News blackout as Burma frees Nobel peace heroine

Burma’s state press today blacked out the news of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest, hailed by world leaders as a first step towards restoring democracy after years of military rule.

The front pages of state-owned newspapers, including the English-language New Light of Myanmar, were devoted to the activities of the visiting Vietnamese president Tran Duc Luong.

The prominent opposition leader emerged from 19 months of house arrest yesterday to a tumultuous welcome by thousands of supporters and members of her National League for Democracy party, who mobbed her when she arrived at the party headquarters.

On her first day of freedom, Suu Kyi spent four hours at the party headquarters before returning home.

She came out again in the evening for an unannounced two-hour visit to the gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s most important Buddhist shrine.

A barefoot Suu Kyi circled the pagoda in a traditional prayer, followed in pin-drop silence by about 100 devotees who were taken aback - pleasantly - to see the 56-year-old Nobel Peace laureate.

Today the ambassadors of Germany, France, Britain and Italy met Suu Kyi at her Rangoon lakeside villa, which remained off-limits to reporters.

But there was no unusual police presence there or at the party office.

Suu Kyi has said that her next step is to continue the closed-door confidence-building talks she has been having with the junta, which started a month after she was placed under house arrest in September 2000.

The current junta came to power in 1988 after crushing a pro-democracy movement, which saw Suu Kyi emerging as a leader.

It refused to honour the results of the 1990 general elections that Suu Kyi’s party won.

But the last 18 months of reconciliation talks, brokered by United Nations envoy Razali Ismail, have raised hopes of a political settlement in a few years.

Suu Kyi’s release - a long-standing demand of the international community - was preceded by an unusual promise by the junta to allow ‘‘all citizens to participate freely in the life of our political process’’.

Her release won praise worldwide, but the junta’s overtures do not mean democracy is around the corner in Burma - also known as Myanmar - or that the government will call elections any time soon.

Burma’s government apparently hopes that by freeing Suu Kyi, international sanctions would be eased and it would be able to get Western aid.

But the signal for that would have to come from Suu Kyi, who has urged the West to keep the sanctions in place to force political change. Yesterday Suu Kyi said her party would maintain its policies for now.

The state media silence is typical of the junta’s attitude toward Suu Kyi, apparently because it fears that giving her publicity will fuel her popularity.

State TV also did not report Suu Kyi’s release.

Satellite television is available only to a select few.