Thai Senators and Exiles Discuss Burma

Several Thai senators and Burmese dissidents in exile discussed political developments in Burma and the plight of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi at a meeting in Bangkok on Wednesday.

The meeting was intended to send a message to Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on the eve of his visit to Rangoon on Thursday to attend the World Buddhist Summit.

The chairman of the Thai Senate Committee on International Relations, Kraisak Choonhavan, was among senators who attended the meeting.

Prime Minister Thaksin said before his departure for Rangoon that he would discuss with the top military leader Sr-Gen Than Shwe the issues of Suu Kyi’s detention and the junta’s National Convention, the first step of the so-called “road map.”

One of the participants at the Bangkok meeting, Aung Naing Oo, researcher for the Burma Fund, a Washington-based pro-democracy think-tank, said it had been agreed that the “release of Suu Kyi and her participation in the NC [National Convention] are very important for Burma’s political reform.”

A National Convention without Suu Kyi and other parties “will not resolve the country’s political stalemate,” Aung Naing Oo said.

Late last month the junta extended the detention of Suu Kyi for another year. She has been detained since May 2003 after a pro-junta mob attacked her motorcade in Sagaing Division, Upper Burma.

The junta also announced last month that the National Convention would resume next February to draw up a seven-stage schedule of drafting a new constitution and holding elections.

The convention, initiated in 1993, stalled in 1996 after Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, or NLD, walked out, saying its proceedings were undemocratic.

The convention resumed in May 2004 and adjourned again in July. The NLD didn’t attend, maintaining that the convention has yet to be changed.

Aung Naing Oo said that if the convention fails to make progress, Burma would be in trouble when it takes over chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, in 2006.

“Another important message we want Thaksin to know is that we opposition groups are just trying to work together with the military government, not to kick them out,” Aung Naing Oo said. “No opposition groups try to exclude the military from the political process.”

He said Thai senators and their advisors who attended the meeting would release a statement based on the discussion, with the intention of sending a message to Prime Minister Thaksin.