MYANMAR'S MILITARY LEADER RULES OUT

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Subject: MYANMAR'S MILITARY LEADER RULES OUT TALKS WITH IMPRISONED NOBEL

  MYANMAR'S MILITARY LEADER RULES OUT TALKS WITH IMPRISONED NOBEL LAUREATE
  (EXCLUSIVE; 10 p.m. ET EMBARGO.)
  By PHILIP SHENON
  c.1994 N.Y. Times News Service
     YANGON, Myanmar  The head of Burmese military intelligence, Lt.
  Gen. Khin Nyunt, Sunday ruled out early talks between himself and
  Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned democracy leader and Nobel
  Peace Prize winner, describing her attitude as ``negative and
  counterproductive.''
     In an interview, Khin Nyunt, who is widely seen as the most
  powerful member of the junta that runs Myanmar, formerly known as
* Burma, said he had sent senior military officers in recent weeks to
  meet with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.
     Face-to-face talks between him and the democracy leader might be
  possible eventually, he said, but ``this is a matter that is
  delicate, a matter on which we must ponder deeply.''
     He offered no timetable for further talks or for the release of
  Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who is in her fifth year of house arrest.
  And he repeatedly questioned her legitimacy as a political leader,
  her popularity among the Burmese public and even her patriotism.
     ``From what we see, her supporters are only from outside
  Myanmar,'' he said. ``She has been portrayed as a great leader of
  the country basically by groups outside of the country.''
     Despite his harsh words, diplomats said the disclosure by Khin
  Nyunt that he had sent representatives to speak with Mrs. Aung San
  Suu Kyi after her meetings last month with an American congressman
  suggested that the junta was considering some sort of dialogue with
  her.
     But it appears that it could now be months before the military
  makes a final decision about what to do with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi,
  whose freedom has become a condition for Myanmar in its bid to
  restore full diplomatic relations and trade with the United States
  and other Western countries.
     The possibility of direct talks between the general and Mrs.
  Aung San Suu Kyi was raised by Rep. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., a
  member of the House Intelligence Committee who last month became
  the first non-family foreign visitor to see her since 1989.
     Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the army general who is
  considered the father of the nation, Aung San, immediately accepted
  the offer of talks and said that all issues were open for
  negotiation  except her departure from the country.
     Khin Nyunt said Sunday that it was impossible for him to
  consider a dialogue with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi until after full
  deliberations within the junta, which calls itself the State Law
  and Order Restoration Council, and within government agencies
  overseen by the military.
     ``This is a very complex matter, and we will have to take many
  factors into account  national politics, international
  relations,'' he said in his first interview with a Western news
  organization in two years. ``This is not something that I alone can
  decide.''
     But the general emphasized that Myanmar was eager for better
  relations with Washington, which has led the international
  community in efforts to isolate the junta over its human rights
  record. ``We wish to go back to a good relationship,'' he said.
 During and after the visit from Richardson in mid-February, Khin
  Nyunt said, he sent ``senior officers to meet with Daw Aung San Suu
  Kyi on my behalf.''
     ``Our impression is that she doesn't think much of us,'' the
  general said, ``and so I think that she doesn't want to be
  serious.''
     He did not discuss details of the conversations between the
  officers and Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, except to say they had asked
  her ``what it would take to fulfill her needs.'' Her attitude ``on
  all these occasions was rather negative and counterproductive,'' he
  said.
     Khin Nyunt is described by diplomats in Myanmar as a highly
  intelligent and calculating commander who is the first among equals
  in the junta, which assumed complete government power in 1988 in a
  violent crackdown on followers of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi. His title
  within the junta is Secretary-1, and he is widely known by the
  Burmese public simply as ``S-1.''
     Richardson said after meeting the general that he was a
  ``pragmatic individual who is sincere about wanting to resolve the
  divisions in his country.''
     Khin Nyunt is considered a protege of Gen. Ne Win, the erratic,
* xenophobic leader of Burma from 1962 until his formal retirement in
  1988, although apart from the loyalty they enjoy among their
  deputies and the fear they inspire among many Burmese, there seems
  little to connect the two.
     Where Ne Win gathered political advice from soothsayers, Khin
  Nyunt is said to seek out Western-educated economists and business
  leaders.
     Unlike several colleagues, Khin Nyunt has a reputation unstained
  by allegations of corruption. But there is grave concern among
  diplomats about his reputation, as head of military intelligence,
  for using brute force against opponents of the junta.
     At times during the two-hour interview, the 54-year-old general
  appeared conciliatory toward Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, repeatedly
  using the Burmese honorific ``daw'' when describing her.
     ``We still feel that she is our sister,'' he said. ``We have no
  animosity or hatred towards her.''
     Still, most of his comments about the 48-year-old democracy
  leader and her movement were caustic and dismissive. He describes
  Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi as a political neophyte who allowed herself
  to be used as a ``front'' for Burmese Communists during public
  uprisings in 1988 and 1989.
     ``She rose up because of the Burmese Communist Party and its
  underground cells,'' he said. ``She has no experience of life or
  work in this country. We deeply respect her father, General Aung
  San, but can you expect us to respect her only because she is his
  daughter?''
     Khin Nyunt suggested that even if he agreed to face-to-face
  talks, there would be little to negotiate.
     ``We don't see any reason why we should have to talk with her
  about the country's political future or economic status,'' he said.
  ``There are 42 million people here, and they are not bothered by
  Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.''
     In fact, the general almost certainly knows that millions of
  Burmese are deeply bothered about her plight and view Mrs. Aung San
  Suu Kyi as the country's best hope for democracy. In national
  elections in 1990, her political party, the National League for
  Democracy, won a landslide victory that was later annulled by the
  Burmese military.
     Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was educated at Oxford and is married
  to an Oxford don, Michael Aris, was living in the English
  university town when she was called home to Yangon in 1988 to tend
  to her ailing mother. During democracy demonstrations later that
  year in the capital, then called Rangoon, she was recruited into
  the movement.
     She was placed under house arrest in July 1989 as part of a
  crackdown on the democracy movement  which the government has
  charged was actually under the control of Burmese Communists.
  Diplomats say 2,000 to 5,000 of her followers were killed in 1988
  at the beginning of the crackdown. In 1991 she was awarded the
  Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to restore democracy to Myanmar.
     Sitting in a Defense Ministry reception room beneath a portrait
  of Ne Win and a painting of Maha Bandoola, the great 19th-century
  Burmese general, Khin Nyunt repeatedly turned to the question of
  whether Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi had given up her right to take part
  in Burmese politics by spending most of her life abroad.
     ``She left the country when she was 14,'' he said. ``And after
  those years she would come here every year for three or four days,
  not more than a week, and apart from that she has been living all
  those years outside the country.''
     Her father was assassinated in 1947, when she was 2 years old.
     Khin Nyunt said that in the late 1980s, members of the Burmese
  Communist Party, which had once mounted a powerful insurgent army,
  ``started searching for a national leader, and they decided that
  she would be the most appropriate since she was the daughter of the
  national hero.''
     ``It would be a good front to use her image for their aim to
  take over power in the country.'' She made the situation worse, he
  said, by criticizing the army publicly.
     ``She was making exhortations to destroy and disintegrate the
  armed forces,'' he said, insisting that the army's 1988 crackdown
  on her movement had saved the country from disintegration.
     ``The country was about to be destroyed completely, and we were
  compelled to come out to save the country,'' he said.
     The army, he insisted, has no ``craving for power'' and will
  hand over power to a civilian-led government once a new
  constitution is drafted.
     Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's followers say  and most diplomats agree
   that the government's allegations of Communist infiltration of
  her democracy campaign are baseless, and that it is a spontaneous,
  legitimate movement intent on ending decades of military rule.
     While some of her advisers may have had Marxist leanings,
  diplomats say, Communists do not dominate her movement.