Myanmar Lets Family Visit Dissident, Now in 4th Year of Arrest

The family of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was permitted to visit the Burmese dissident this week in her heavily guarded home as she began a fourth year of house arrest, diplomats said Thursday.

The visit by Suu Kyi’s husband, Oxford University professor Michael Aris, and their elder son, Alexander, was the second permitted by the military regime under a recent liberalization policy. They arrived Saturday and were scheduled to leave by today.

Myanmar’s foreign minister, Ohn Gyaw, said in an interview that Aris, who is British, may visit the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner “whenever he wants.”

However, since December, 1989, Suu Kyi has been allowed only one other family visit, in April.

Myanmar’s military junta maintains that Suu Kyi will be freed as soon as she agrees to leave Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Suu Kyi, the charismatic daughter of Burmese independence hero Aung San, is viewed as the only leader who can revive the nation’s democracy movement. She has rejected any conditions for her release.

Suu Kyi has been kept isolated in her rambling white house surrounded by coils of barbed wire under a law “protecting the state from dangers of disruptive and destructive elements.” She has not been legally charged.

She insists that the regime recognize the results of the 1990 national election in which her party, the National League for Democracy, won 92% of the contested parliamentary seats.

The regime’s liberalization policies over the past few months have included the release of hundreds of dissidents and allowing political parties to hold tightly controlled meetings.

Observers say the measures are probably an effort to boost the regime’s popularity. At the same time, the junta believes it can relax its grip somewhat after the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands, of demonstrators gunned down by troops since the regime seized power in 1988.

Asked Thursday if the government hopes Aris will persuade Suu Kyi to leave the country, Ohn Gyaw said: “Any husband would like to have his wife near him all the time. . . . Her permanent address is in Oxford.

“Right now what is important is to keep law and order intact,” the foreign minister said. “We do not want to have what is going on in Yugoslavia.”

Like disintegrating Yugoslavia, Myanmar is composed of numerous ethnic minorities, some of which have been carrying out rebel insurgencies for decades. The military has long justified coups by the need to maintain national unity.

Ohn Gyaw said a national convention will be held by January to decide on a new democratic constitution, a process he said would include those elected in 1990 “unless the election commission decides they are disqualified.”