Japan Urges Mayanmar TO Free Opposi

[RANGOONP@xxxxxxx]

Japan urges Myanmar to free opposition members
Wed 09 Sep 98 - 12:16 GMT
TOKYO, Sept 9 (AFP) - Japan urged Myanmar's ruling junta Wednesday to
immediately free
parliamentarians and other opposition members it has detained since the
weekend.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiromu Nonaka told a news conference that the Japanese
embassy in
Yangon had conveyed the demand to the Myanmar government.
"Japan will continue patient efforts to press for an improvement of the human
rights situation to
help promote democratisation (in Myanmar)," Nonaka said.
Myanmar's National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Aung
San Suu Kyi, says that the military government has arrested 220 of its members
since the
weekend.
The arrests are being seen as a bid to stop the party convening a session of
parliament.
The NLD won 392 out of 485 seats in parliament in the 1990 general election
but the junta
ignored the result. Only 225 of the 485 elected remain active in politics, 166
of whom are NLD
members.
Myanmar's state-run media on Wednesday accused the NLD of supporting
"terrorists" and
hiding weapons and ammunition.
A commentary in the official New Light of Myanmar said such activities called
into question
whether the NLD was a legitimate political party.
Japan, formerly the biggest aid donor to Myanmar, joined Western nations in
freezing official
lending to Yangon in 1988 after a military crackdown on the pro-democracy
movement there.
But Tokyo is reportedly looking at resuming official aid to Myanmar for
humanitarian projects,
in what it calls a dual approach of lobbying the Myanmar regime to improve its
human rights
record while seeking to boost people's living conditions.