YANGON, Nov 8: Myanmar’s pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi will refuse freedom from house arrest until the country’s ruling generals release dozens of her jailed colleagues, a UN rights envoy said on Saturday.

The United Nations’ Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, who on Thursday became only the second outsider to meet the opposition leader, said Aung San Suu Kyi was in high spirits but unwilling to accept any “privileges” from the junta unless other political prisoners arrested after May unrest were released.

“Aung San Suu Kyi let me know that she would refuse any privileges until all the prisoners detained on May 30 have access to freedom,” Pinheiro told a press conference here at the conclusion of his investigative mission.

The envoy spent six days in the military-ruled state looking into alleged rights abuses, including a May 30 attack on Aung San Suu Kyi’s entourage by a pro-junta mob during her political tour of northern Myanmar.

He said the Nobel peace laureate, who has been detained since the incident and remains confined to her home despite the government’s pronouncement that there are no legal restrictions on her, “was in high spirits when I met her”.

Several local contacts and foreign diplomats in recent weeks have been turned away at the gates of her guarded lakeside villa, where Aung San Suu Kyi was shifted to house arrest in September after more than three months of secret detention, which the junta described as “protective custody”.

Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) party won a landslide victory in 1990 elections that were never recognised by the junta has spent more than seven years under three different stints of house arrest, the previous period ending in May 2002.

The unrest and subsequent detention of the entire NLD leadership brought to a dead halt the national reconciliation negotiations between Aung San Suu Kyi and the generals that had been brokered by the United Nations.

According to Pinheiro, Aung San Suu Kyi stressed that the political dialogue should move forward despite the May 30 setback but demanded an investigation into the attack, which witnesses and rights groups say may have left dozens of her supporters dead.

“She says there should be justice and accountability, not revenge.”

Pinheiro, a Brazilian academic, had travelled to Myanmar in part to flesh out what happened in the May violence, but was rebuffed by the junta.

“The authorities have not yet agreed to my proposal to conduct an independent assessment of the May 30 incident,” he said.—AFP