YANGON: Myanmar’s newly freed Aung San Suu Kyi was “ready for dialogue” with the regime, her lawyer said Monday, as the democracy icon knuckled down to the task of rebuilding her weakened party.
The 65-year-old spent several hours at her National League for Democracy (NLD) headquarters in meetings with regional party members, ending her first day back at work in years with a trip to a Yangon monastery.
Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest on Saturday, less than a week after a controversial election that cemented the junta’s decades-long grip on power but was widely criticised by democracy activists and Western leaders as a sham.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has been locked up by Myanmar’s regime for 15 of the past 21 years, gave her first political speech in seven years on Sunday, appealing to thousands of her jubilant supporters for unity.
She also told reporters she was willing to meet junta chief Than Shwe and talk through their differences.
“We have asked since the beginning for dialogue. She is always ready for dialogue,” Nyan Win, a spokesman for the NLD, told AFP on Monday.
When asked whether a letter would be sent to Than Shwe to request a meeting, he said: “I don’t know.” NLD members expressed cautious optimism at the suggestion of talks between their heroine and the secretive military leader.
“If they meet face-to-face there will be a solution, I think,” said NLD youth member Nyi Nyi. After having only limited contact with the outside world for most of the past two decades, Suu Kyi’s telephone line at her crumbling lakeside mansion will be restored “soon”, an unnamed Myanmar official told AFP.
Nyan Win said the mother-of-two is also hoping that her youngest son Kim Aris will be able travel to Yangon and join her on a visit to Shwedagon Pagoda, the site of Suu Kyi’s first political speech in 1988.
Kim Aris, who lives in Britain, travelled to the Thai capital ahead of his mother’s release but it remained unclear whether he had received a visa that would grant him entrance to Myanmar.
On the political front, attention is now focused on whether Suu Kyi can unite the country’s deeply divided opposition and bring change to the impoverished nation.
“I want to work with all democratic forces,” she told her supporters on Sunday, saying she wanted to “hear the voice of the people” before deciding her course of action.
The daughter of the nation’s assassinated independence hero Aung Sang carries a weight of expectation among her followers for a better future after almost half a century of military dictatorship.
There was a new air of optimism on the streets of Yangon but some observers have warned that the dissident is no “miracle worker”. “She has always voluntarily tested the military authorities, has always wanted to push the red line drawn by the regime,” said Renaud Egreteau, a Myanmar expert at the University of Hong Kong.
But with a powerful junta watching her every move, the situation “might make her avoid a direct confrontation for the time being”, he added. Suu Kyi said in a BBC interview that an NLD committee would investigate all complaints about the November 7 poll, after opposition parties complained of cheating and voter intimidation by the regime-backed party.
“From what I have heard there are many many questions about the fairness of the election and there are many many allegations of vote rigging and so on,” she said.
Suu Kyi’s party boycotted the vote, a decision that deeply split the opposition. Some former members of her party left to stand in the poll, prompting accusations of betrayal from some of her closest associates.
Newly freed Suu Kyi ‘ready for dialogue’
