NAYPYIDAW: Myanmar’s Army-backed regime held out an olive branch to its critics on Friday, pledging to continue talks with democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and to allow a visit by a United Nations (UN) human rights envoy.
During a rare news conference, Information Minister Kyaw Hsan said that the nominally civilian government, which came to power after controversial elections in November, hoped to get “successful results” from cooperating with Suu Kyi.
The comments came shortly before Suu Kyi and Labor Minister Aung Kyi began a second round of talks in Yangon.
“We will continue these kinds of meetings for the benefit of the people,” Kyaw Hsan told about 50 reporters and some 250 officials invited to the new government’s first media briefing in the capital Naypyidaw since taking power.
Kyaw Hsan said that Tomas Ojea Quintana, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, who was last allowed into the country in February 2010, would return without specifying a date.
Suu Kyi was warned by the regime in June to stay out of politics, but the first round of talks with Aung Kyi appeared to strike a more conciliatory tone.
She also signalled her intention to remain in politics and Friday’s meeting came two days before she was due to make her first overtly political trip outside Yangon since she was freed from seven straight years of house arrest in November.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner first tested her freedom with a visit to an ancient temple city in central Myanmar in July, although politics was not officially on the agenda.
Her one-day excursion to the Bago region, about 80 kilometers north of Yangon, on August 14—where she is due to attend a library opening and meet members of a youth forum—will be political, her party has said.
She has also issued an open letter offering to help broker peace in conflicts between the military and ethnic minority rebels.
Her National League for Democracy (NLD) was also spoken of in unusually warm terms by Myanmar’s Army-backed rulers.
“While the government is struggling for national reconciliation, it is giving assistance to the NLD as much as possible,” Kyaw Hsan said, urging the group to officially register as a party.
The NLD boycotted the elections because of rules seemed designed to exclude Suu Kyi and was stripped of its recognition as a political party as a result.
The NLD won a 1990 vote but was never allowed to take power.
