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Tag: Aung San Suu Kyi

Burmese Dissident Is Freed After Long Detention

By The New York Times

Photo by European Press Photo Agency
YANGON — Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was freed from seven and a half years of house arrest on Saturday and was greeted at the gate of her compound by thousands of jubilant supporters.

She stood waving and smiling as people cheered, chanted and sang the national anthem in a blur of camera flashes. She held a white handkerchief in one hand.

“Thank you for welcoming me like this,” she said, clutching the iron bars of her gate as she looked out at the cheering crowd. “We haven’t seen each other for so long, I have so much to tell you.”

She said she would speak again on Sunday at the headquarters of her now defunct political party, the National League for Democracy.

Burma Court Finds Aung San Suu Kyi guilty

Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi was Tuesday ordered to stay under house arrest for 18 months.

by Andre Marshall/Bangkok
TIME

aung-san-suu-kyi
Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi will spend another 18 months as a prisoner of Burma’s military junta, a Rangoon court decreed today. She was found guilty of violating the terms of her house arrest after an American man called John Yettaw swam to her lakeside house in Rangoon in May. Yettaw, who has been in poor health, was sentenced to seven years in prison with hard labor.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was initially jailed for three years with hard labor until a special order from junta chief General Than Shwe was read out in court commuting her sentence to 18 months under house arrest. The verdict has prompted further global outrage and renewed calls for stronger action against the dictatorship. Suu Kyi has already spent more than 13 of the past 20 years in jail or detention.