Myanmar Bars U.N. Aide’s Visit to Nobel Winner

Myanmar’s military junta refused to let a U.N. human rights investigator see detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi but let him visit a prison where many of her supporters are held, diplomats said Monday.

Yozo Yokota, a Japanese professor, went to Myanmar (formerly Burma) last week to check on persistent reports of torture and other human rights abuses.

Yokota was prevented from seeing Suu Kyi, the country’s leading dissident who has been under house arrest since July, 1989, the diplomats said.

Instead, he was allowed to visit Insein Jail on the outskirts of Yangon (formerly Rangoon), where many political prisoners are held. Last year, U.N. investigator Sadako Ogata was not allowed to visit the jail.

Suu Kyi won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for standing up to what the Norwegian Nobel committee called “a regime characterized by brutality.”

Many of the Insein prisoners are members of the National League for Democracy, which won the general election in May, 1990, by a landslide but has been barred from office by the junta.

Myanmar’s state media said that Yokota spent two hours Friday at Insein and toured the prison hospital. Before leaving the country Saturday, he met officials of the NLD and two other parties.

Yokota’s report for the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva is confidential.