Myanmar bars Suu Kyi from polls

2008-02-19 21:12

Yangon - 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 on 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 spokesperson Nyan Win said.

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 (who are) 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 of the 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 kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.

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

- AFP