U.N. Chief Meets With Myanmar Junta

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, asked this country’s ruling generals on Friday to free its many political prisoners, including the democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but there was no sign yet of movement on the issue from the junta.

Mr. Ban also asked to visit Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, but said the military leaders reminded him that she was on trial. Early Saturday, Mr. Ban said that his request to see her before he left the country Saturday night had been rejected.

Mr. Ban is hoping to win the release of political prisoners — estimated at 2,100 by international humanitarian organizations — ahead of elections scheduled for 2010.

Mr. Ban’s rare meeting with Senior Gen. Than Shwe and the other four generals who constitute the ruling State Peace and Development Council came as the government declared a one-week pause in Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial.

Mr. Ban called his exchange with the generals “frank,” and a senior United Nations official described the discussion as “forceful” on both sides.

Mr. Ban said he told the generals it would be important to release Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and the other political prisoners to ensure the broadest possible participation in the election.

“This election should be a credible, fair, inclusive and legitimate one where all the Myanmar people can express their will in a free way,” Mr. Ban said after meeting with the generals. “I was assured that Myanmar’s authorities will make sure that this election will be held in fair and free and transparent manner.”

At the same time, Mr. Ban asked for a series of steps toward that goal, though it was unclear whether the military government would endorse such a development, senior United Nations official said. The steps include revamping the election laws publicly and establishing an electoral commission. Not even the aborted election of 1990, which Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won, truly covered the whole nation, so another step would be allowing the party, the National League for Democracy, to open offices across the country and to permit her to campaign.

Mr. Ban said he also urged the generals to resume their dialogue with the opposition in a substantive and meaningful way, including with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.

Mr. Ban is expected to have an additional, unscheduled meeting with General Than Shwe on Saturday, and is due to make a speech about the country’s future to a group of nongovernmental organizations involved in relief efforts for the past 14 months. He also plans to tour the Irrawaddy Delta, where Cyclone Nargis struck a devastating blow in May 2008, killing 138,000 people. His visit at that time opened the door for international aid organizations to play a greater role in relief efforts.

But Bishow Parajuli, the humanitarian coordinator for the country, said there was currently a backlog of about 219 international aid workers seeking visas to work in the country. The visa process has slowed since March, he said, another issue Mr. Ban took up with General Than Shwe.

International human rights groups have urged Mr. Ban to take a tough line on the junta. He tried, however, to play down expectations, saying that it would be a difficult trip, but that it was important to engage the ruling generals.

“I am very pleased to continue our discussion,” Mr. Ban said in his opening remarks to General Than Shwe. “I appreciate your commitment to move your country forward.”

The meeting was held in a soaring reception room painted with a mural of Buddhist temples set in the jungle, the landscape around Naypyidaw (pronounced nay-pee-DAW), the sprawling, isolated capital the generals constructed out of the rice fields and jungle about 200 miles north of Yangon. Yangon, formerly Rangoon, is the country’s main city.

The official reception building here is called Bayinnaung Hall, named after a 16th-century warrior king who united much of what is today Myanmar, as well as parts of India, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.

The monarch is the favorite historical figure of the authoritarian government.

Shortly after Mr. Ban arrived in the country, the authorities said that the current trial of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years, would be adjourned for one week until July 10. The trial was delayed because of what was described as an administrative error, according to Kyi Win, a lawyer representing her.

“When the judges came onto the bench they announced that the files from the higher court had not been returned,” Mr. Kyi Win said.

“There must be other reasons,” he said in an interview. “But we hate to speculate.”

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has not been told whether she will be meeting Mr. Ban, the lawyer said. She is on trial on charges of violating the terms of her current house arrest after an American man swam uninvited across a lake to her home.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has denied the charge, but could be sentenced to five years imprisonment if found guilty. She is being held at the infamous Insein Prison. John Yettaw, the 53-year-old American intruder, was charged with trespassing and is also detained there.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.

An Ancient Pagoda’s Collapse Turns Myanmar’s Gaze to the Stars

New York Times, Bangkok, Seth Mydans, June 18 — It cannot have pleased Myanmar’s ruling family: the collapse of a 2,300-year-old gold-domed pagoda into a pile of timbers just three weeks after the wife of the junta’s top general helped rededicate it.

There is no country in Asia more superstitious than Myanmar, and the crumbling of the temple was seen widely as something more portentous than shoddy construction work.

The debacle coincides with the junta’s trial of the country’s pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, after an American intruder swam across a lake and spent a night at the villa where Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the past 19 years.

After two weeks of testimony that began May 18, the trial has been suspended as the court considers procedural motions — and as the junta apparently tries to decide how to manage what seems to have been a major blunder, drawing condemnation from around the world.

The superstitious generals may be consulting astrologers as well as political tacticians for guidance. That would not be unusual for many people in Myanmar, formerly Burma.

Previously, currency denominations and traffic rules have been changed, the nation’s capital has been moved and the timing of events has been selected — even the dates of popular uprisings — with astrological dictates in mind.

“Astrology has as significant a role in policies, leadership and decision making in the feudal Naypyidaw as rational calculations, geopolitics and resource economics,” said Zarni, a Burmese exile analyst and researcher who goes by one name. He was referring to the country’s fortified capital, which opened in 2005.

And so it seemed only natural to read a darker meaning into the temple’s collapse.

The Danok pagoda, on the outskirts of Myanmar’s main city, Yangon, was newly blessed May 7 in the presence of Daw Kyaing Kyaing, the wife of the country’s supreme leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, along with an A-list of junta society. The rite received major coverage in government-controlled media.

In a solemn ceremony, the worshipers fixed a diamond orb to the top of the pagoda along with a pennant-shaped vane and sprinkled scented water onto the tiers of a holy, golden umbrella, according to the government mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar.

Like the rest of the heavily censored press, the newspaper was silent when it all came crashing down.

But word of mouth — and foreign radio broadcasts — spreads fast in Myanmar.

“People were laughing at her,” said a longtime astrologer, reached by telephone in Myanmar, speaking of Mrs. Kyaing Kyaing.

“O.K., she thinks she is so great, but even the gods don’t like her — people believe like that,” the astrologer said on the condition of anonymity because of the danger of speaking to reporters.

“Even the spiritual world will not allow her to do this thing or that thing,” the astrologer said. “People laugh like that.”

The ceremony was part of a decades-old campaign by the senior general to legitimize his military rule on a foundation of Buddhist fealty — dedicating and redecorating temples, attending religious ceremonies and, with his influential wife, making donations to monks and monasteries.

That campaign was undermined, and perhaps fatally discredited, in September 2007 when soldiers beat and shot monks protesting the military rule in the streets, invaded monasteries without removing their boots and imprisoned or disrobed hundreds of monks.

“No matter how many pagodas they build, no matter how much charity they give to monks, it is still they who murdered the monks,” said Josef Silverstein, a Myanmar specialist and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, at the time of the protests.

So when the Danok pagoda suddenly collapsed May 30 as workmen were completing its renovation — killing at least 20 people, according to émigré reports — many people saw it as the latest in a series of bad omens for the junta that included a devastating cyclone early last year.

The pagoda’s sacred umbrella tumbled to the ground, and its diamond orb was lost in the rubble, according to those reports.

“The fact that the umbrella did not stay was a sign that more bad things are to come, according to astrologers,” said Ingrid Jordt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and a specialist in Burmese Buddhism.

“It is also a sign that Than Shwe does not have the spiritual power any longer to be able to undertake or reap the benefit from good acts such as this,” Professor Jordt said in an e-mail message.

“In a sense, the pagoda repudiated Than Shwe’s right to remain ruler.”

As laborers began trying to rebuild the pagoda, local residents gave émigré publications vivid accounts of supernatural happenings.

“The temple collapsed about 3:10 p.m. while I was loading bricks on a platform around the pagoda,” a 24-year-old construction worker told The Irrawaddy, an exile magazine based in Thailand.

“The weather suddenly turned very dark,” he was quoted as saying. “Then we saw a bright red light rising from the northern end of the pagoda. Then, suddenly, the temple collapsed. I also heard a strange haunting voice coming from the direction of the light.”

Indeed, the Danok pagoda may have been a poor choice for the junta’s ruling family to seek religious affirmation.

According to The Irrawaddy, “Several elderly locals from Danok Model Village said that they believed that the pagoda never welcomed cruel or unkind donors, and always shook when such persons made offerings.”