Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi went on trial yesterday, facing a five-year jail sentence that has triggered threats of tougher international sanctions against the nation’s military regime.
Suu Kyi, charged with breaking the terms of her house arrest after an American intruder sneaked into her home this month, was in good spirits as the closed-door trial began in Burma’s notorious Insein prison, her lawyers said.
“She looked quite well. She said she was okay,” Nyan Win, a lawyer and spokesman for Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), told reporters.
The ambassadors of Britain, France, Germany and Italy as well as an Australian diplomat were barred from entering the prison, but the US consul was allowed into the prison compound since a US citizen, John William Yettaw, was also on trial.
Yettaw, the 53-year-old who used homemade flippers to swim to Suu Kyi’s lakeside villa, attended a separate hearing on immigration and trespassing charges, state TV said.
Suu Kyi has denied the charges, which were reported for the first time on state-owned MRTV yesterday, five days after the Nobel laureate and two female companions were charged.
Security was tight outside the prison in Yangon. Armed police threw barbed-wire barricades across roads and ordered businesses to close after dissidents called for mass protests against Suu Kyi’s trial. Some 200 NLD supporters and scores of pro-junta thugs gathered near the prison.
The court heard from the first of 22 prosecution witnesses and adjourned until today. Suu Kyi will not testify until the prosecution rests.
Activists outside the military-ruled country say the charges were trumped up to keep Suu Kyi in detention after her current house arrest order expires on May 27th, six years after her latest incarceration began. A conviction would sideline the charismatic NLD leader through the junta’s elections in 2010, derided by the West as a sham to entrench more than four decades of military rule.
The military, which denied the NLD power in 1990 after its landslide election victory, has detained Suu Kyi for more than 13 of the past 19 years.
Yettaw’s motives remain unclear. He swam to her home on November 30th last year, but she refused to see him. When he tried again on May 3rd, Suu Kyi gave him food and allowed him to stay until May 5th. Suu Kyi’s lawyers say she did not invite Yettaw and pleaded with him to leave, but he refused.