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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 Tuesday.
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.
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 recognized the
result late Tuesday and announced on state television that a special
commission had finished the final draft of the charter.
“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
spokesman Nyan Win told Agence France-Presse.
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 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 involving 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
prodemocracy uprising as soldiers opened fire on protesters and
killed at least 3,000 people.
Two years later, the regime
organized elections that the NLD won. The junta ignored the result
and instead has kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for 12 of
the past 18 years. The NLD had warned Monday that in order to
achieve democracy, Myanmar’s rulers must first respect their
victory in the 1990 elections.
Myanmar still has not released
the final version of its proposed charter, but the head of the
drafting commission, Supreme Court chief justice Aung Toe, indicated
in state media that not many changes had been made from guidelines
already made public.
A group of Nobel laureates called
Wednesday for an arms embargo against Myanmar, dismissing elections
planned for 2010 as flawed if Aung San Suu Kyi is barred. The seven
laureates, including Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai
Lama and South Africa’s anti-apartheid cleric Desmond Tutu, said
the junta should face sanctions for its crackdown on monks.
Myanmar’s generals have ignored
calls to free Aung San Suu Kyi and open a political dialogue,
instead sticking to their own “road map,” which critics say will
enshrine the military’s rule.
---AFP
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