AP: Myanmar Wants to Ban Burma , NL

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Subject: AP: Myanmar Wants to Ban Burma , NLD Saturday Forum

Myanmar Wants to Ban Burma
              NLD Saturday Forum

  By AYE AYE WIN
 Associated Press Writer
   RANGOON, Burma (AP) -- The state-controlled press urged the military
regime Saturday to ban publications that call their country Burma rather
than Myanmar, the name adopted by the government.
   Calling the Southeast Asian nation Burma is an "insult," according to an
article signed "Patriot" in the English-language New Light of Myanmar.
   The ruling junta, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council,
or SLORC, announced in 1989 that Burma would henceforth be known as Myanmar
and the capital, Rangoon, as Yangon.
   Myanmar is the name most citizens use, feeling it represents the entire
country, while Burma, the name given by British colonizers, recognizes only
the ethnic Burmese. The regime rejects it and all who use it as
neo-colonialist. Yangon is the way inhabitants pronounce the name of the
capital city. Rangoon is a British approximation.
   In what amounts to a denial of the regime's legitimacy, pro-democracy
leader Aung San Suu Kyi uses the old names.
   Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma's independence hero, Aung San, rose to
prominence in 1988, when the current junta came to power by suppressing
pro-democracy protests. She was freed in July after six years of house
arrest. The military has ruled Burma since 1962.
   The regime has responded to her stepped-up campaign for democracy by
detaining hundreds of her supporters and imposing harsh new laws limiting
political activity, but she has not flinched.
   Speaking at the gates of her Rangoon home -- virtually the only
opposition activity allowed in Burma -- Suu Kyi said Saturday that the
regime sent intelligence agents to the homes of recently freed detainees to
coerce them into resigning from her party, the National League for
Democracy, and from the parliament elected in 1990 but never allowed to
convene.
   "Pressuring the MPs (members of Parliament) to resign from the NLD at
their homes is much better than placing them under detention and forcing
them to resign," Suu Kyi said. "But asking these people to resign their
posts is not nice."
   Meanwhile, diplomats from Denmark, Norway, Finland and Switzerland met a
Burmese foreign ministry official on Friday to demand an explanation of the
death of James Leander Nichols, a former honorary consul and friend of Suu
Kyi who died in prison last week, apparently of a stroke.
   Danish Ambassador Joergen Reimers said he asked for an independent
autopsy conducted by a Danish surgeons' group working on human-rights
cases.
   There was no official reply by late Saturday.
   Nichols, 65, was arrested in April and sentenced to three years in jail
for illegal possession of two fax machines and a telephone switchboard. The
government requires people to obtain permission to own fax machines and
sophisticated phone systems in an effort to discourage contact between
Burmese citizens and the outside world.
   Diplomats and his family say Nichols, who had diabetes and heart
trouble, was punished for his links to Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel
Peace Prize for her non-violent promotion of democracy.
   
KT
ISBDA