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THE simmering hostility between Myanmar's democratic movement led by Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and the country's military government has spilled over into open confrontation. With the arrest of 258 of Suu Kyi's supporters, including 238 elected parliamentarians, the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) has made clear its intention to keep a firm lid on opposition politics. The arrests preceded a meeting of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) members who won in the May 1990 elections. The NLD won 392 of the 485 seats contested, but the junta did not allow Parliament to convene after that.

바카라 웹사이트A military official, Colonel Kyaw Win, said the parliamentarians had been "taken in as a preventive measure". Most of those detained are expected to be released soon. But the point here is that the NLD has carved out some much-needed political space for itself and the recent chain of events should be seen as having been initiated by the NLD, not the SLORC. NLD leaders no doubt scheduled the meeting partly to provoke a confrontation with the junta.

Until now, the party has been biding its time. Asked recently why she had not made any bold moves soon after her release from house arrest last July, Suu Kyi said: "We do not believe in bold moves for the sake of making bold moves. We think the timing is very important to the process."

바카라 웹사이트Evidently, in the minds of the NLD leadership, the sixth anniversary of the May 27—1990 elections —was the right time to strike. The three-day meeting was the first since the elections, which were annulled by the junta. The NLD also invited leaders of the Kachin, Wa, Shan and other ethnic minorities to attend the meeting as observers. This is considered significant because the majority Burmese, who predominate in the NLD, are viewed with suspicion by the other ethnic groups.

For many weeks, observers had been anticipating a move by NLD leaders to court arrest in order to galvanise its supporters. "I don't think Gandhi or Martin Luther King courted arrest for the sake of being arrested," said Suu Kyi, when asked if that was her plan. "I think what they were trying to show was that even at the risk of imprisonment, one must do what one has to do. We know that what we do may well lead to imprisonment, but that will not stop us from carrying out our duties."바카라 웹사이트

"Every one of us knows that we can be arrested any time," a close associate of Suu Kyi had said in April. "But we have to do it because it is the right thing to do."

Suu Kyi also admitted that her own rearrest could help her cause. "I think that (our re-arrest) would probably give a new momentum to the movement," she said. "So it does not worry us from a purely tactical point of view. We believe in hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. And I wouldn't call that the worst, actually." On May 23, while the arrests were going on, Suu Kyi said it was 'quite possible' she herself would be arrested but that didn't happen.

The military government believes that by ruling as it does, it is keeping under control a country that otherwise would be politically and ethnically volatile. Recent cease-fire agreements with several rebellious ethnic armies have been signed more or less at gunpoint. But these have brought a measure of peace and stability to the country. "What if they take to the streets?" asks Kyaw Win, voicing government fears. "Economic development will be stunted and the government will seem weak in the eyes of the ethnic rebels."

바카라 웹사이트But Suu Kyi, remembering the thousands of demonstrators killed by soldiers in 1988, is against resorting to street action. At a press conference last November 29, she said: "We do not like to call the people onto the streets. And we have no intention of doing so." But in April she clarified: "In politics you don't rule anything out. I've never made any statement that would put me in a position of having to go back on my word, so I never say I'll never do this or I'll never do that. But obviously it's not the kind of tactics that I would willingly use, ever."

바카라 웹사이트Clearly, though, the sixth anniversary NLD meeting seemed a deliberate provocation. As she said in April about a diplomat's suggestion that the NLD was playing 'defensive cricket': "We never do that. In any case, I don't know anything about cricket, and I don't think anybody in the NLD knows how to play cricket. So we wouldn't know exactly what he means. But if he thinks that we're just waiting and watching for things to happen, he's wrong. We have a good agenda and we stick to it." And perhaps that was what she was trying to prove last month.