Activist Suu Kyi's sentence extended

Refusing to bow to international pressure, the Burmese military junta has thrust Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the world's most famous political prisoners, back into the shadows by renewing the house-arrest order that has confined her to her run-down Rangoon villa for most of the past decade and a half. About 100 cheering supporters gathered near her house on May 27, hoping to see the 1991 Nobel Peace laureate, but dispersed after police told them she had not been freed. A government official said her detention had been extended for one year, despite a direct appeal by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Burma's leading general. May 27 marked the 16th anniversary of a landslide victory by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in a free election. It is also exactly three years since her motorcade was ambushed by government-backed thugs in Depayin. Optimism had been stirred when the UN's under-secretary for political affairs, Ibrahim Gambari, was allowed to visit Suu Kyi last weekend, the first time she had seen an outsider for two years. But a Western diplomat in Rangoon said that he was not surprised by the junta's actions. "The problem is that there is no dialogue yet," he said. "Suu Kyi's release needs to be the culmination of any re-engagement efforts, not the start. If she is let go and big crowds come to hear her message, the generals will freak out and the same old cycles will start anew. That's what happened last time." Suu Kyi's oratory attracted rapturous crowds for a few months in 2002-03, until the generals jailed her again "for her own protection." Last week's maneuverings are believed to have been designed to distract from their brutal ethnic cleansing campaign against Karen villagers in the southeast of the country. The junta has launched its biggest military offensive in years, with an estimated 16,000 people forced to flee from their homes and widespread reports of killings and torture as villages are burned and food stocks destroyed. Suu Kyi, who turns 61 next month, is accustomed to a solitary life under house arrest. She has been locked away for 10 of the past 17 years by the same generals who crushed the pro-democracy movement in 1988. More than 1,100 other political prisoners remain locked inside Burma's primitive jails. In the country's spy-ridden cities, anyone heard criticizing the authorities can be seized by police and disappeared.