Suu Kyi can vote in referendum, says NLD

P. S. Suryanarayana Thursday, April 17, 2008

SINGAPORE: Seeking to transform Myanmar’s May 10 referendum on a draft constitution into a vote on democracy, Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s party said on Wednesday that “she is an eligible voter.”

U Nyan Win, spokesman for Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, told The Hindu over the telephone from Yangon that the party had decided against boycotting the referendum on a flawed draft statute.

The party was, instead, calling on the people to “vote ‘no’ in the referendum” and defeat the move by the country’s military rulers to vest sovereignty in the Commander-in-Chief on a long-term basis.

Mr. Nyan Win said there was no word from the military rulers whether Ms. Suu Kyi, still under house arrest, would indeed be allowed to participate in the prospective referendum.

However, she was not at all disqualified under the “referendum law” which barred only those detained on court orders.

The celebrated democracy campaigner, he maintained, was being detained under “the administrative order of a group of Cabinet members and not a court order.”

The draft constitution, enshrining critical roles for the military in any future government, was also designed to disqualify Ms. Suu Kyi for any elective office on the ground of her marriage to a foreigner. Asked whether she would at least be eligible to vote in the proposed general election in 2010, Mr. Nyan Win said “it is too early to discuss that.”

This was because the rejection of the draft constitution in the imminent referendum would change the political dynamics in the southeast Asian country, he said.