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YANGON, Sept 6: The Red Cross, the first independent agency to meet Aung San Suu Kyi since she was reported on hunger strike last week, said on Saturday Myanmar’s detained opposition leader was well and not fasting.
Two officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) met Suu Kyi privately for one hour earlier on Saturday.
“They asked her if she was on hunger strike and she said: ‘No’,” ICRC spokesman Jean-Pascal Moret said, confirming a government statement on the visit.
“This afternoon the ICRC paid a visit to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to deliver the family messages,” the statement said. “According to the ICRC, they found her well and also that she was not on hunger strike as alleged by some quarters.”
The US State Department first reported the hunger strike last Sunday, a day after new Myanmar Prime Minister Khin Nyunt promised a “road map to democracy” in a speech three months after Suu Kyi was detained.
It repeated the assertion on Tuesday after the military junta denied it and other sources could not confirm it.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, asked later in the week for an update on her status, said: “We had credible information about Aung San Suu Kyi being on a hunger strike.”
Saturday’s ICRC visit was the second permitted by the military since July, and had been requested before the US hunger strike report, Moret said.
“She said she was not on hunger strike. Whether that includes the past and the present, I cannot say,” Moret said.
The military has kept Suu Kyi at an unknown location since May 30, after a bloody clash between her convoy and government supporters in northern Myanmar.
The government says she is being held for her own protection and has ignored an international outcry over her detention. It says it will free her when the political temperature cools.
UNDER PRESSURE: Suu Kyi, a 58-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, won a general election in 1990 but the military prevented her party from taking office.
The pro-democracy icon has been in and out of detention for the past 14 years, most recently the last three months, despite repeated international appeals for her release.
Myanmar has accused Washington of spreading a false hunger strike report in an effort to undermine the junta’s road map, already dismissed by opposition groups as ploy to keep power.
Khin Nyunt, also the powerful head of military intelligence, mentioned Suu Kyi only once in his speech on August 30 — and that was while criticising her party.
Diplomats and exiled opposition groups said Khin Nyunt’s speech was an attempt to deflect international pressure on the junta to free Suu Kyi and make clear moves toward democracy.
The United States and the European Union have imposed tougher sanctions, while Japan has frozen new aid. Myanmar’s neighbours oppose sanctions, but they issued an unprecedented rebuke in June and say Suu Kyi must be freed.—Reuters
