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SCMP-Regime threatens to expel diss



South China Morning Post
Wednesday  September 9  1998

Regime threatens to expel dissident 
by William Barnes in Bangkok 

The military regime made thinly veiled threats yesterday to deport
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to thwart her plan to convene a
"people's parliament".

Commentaries in the state-controlled newspapers, signed by "an advocate",
called on the authorities to eject Ms Aung San Suu Kyi as a foreigner
attempting to destabilise the country.

This is not the first time that the military regime has flirted with such
an idea.

But the leader of the National League for Democracy has never pushed the
regime so hard. She has stated that since repeated attempts to negotiate
with the regime broke down, her party would call parliament itself this
month.



The league said that 220 members and officials including 63 MPs had been
detained in recent days to prevent them from participating.



After the biggest student protests in two years erupted in Rangoon last
week, opposition sources said yesterday that 12 Buddhist monks had been
arrested after a demonstration in Mandalay.



Three monks were injured when riot police broke up a gathering of about 200
monks who shouted their support for the "people's parliament", according to
the All Burma Students Democratic Front.



Several other smaller protests are thought to have taken place at Monywer,
Sagaing, Myangyan and Pakkoku, the Bangkok-based exiled group said.



Monks, like students, have traditionally been at the vanguard of all major
political movements in Burma since colonial days.



"Buddhist monks have suffered a lot under the military regime. Despite
their status they have suffered extra-judicial killings, torture, forced
labour under brutal conditions and have been used as porters for the army
in frontline military operations," said the chairman of the All Burma Young
Monks Union, Shin Kemersara.



But Ms Aung San Suu Kyi remains the critic around which the opposition
revolves.



Yesterday's papers said Ms Aung San Suu Kyi's marriage to English academic
Michael Aris made her a foreigner - an old refrain but a popular one with
state propagandists. The commentaries also complained that she had not
registered the birth of her two college-age sons in Burma, paid income tax
on income from abroad and pushed the inflation rate higher with her
political activism.