YANGON — A UN envoy met ministers from Myanmar's junta Friday to press for a meeting with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and discuss human rights ahead of elections this year.
The talks came as the opposition said a senior Buddhist monk had been jailed for seven years, underscoring the military regime's crackdown on dissent ahead of the first national polls for two decades.
On the fifth and final day of his trip to Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana flew to the remote capital Naypyidaw for talks but was not meeting the regime's reclusive supremo, Senior General Than Shwe, officials said.
Quintana met Foreign Minister Nyan Win and was due to see Myanmar's home affairs minister, chief justice, attorney general and police chief, officials said.
"He will not see our senior general," a Myanmar official said on condition of anonymity. Details of Friday's talks were not immediately available.
Members of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy said Quintana had told them at a meeting late Thursday that he had asked to meet Suu Kyi but had received no answer yet from the junta.
Quintana has not spoken publicly since arriving in Myanmar but said in a statement a week ago that "I hope that my request to the government to meet with... Aung San Suu Kyi will be granted this time."
He was due to address the media later in the former capital Yangon before flying to the Thai capital Bangkok.
Quintana met Thursday with Tin Oo, the elderly vice chairman of the NLD, who was freed from house arrest on February 13 after a total of seven years in detention.
"We met for about one hour. We discussed the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the political prisoners," Tin Oo said. Daw is a Burmese-language term of respect.
"We also spoke of our request for a meeting between the Senior General and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and for a meeting between (her) and our central committee members so that we can continue our work for the future," he said.
Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi has been detained for most of the last two decades and her house arrest was extended by 18 months in August after an incident in which a US man swam to her lakeside house.
Adding to the number languishing in Myanmar's jails, a court at Yangon's notorious Insein prison sentenced Buddhist abbot Gaw Thita to seven years in jail on various charges on Wednesday, the opposition said.
"He was sentenced to three years under the Immigration Emergency Act, two years under the Unlawful Association Act and two years under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act," Aung Thein, a former NLD lawyer, told AFP.
Gaw Thita was arrested in August as he returned from a trip to Taiwan, while seven other monks detained with him were later freed. His lawyer plans to appeal, Aung Thein said.
Dozens of people have received tough jail sentences since the so-called "Saffron Revolution" led by Buddhist monks against the junta in 2007, and the pace of repression has picked up ahead of elections promised for this year.
The junta has not yet set a date or published election laws, adding to criticisms that the vote is a sham designed to legitimise the generals' hold on power.
The NLD has not yet said whether it will take part in the polls, the first in Myanmar since 1990, when the NLD won by a landslide. The military subsequently annulled the result.
Myanmar's new constitution, voted through in a 2008 referendum just days after a devastating cyclone killed around 138,000 people, effectively bars Suu Kyi from standing and reserves a quarter of legislative seats for the military.
Source :http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i85tS6mj5aVW69c0ksvQ6JQbffXw
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