Myanmar democracy campaigners said Friday they would form a new party after opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy was abolished by the junta ahead of rare elections.
At least 25 senior figures in the disbanded NLD have signed up to the unnamed party, to advance the movement's two-decade campaign to end military rule, leading member Khin Maung Swe told AFP.
"The NLD is finished but we will continue the NLD's unfinished political duty by keeping our faith with the NLD and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi," he said, using a respectful form of address for the Nobel peace laureate.
The NLD refused to meet a May 6 deadline to re-register -- a move that would have forced it to expel its own leader -- and boycotted the vote, which critics say is a sham designed to legitimise the junta's half-century grip on power.
Analysts say that within Suu Kyi's party there has been friction between older, hardline members and younger more moderate figures who opposed the boycott decision.
Khin Maung Swe, a former member of the NLD's decision-making central executive committee, said they aimed to register the party this month but had not yet decided whether to take part in the polls scheduled for this year.
Nyan Win, the NLD's longtime spokesman, urged the founders of the new democracy movement to refuse to participate in the polls.
"They should formally obey the unanimous decision of the NLD" to boycott the elections, he told AFP. "Whether they obey the decision or not is their choice. But I'm not preventing them."
Under the election laws handed down by the regime, which have been widely criticised by the international community, the NLD was officially abolished at midnight Thursday.
"The NLD is not a legal registered party any more according to the law. That is for sure now," a government official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Witnesses said the doors of the NLD headquarters in Myanmar's main city Yangon had opened as usual on Friday, and that the party's signboards and its "fighting peacock" flag were still in view.
Along with Suu Kyi's lakeside home, where she has been detained for 14 of the last 20 years, the shabby wooden building has been the focus of efforts to end nearly half a century of military rule.
Nyan Win has said that former members would continue operating from their headquarters, and that some were pursuing a new mandate to focus on social and development work.
The NLD was founded in 1988 after a popular uprising against the military junta that left thousands dead. Two years later the party won elections in a landslide but the results were never recognised by the regime.
Suu Kyi filed a lawsuit last week to try to overturn the election laws, which also officially nullify the 1990 poll results, but the Supreme Court turned down the bid.
Years of persecution by the junta has left the NLD in poor shape, and the purist stance taken by the leadership, many aged in their 80s and 90s, had been questioned by a new generation favouring a more pragmatic approach.
However, analysts said any new pro-democracy force would lack the NLD's trump card -- Aung San Suu Kyi, the charismatic 64-year-old whose campaign has captivated both Myanmar citizens and sympathisers around the world.
Trevor Wilson, a former Australian ambassador to Myanmar, said the new party would have scant opportunity to prepare itself for elections.
"I think the consequences for political expression in Burma are quite pessimistic in the short term," he said, using the country's former name.
"At least when the NLD was active it was the focus of popular hopes and ideals," he said. "People really did put their hopes in the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi and now they have no one to do that."
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