Brown says Burmese poll sans Suu Kyi “masquerade of an election”

LONDON - Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said that the world leaders are not doing enough to highlight the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi, the embodiment of the campaign for democracy in Burma, and added that the world must focus on grave injustices in that country.

Brown, who is preparing to return to British politics, has expressed his disappointment as Suu Kyi was barred from this week’s “masquerade of an election”.

“Next weekend’s poll will be a masquerade of an election. Aung San Suu Kyi, the one person who in half a century has actually been democratically elected, has been prevented from standing for re-election on the specious grounds that her late husband was not Burmese and her party, the National League for Democracy, has been forcibly dissolved,” the Guardian quoted Brown, as saying.

“It is a ‘democratic election’ where a third of the seats have been reserved for the military and, in addition, 40 ‘civilian candidates’ of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the junta’s party, are senior military officers who resigned from the army a few weeks ago specifically to stand,” he added.

Brown has been campaigning for Suu Kyi’s release since the mid-1990s, when he met her late husband.

He wrote about Suu Kyi’s victory in elections 20 years back, which the junta refused to accept and jailed the winners.

“It is impossible not to weep over the fate of Burma. It is a country that resisted the Japanese but whose first democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, was assassinated as the army took power in a bloody coup … It is also where more than 130,000 people were allowed to die two years ago when the regime initially shunned external aid after severe flooding,” he added.

He urged the world to stand for her rights and against the alleged injustices done in Burma. (ANI)