Dissident in Myanmar Is Improving

May 31, 2009

By REUTERS

YANGON, Myanmar (Reuters) — The Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is feeling better, her lawyers said on Saturday, a day after members of her party expressed concerns about her health and demanded that she be given urgent care.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, who has been reported recently to be in fragile health, is on trial on charges of violating her house arrest. She had complained last week of leg cramps and a lack of sleep.

One of her lawyers, U Nyan Win, said prison doctors had recommended that she stop taking two medicines. He said that she could now sleep well.

The defense team was allowed to meet her for two hours on Saturday. “She didn’t say what she expects the verdict to be,” Mr. Nyan Win said. “She is ready to face whatever happens.”

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi may be jailed for three to five years if found guilty of breaking the terms of her house arrest by allowing an American intruder to stay at her home after he swam there on May 4.

She has spent more than 13 of the past 19 years in some form of detention, much of it as a virtual prisoner inside her home on Yangon’s Inya Lake. Activists fear for her health if she is convicted, as is widely expected, because they say she would face harsh conditions at Insein prison, where hundreds of other political prisoners are believed to be held.

The West has condemned the trial as a ploy to keep the charismatic opposition leader detained during the military government’s promised elections next year.

In Singapore, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates repeated the call by the United States for the release of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and more than 2,000 other political prisoners in the former Burma, where the military has ruled for nearly half a century.

Speaking at an Asian defense conference, he called Myanmar “one of the isolated, desolate exceptions to the growing prosperity and freedom of the region.”

“We saw Burma’s resistance to accept basic humanitarian aid last year following Cyclone Nargis — a decision indicative of that country’s approach to the rest of the world,” he said.


Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/world/asia/31myanmar.html?_r=1&ref=world

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