Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi Allowed to Meet With Western Envoys - washingtonpost.com

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By Tim Johnston
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 10, 2009

BANGKOK, Oct. 9 -- Burma's military government granted detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi a rare meeting with Western diplomats Friday in the former capital, Rangoon.

Suu Kyi, who was sentenced to an additional 18 months of house arrest in August, met with diplomats from Australia, Britain and the United States in a government guesthouse, but strict conditions imposed by the ruling junta limited the conversation's scope.

Two representatives of Burma's Foreign Ministry also attended the hour-long meeting.

"It was a very interesting meeting, very focused on the subject at hand, which was sanctions. Daw Suu Kyi was very interested in all the details," said British Ambassador Andrew Heyn, using a term of respect for older women.

He said Suu Kyi, 64, appeared healthy and in good spirits.

"She was very clear that it was a fact-finding session, and she made absolutely explicit that she had not reached a policy on sanctions," he said. But Suu Kyi did ask, he said, under what conditions Western countries might lift sanctions, a topic that brought the fate of the 2,100 political prisoners held in Burmese jails into the conversation, along with free and fair elections next year and dialogue with Burma's ethnic minorities.

The United States has severe restrictions on doing business with Burma, while the European Union has targeted members of the regime, their families and their business associates.

The United States has recently undertaken a major review of its Burma policies and concluded that it will leave its sanctions in place but end the country's diplomatic isolation, a measure that critics fear might push the country further toward China.

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in Burma's previous elections, in 1990. She has spent almost 14 of the intervening 19 years under house arrest, and analysts have said that her latest sentence, imposed after an American tourist swam across a lake to her house, is designed to keep her out of circulation until after the elections.

Despite her prolonged isolation, Suu Kyi remains the junta's most formidable opponent. But she has recently reached out to the generals, offering to discuss lending her moral authority to the drive to lift a catalogue of sanctions that are economically crippling and personally embarrassing for a military that still struggles for legitimacy 47 years after it toppled the last civilian government.