Group Says Suu Kyi's Doctors Barred

[RANGOONP@xxxxxxx]

Group Says Suu Kyi's Doctors Barred

 .c The Associated Press 

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Myanmar's military government has barred doctors from
visiting opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is suffering from kidney
problems, her political party said Sunday. 

Suu Kyi has entered the 12th day of her nonviolent protest on a rural road
against the military restricting her from traveling outside Yangon. She and
three colleagues are camped inside a van 19 miles west of the capital. 

The authorities are refusing to let her proceed to the city of Bassein, where
she intended to meet members of her political party. 

``The personal physicians of Aung San Suu Kyi were not allowed to see her
Saturday,'' said Tin Oo, the vice chairman of Suu Kyi's National League for
Democracy. 

``They waited for a response from the authorities, but they did not get any.
The authorities did not give any reason. We are trying to get permission
today,'' Tin Oo, a former general, defense minister and Buddhist monk, said. 

Suu Kyi's doctors were permitted to visit her twice earlier in the week. They
said after examining her the first time that she was suffering from low blood
pressure and some kidney problems. On Friday, they said her blood pressure had
improved. 

Suu Kyi has offered to end her protest if the government releases from prison
members of her party elected to parliament and all those arrested after May
this year. 

``No detained NLD members have been freed yet,'' Tin Oo said Sunday. 

The NLD set Aug. 21 as a deadline for the military to convene the parliament
elected in 1990. The NLD won 82 percent of the seats in the assembly, but the
military, which has ruled Myanmar, also known as Burma, since 1962, ignored
the result. 

After the deadline passed, the NLD announced it would call a parliament
session on its own, setting up a serious confrontation with the government. 

The military responded with mass arrests of NLD members on previous occasions
the party attempted to hold meetings. 

An editorial in Sunday's state-run New Light of Myanmar said the government
``has achieved unprecedented success.'' 

``However the threat of neocolonialists and their lap dogs are working for a
recurrence of the 1988 nightmare, the trauma of which still haunts those who
have gone through it,'' it said. 

The military brutally crushed a nationwide democracy uprising in 1988 by
gunning down more than 3,000 protesters. The military has said only a few
dozen died. 

It frequently accuses Suu Kyi and her colleagues of being controlled by
Western countries intent on subjecting Myanmar to neocolonialist control. 

Suu Kyi is the winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent
campaign to bring democracy to Myanmar. 

Myanmar was a colony of Great Britain from 1824 to 1948. Under Gen. Ne Win,
Myanmar closed itself off to the outside world from 1962-88.