Pro-Democracy Leader in Myanmar Is Convicted

Pro-Democracy Leader in Myanmar Is Convicted
By SETH MYDANS
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: August 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/world/asia/12myanmar.html?th&emc=th


BANGKOK — Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy leader, was sentenced Tuesday to three years of hard labor for violating the terms of her house arrest, but her sentence was quickly commuted to a new term of house arrest of up to 18 months.

She presumably will be allowed to leave the prison guest house where she has been held since the trial began May 18 and return to the villa where Myanmar’s ruling junta has kept her confined for 14 of the past 20 years.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 64, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had faced a possible prison term of five years.

“The outcome of this trial has never been in doubt,” Jared Genser, her international counsel in Washington, said Tuesday after the verdict was announced. “The real question is how the international community will react — will it do more than simply condemn this latest injustice?”

The charge against Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi was prompted by a strange incident in early May when an American intruder swam across a lake in central Yangon, Myanmar’s main city, and spent two nights in her villa, saying he wanted to save her from assassins.

The intruder, John Yettaw, 53, of Falcon, Mo., was given a seven-year sentence on Tuesday, including four years of hard labor, for abetting Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s actions and for violating immigration law and local ordinances, according to diplomats reached by telephone in Yangon.

According to news agency reporters allowed inside the courtroom to hear the reading of the three-year sentence, a five-minute recess was called after the verdict was given, and the country’s home minister, Gen. Maung Oo, entered the court and read aloud an order of commutation issued by Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the leader of the junta.

The 18-month term will ensure that Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi will be confined during a parliamentary election due next year. Many analysts have said they believe the case against her was intended to keep her from participating in the election.

The junta has come under severe international pressure since Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s arrest, and analysts said the generals might seek to appear lenient by commuting a conviction to house arrest.

Her lawyer, U Nyan Win, said Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi had been “prepared for the worst” and had collected a supply of reading matter and medications to sustain her.

“From my point of view she is innocent and she should be acquitted,” Mr. Nyan Win said, speaking by telephone in advance of the verdict.

“But this is a political case and the authorities will decide it from a political point of view,” he said, adding, “I have never known of an acquittal in a political case.”

Khin Khin Win and Win Ma Ma, two longtime housemates of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, also were convicted Tuesday, Mr. Genser said, on the charge of allowing Mr. Yettaw to enter the house.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial has been a setback for the emerging possibility of improved relations between Myanmar and Western nations, particularly the United States, which had said it was reviewing its policy of economic sanctions and political confrontation.

But in a statement last week, the State Department appeared to stand by that possibility, saying, “The door remains open for the regime to respect the wishes of the Burmese people and international community, and to step toward the path of engagement after so many years of isolation.”

As a “welcome first step,” it called for the release of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi along with all 2,100 political prisoners said to be detained by the military junta.

The election next year could put a civilian face on the military rule that has isolated and impoverished Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, since a coup in 1962. It will be the first nationwide election since 1990, which the military annulled after Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, won by a landslide.

The government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, has insisted that the trial of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, like those of the other prisoners, is not political, but is based on purely criminal conduct. Since her arrest on May 14, Mr. Nyan Win said, she has been held in an individual dormitory in Insein Prison, where the trial is being held. He said she lives on the second floor together with her housemates. Five prison matrons live on the ground floor, he said.

At a news conference last week in Yangon, the national police chief, Brig. Gen. Khin Yi, said that 20 police officers had been demoted and that some had been given jail terms for allowing Mr. Yettaw to breach security.

Mark McDonald contributed from Hong Kong.