YANGON - Detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party dismissed the Myanmar junta's offer of talks as surreal on Friday, while China said the ruthless suppression of pro-democracy protests did not require international action.
Senior General Than Shwe, who caused international outrage by sending in soldiers to crush peaceful monk-led demonstrations, was asking Suu Kyi to abandon the campaign for democracy that has kept her in detention for 12 of the last 18 years, a spokesman said.
"They are asking her to confess to offences that she has not committed," said Nyan Win, spokesman for the Nobel peace laureate's National League for Democracy (NLD), whose landslide election victory in 1990 was ignored by the generals.
Than Shwe, head of the latest junta in 45 unbroken years of military rule of the former Burma, set out his conditions for direct talks at a meeting with special U.N. envoy Ibrahim Gambari on Tuesday, state-run television said.
It announced the terms on the eve of Gambari's report on his mission to the U.N. Security Council, saying Suu Kyi must abandon "confrontation", give up "obstructive measures" and support for sanctions and "utter devastation", a phrase it did not explain.
"It is very difficult to see how that will be productive because basically he has asked Aung San Suu Kyi publicly to surrender before the meeting takes place," Georgetown University Myanmar expert David Steinberg told Reuters Television.
"You could say it's a psychological ploy and at the same time it's very clear that the military is not making any concessions."
Nyan Win demanded Suu Kyi be allowed to respond in public.
That is unlikely. The only time Suu Kyi has been seen in public since she was last detained in May 2003 was during one monk-led demonstration when protesters were inexplicably allowed through the barricades sealing off her street.
People who applauded protest marches from the sidewalk could face two to five years in jail, said Win Min, who fled to Thailand in 1988 as the army crushed an uprising at the cost of around 3,000 lives. Leaders could face 20 years, he said.
The Norway-based opposition Democratic Voice of Burma quoted relatives as saying about 50 students who demonstrated in Mandalay had been sentenced to five years hard labour.
GAMBARI REPORT
