Suu
Kyi, who has spent most of the past two decades under house arrest, from standing.
Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962.