IN commuting a three-year prison sentence for opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to 18 months of house detention, Myanmar’s military masters have achieved their main goal — keeping the democracy icon out of the picture during the 2010 polls.
On Tuesday, a court set up in Yangon’s Insein Prison to try Suu Kyi, her two housekeepers and US national John William Yettaw on charges related to the violation of Suu Kyi’s terms of an earlier home detention, found all the defendants guilty.
Suu Kyi, Khin Khin Win and Win Ma Ma were sentenced to three years in jail, including hard labor, but a reprieve came from above. Home Minister Maung Maung Oo swiftly seized center stage in the prison courtroom, which was packed with local journalists and foreign diplomats, to announce that Myanmar’s military supremo, Sen. Gen. Than Shwe, who professed to have been worried about Suu Kyi’s trial but reluctant to interfere in the judicial process, had decided to commute her sentence to 18 months under house detention. There is little doubt that Myanmar’s judiciary is at the beck and call of the military.
The reprieve extends to Suu Kyi housekeepers, who along with Suu Kyi were quickly returned to the same lakeside family compound in Yangon that Yettaw swam to on May 3, staying uninvited until the night of May 5. He had claimed he was on a mission to warn Suu Kyi of an assassination attempt he had foreseen in a dream.
Yettaw, 53, a member of the Mormon faith, also paid Suu Kyi’s compound an unsolicited visit in November to pass her a Book of Mormon.
Yettaw was sentenced Tuesday to seven years in jail, including hard labor, on charges of violating the conditions of his tourist visa and swimming in a prohibited part of Yangon’s Inya Lake.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s previous term of house detention was to have ended in May.
The reaction from the international community to the junta’s latest moves against Suu Kyi has been vociferous, as usual.
The European Union condemned the verdict as “unjustifiable” and promised new sanctions against the military leaders.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “saddened and angry” at the conviction of Suu Kyi.
There were protests outside the Myanmar embassy in Manila, and activist groups, such as the US Campaign for Burma, renewed calls for the United Nations Security Council to put Myanmar on the table for talks.
But by mitigating Suu Kyi’s sentence, Than Shwe might have also mitigated international and domestic outrage.
“He is trying to manage the anger of the international community and the local population,” said Win Min, a lecturer on Myanmar affairs at Thailand’s Chiang Mai University.
Than Shwe is determined to push through the junta’s seven-step “road map to democracy,” one step of which included holding a referendum on a new military-sponsored constitution in May 2008, a vote that proved successful for the junta.
Further steps along the path to “discipline-flourishing democracy” are to include announcing the rules for setting up political parties, an election law and the polls themselves, to be held sometime in 2010.
Suu Kyi’s trial has been seen all along as a convenience for keeping the leader of the National League for Democracy — which won the 1990 polls by a landslide but was barred from taking power — out of the way during the lead-up to that election.
The fact that Than Shwe’s reprieve was set at 18 months assures that she is out of the political scene until the polls are over.
“Their main objective is to keep her out of the picture until the election time, which is very crucial for them,” Win Min said.
