YANGON - Myanmar’s military junta extended the house arrest of opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for yet another year on Friday, ignoring international pleas for her release, a government source said. “Home Ministry officials went to her residence and read it out to her,” the source said of the order issued two days before her detention was set to expire.The decision to keep Suu Kyi, 61, confined in her lakeside home in Yangon had been widely expected despite appeals from the White House, United Nations and fellow Nobel winners to the generals ruling the former Burma. She has now been in detention for more than 11 of the last 17 years and United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, called her confinement ”cruel and unacceptable”.
Debbie Stothard, a member of the activist Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, said in neighbouring Thailand: “The regime is obviously more afraid of Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularity than international opinion.”
“If they had released Suu Kyi, it would have been an hasty end for the regime. There is increasing resentment over its mismanagement of the economy,” she said, refering to small public protests in Yangon this year against worsening living conditions.