Word: kyi
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...worldwide amazement, the May 1990 elections in Burma, renamed Myanmar last year, were generally free and fair. The League, under the leadership of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma's national hero, won a huge majority in parliament. The military showed its true colors by keeping her under house arrest and calling for a convention to draw up a new constitution, a process that could take years...
...Citing "security reasons," government forces in Rangoon and Mandalay arrested six top leaders of the National League for Democracy, the opposition party that won 80% of the seats in the national legislature. The arrests came a week after the junta said it would release N.L.D. leader Aung San Suu Kyi if she agreed to leave the country. Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest in July 1989, after she led a series of antigovernment rallies and criticized Burma's behind-the-scenes strongman...
...victorious league, one of the first orders of business will be to secure the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. She alone has the moral stature to press for the end to authoritarian rule and to halt the political factionalism that brought the military to power 28 years ago. Like the Philippines' Corazon Aquino, Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto and Nicaragua's Violeta Chamorro, Aung San Suu Kyi's moral authority stems from family history and political tragedy: her father, Aung San, was a national hero who was assassinated in 1947, on the eve of Burma's independence from Britain...
...first, Aung San Suu Kyi will need to get her own political party in order. "There's no ruling out the possibility that the National League for Democracy and the opposition in general could succumb to the old Burmese disease of factionalism," warns a Western diplomat based in Rangoon. Excessive wrangling within the league would provide the military junta with a convenient excuse to delay a transfer of power...
With or without Aung San Suu Kyi's release, her party must move quickly to cement its mandate. Party leaders aim to call the new National Assembly into session within 60 days after the election. To forestall extensive negotiations over the drafting of a new constitution, the league may resurrect the 1947 constitution, which was suspended in 1962. And it plans to invite the junta to enter into talks on the transfer of power. "We have to calm the present political anger and forget about political reprisals," says Khin Nghwe, 48, who belongs to the league's executive committee...