By DPA
Yangon : Myanmar’s junta Thursday announced that it was ready to start reconciliation talks with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi if she would stop her “confrontation” tactics and support of sanctions against the country.
A state-run television broadcast Thursday night said Senior General Than Shwe, who heads the junta, had made these conditions known to visiting United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari.
Gambari’s visit to Myanmar, which ended Tuesday, included separate meetings with Than Shwe and Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has spent the past four years under house arrest in Yangon.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has suggested in New York that Gambari’s trip was far from successful, casting doubt on the Myanmar TV announcement which may be designed to cast blame for failed negotiations on Suu Kyi, analysts said.
Gambari was sent to Myanmar to assess the country’s political situation in the aftermath of a brutal crackdown on peaceful monk-led protests in Yangon against the military’s 45-year reign in the country.
The crackdown sparked international condemnation, even from Myanmar’s Southeast Asian allies, and calls for renewed efforts to force a political resolution to Myanmar’s political stalemate, which has pitted an entrenched military regime against the forces of democracy for the past 17 years.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) Party won the 1990 general election by a landslide, but has been blocked from power since by the military who claimed Myanmar was not ready for civilian rule because of its security threat from ethnic minority insurgencies.
In 1995, the regime began to draft a new constitution to address the country’s power-sharing issues, but the military-controlled process was dubbed a sham by the NLD and most western observers, who claimed it was designed to keep the generals in power indefinitely.
The National Convention process to draft the principles for a new constitution was wrapped up on Aug 20.
The conclusion to the 14-year-old efforts was swiftly overshadowed by a groundswell of protests against the doubling of fuel prices imposed on Aug 15.
The anti-inflation protests were picked up by Myanmar’s 400,000-strong monkhood in early September and grew into a barefoot Buddhist rebellion that shook Yangon between Sep 18 and 27.
The peaceful movement was extinguished by a brutal crackdown on Sep 26-27 that left 10 dead, according to government sources. The actual death toll is believed to be much higher.
Since last week’s crackdown, thousands of dissidents have been arrested.
In the same broadcast announcing its terms for talks with Suu Kyi, Myanmar public TV claimed that of the 2,093 arrested, some 692 had already been released.
Nearly all Western governments and multinational donors ended their aid programmes to Myanmar in 1988, after the army’s brutal suppression of a pro-democracy movement that year that left an estimated 3,000 dead.
The US later imposed sanctions against US companies, prohibiting them from doing business with Myanmar.
The European Union has imposed visa sanctions against the junta’s leaders but stopped short of stopping their companies from doing business in the country.