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No change in Suu Kyi’s status: party

SINGAPORE: The Myanmar military government’s reported offer to release celebrated democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi in November this year will not cut short her house arrest in Yangon, according to her political associates. Nyan Win, spokesman for Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), told The Hindu from Yangon on Tuesday that the 18-month term of her current house arrest would “expire in November this year.”

Mr. Nyan Win said the NLD was not so far told by the junta of any move to set her free at any particular time.

A government Minister was, however, reported to have told some “township officials in upper Burma [Myanmar]” that the junta might grant her freedom later this year. Ms. Suu Kyi, who has spent over 14 years in several forms of detention during the last two decades, is under house arrest in terms of an executive fiat that softened a lower court verdict of rigorous imprisonment.

Her appeal to the apex court against that sentence was now pending. With the arguments concluded, the NLD was now waiting for a date to be set for judgment, said Mr. Nyan Win. The junta had promised to hold polls this year in accordance with its “roadmap for democracy”.

But the polling date was not yet set, and the NLD would decide its course on the basis of the electoral laws, he said. Though the NLD won a massive mandate in a general election two decades ago, the military rulers did not allow the party to assume office.

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