Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi confirms her party will contest November elections
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Version 0 of 1. Burma’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has confirmed that her National League for Democracy (NLD) party will contest elections in November despite her being barred from the presidency. “This is to announce officially that the NLD will be contesting the elections that will be held on the 8th of November,” Suu Kyi said in the capital Naypyidaw over the weekend. The Nobel Peace Laureate, who spent 15 years under house arrest, is barred from the country’s top job because of a constitutional provision excluding those with foreign children. Her late husband was British and she has two British sons. Last month, Burma’s parliament voted against constitutional amendments that would allow Suu Kyi to run for the presidency. There was widespread speculation that the NLD, expected to win a considerable number of seats in both houses of parliament, might boycott the election in response. But Suu Kyi said her party had a plan that she believed “would be acceptable to our people” to tackle the bar. She would not detail it immediately. “Of course we are not going into the elections without having an idea of how we intend to handle this problem,” she said. She also complained that there are errors in the voting lists. “If there is an error it means that the voter concerned will not be able to cast his or her vote on the day of the elections.” Related: Why Burma still needs Aung San Suu Kyi | Martin Woollacott The election holds the promise of being the next step towards full democracy for a nation run by a repressive military junta for nearly half a century. The NLD won the election in 1990 but the result was ignored by the military. The party boycotted the next nationwide poll, which was not held until 2010 and was condemned by international observers for widespread irregularities. About 30 million people are eligible to vote in Burma, a country left isolated by the military, whose rule was defined by its widespread oppression, violence and economic stagnation. President Thein Sein, a former general, pushed through reforms in 2011 which lifted western sanctions, but the NLD and activists say many are superficial. Political prisoners remain in jail and the media is tightly controlled. |