Word: aung
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...Burma has scheduled multi-party elections in 2010. The polls are considered a charade by many international observers, who note that the leader of the main opposition party, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, is under house arrest and is barred from participating. But even after locking up a woman whose National League for Democracy won the 1990 elections that the junta then ignored, Burma's ruling brass still appears spooked by the power of the people. "Burma's leaders are clearing the decks of political activists," says Pearson, "before they announce the next round of sham political...
...power to intimidate the highest ranking members of the junta derives from his intellectual prowess. One of the founders of the opposition National League for Democracy, he was viewed by many as the party's chief strategist, as well as a mentor for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who is in her 13th year of house arrest for leading Burma's ongoing pro-democracy movement. The generals believed he "was my puppet master," Suu Kyi once wrote of Win Tin. Bo Kyi Win of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma, a Thailand-based exile...
Many in Burma's exile community rejected the regime's explanation for the release of Win Tin and a half dozen other political prisoners. "This is a publicity stunt, and the international community should not fall for it," said Soe Aung of the National Coalition of the Union of Burma, an alliance of exile groups. "If they were serious, they would release all political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi." He said the move was intended to relieve international pressure - and more importantly domestic discontent - over the junta's handling of the cyclone relief effort in which outside assistance...
...during one of her brief periods of freedom, Aung San Suu Kyi, in a syndicated newspaper column, wrote that Win Tin's "undoubted ability and his strength made [him] a prime target of those who opposed the democratic cause and in 1989 he became one of the first leaders of the NLD to be arrested. The charge against him involved an unproven telephone conversation with the father of an individual who had been declared a fugitive from the law. Telephone conversations are, in any case, inadmissible as evidence under Burmese law, but the law offers scant protection for those...
...among those released this week. A former military officer, he was imprisoned in 1996 for allegedly meeting with activists who had made a video documenting harsh conditions in the Burmese countryside. He was arrested because the regime "wanted to cut off Suu Kyi?s ears and eyes," said Soe Aung. But as last year's monk-led uprising showed, voices of dissent are becoming more difficult to silence. Although Win Tin has vowed to continue speaking out and working to end military rule, he is surely aware that the military is capable of revoking his newfound freedom. Another long-serving...