Aung San Suu Kyi barred from Burma election

Telegraph.co.UK

Burma’s detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been officially barred from voting in the forthcoming general election, the first poll in the military-run state in two decades.


By Ian MacKinnon in Bangkok
Published: 2:14PM BST 20 Sep 2010
Aung San Suu Kyi has been banned from taking part in elections in Burma in November
Aung San Suu Kyi has been banned from taking part in elections in Burma in November Photo: EPA

The Nobel peace laureate’s name is missing from the electoral rolls posted in the district of the commercial capital, Rangoon, where she has been detained in a lakeside villa for 14 of the past 20 years.

Laws passed governing the election set for November 7 had already effectively barred Mrs Suu Kyi, 65, from taking part, but the list’s publication in Rangoon’s Bahan township are the first official confirmation of her exclusion.

International criticism of the election has been mounting, with observers denouncing it as the junta’s effort to consolidate its grip on power under thinly veiled democracy.

Last week William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, joined the growing chorus deriding it as a “sham process designed to keep the regime in power and keep the Burmese people their right to freely choose their leaders”.

His remarks followed the announcement by Burma’s Election Commission that Mrs Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party had been disbanded for failing to register for the poll.

The NLD – which won by a landslide the last 1990 elections whose results were ignored by the ruling generals – said it would not compete in the forthcoming poll which would be neither free nor fair.

New election laws barred Mrs Suu Kyi from standing in the poll or evening being a member of her own party, which has been threatened with fines and lengthy jail terms if it continues to criticise the election.

The legislation, widely believed to be aimed at Mrs Suu Kyi, also barred convicted persons from voting.

She is currently serving an 18-month sentence for violating the terms of her house arrest by sheltering an eccentric American man who swam uninvited across the lake to her house. Her sentence expires on November 13, six days after the poll.
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