Suu Kyi's peacock may be set to fig

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Subject: Suu Kyi's peacock may be set to fight.


Suu Kyi's peacock may be set to fight.
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RANGOON, Sunday: The slim woman with yellow and pink rosebuds in her hair
rises to the applause of the crowd of several thousand who sit behind the
barbed-wire barricades in front of her house.

"The peacock sometimes dances but not always," she said. "Sometimes it must
fight when the time is right. That is the way of the peacock. It will dance
when victory is achieved."

>From above the high steel gates which for six years secured her prison but
now from her pulpit, Aung San Suu Kyi preaches to the converted and
challenges her enemies with political metaphors.

Each weekend since her release from six years of house arrest in July, she
has starred in a gentle street theatre in front of the old colonial house at
54 University Avenue. Suddenly, the rhetoric has taken a harder edge.

The peacock is the elblem of Ms Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. And
the question for Burma is whether the woman who has long counselled patience
and pacifism in her dance with the dictators has decided that now is the
time to fight.

The Nobel Peace laureate last week set the scene for a showdown. She
rejected the military's plans for constitutional reform, put a deadline for
the junta to open negotiation, and reaffirmed the NLD's popular mandate,
secured in its 1990 landslide election victory then brutally denied by the
generals.

Ms Suu Kyi signalled that her party was ready to boycott the regime's
national convention, which is due to resume sitting on Tuesday to make final
preparationas for a new constitution, unless Burma's rulling State Law and
Order Restoration Council (SLORC) agrees to open dialogue on a return to
democracy.

The hand-picked national convention has already decided on a framework that
will guarantee the military 25 per cent of parliamentary seats, a veto on
constitutional change and immunity from control by the executive. It will
also bar Ms Suu Kyi from becoming head of state.

"The national convention in its present form is not acceptable to the people
of Burma," Ms Suu Kyi told the crowd.

"A constitution that is drawn up by a national convention that does not
enjoy the confidence of the people will not get the support of the people.
And a constitution that is not supported by the people will be nothing more
than a peice of paper."

(THE SMH, 27.11.95, P 10).

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