Word: junta
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...DIED. KYI MAUNG, 85, vice chairman and co-founder of Burma's National League for Democracy (NLD); in Rangoon. Kyi Maung led the NLD to a landslide victory in Burma's 1990 election after party head Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest?the ruling junta has never honored that electoral result. After the election, Kyi Maung, who had often been detained in the past, was sentenced to 20 years in jail but was released in 1995. He eventually fell out with Suu Kyi over how best to fight the junta...
...independent Burmese reporters?have been denied access to the convention. There are other absentees, too, most notably Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won a landslide victory in the 1990 general election but was prevented by the junta from assuming power. Many hoped Suu Kyi would be released from house arrest to attend the event, but the generals chose to take their own idiosyncratic approach to democracy: keeping her locked up, while also shuttering her party's branch offices. As a result, the NLD has sent no delegates...
...Walking through downtown Rangoon, I noticed with horror how acres of historic buildings have been demolished to make way for the modern towers the junta hopes will dominate the capital's skyline by 2006, when Burma is to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and host its the summit. Most of these projects, including the inauspiciously named Twin Towers, sit idle for lack of investment. Ordinary Burmese feel baffled and betrayed by the encouragement their oppressors get from Asia's leaders. Privately, Southeast Asian diplomats insist they are heaping more backroom pressure on Burma than their abysmal public...
...junta promises to reconvene next month a national convention on a new constitution. Yet the arrest, surveillance and intimidation of opposition figures continues, Amnesty International notes in a March 31 report, while as many as 1,400 political prisoners?many of whom should by rights participate in the convention?still languish in prison. Ambiguous public remarks by Burmese Foreign Minister Win Aung, followed by the release from house arrest of two senior NLD leaders last week, have raised hopes that Suu Kyi and party vice chairman Tin Oo will soon be freed, too. We'll see. The convention's success...
...DIED. SEIN LWIN, 81, former Burmese President and army general known as the "Butcher of Rangoon"; in Rangoon. A member of the military junta that seized control of Burma in 1962, Sein Lwin was behind some of the army's bloodiest massacres of civilians. These included the killings of hundreds of students protesting the 1962 coup and of an estimated 3,000 people in street demonstrations in 1988, during which Sein Lwin replaced strongman Ne Win as President. But he was unable to quell the political agitation and stepped down after only 18 days in office...