Myanmar junta sets election date of Nov. 7

Myanmar leader senior general Than Shwe, center, and his wife arrive to offer prayers at the Mahabodhi Temple in India on July 25, 2010.

(CNN) -- Myanmar will hold general elections on November 7, the Myanmar National Radio announced Friday.

The vote will be the first since 1990 when Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's party won a landslide victory -- a result that the country's military junta refused to recognize.

Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has been under military rule since 1962.

Critics believe that Myanmar's announced elections are intended only to create a facade of democracy.

The junta recently announced a new election law that bars Suu Kyi from taking part in the upcoming race.

The Political Parties Registration Law, announced in state-run newspapers, excludes electoral participation by any member of a political party who has been convicted in court.

A Myanmar court convicted Suu Kyi, 64, in August 2009 for breaching the terms of her house arrest after American John Yettaw swam uninvited to her lakeside house in Yangon and briefly stayed there.

Her ongoing detention was extended to November 2010, and in February a court rejected her appeal for release.

Suu Kyi has spent more than 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest.

Her supporters have said the conviction was a way to remove her from the election campaign.

The new law forced Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, to choose between honoring her as its leader and risking the party being declared illegal -- or ejecting Suu Kyi from the party and contesting the election.

It decided to skip the race.

Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest in 1989. The next year, her party won more than 80 percent of the legislative seats in the first free elections in the country in nearly 30 years. But the military junta disqualified Suu Kyi from serving because of her house arrest.

Source: CNN