LT. GEN. KHIN NYUNT/SOUTH AFRICA(Af

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Subject: LT. GEN. KHIN NYUNT/SOUTH AFRICA(African National Congress Daily

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MYANMAR-SA
MYANMAR: MANDELA INVITES INTELLIGENCE CHIEF TO SOUTH AFRICA 
YANGON, Myanmar June 11 1999 Sapa-AP
Myanmar's intelligence chief has been invited by South African President
Nelson Mandela to attend the inauguration of new President Thabo Mbeki, the
state-run New Light of Myanmar reported Friday. 

Gen. Khin Nyunt will be the first member of Myanmar's military government to
visit South Africa. He will be attending on behalf of Gen. Than Shwe, the
chairman of the military government of Myanmar, also known as Burma. 

The invitation provides a bitter irony for the leader of Myanmar's
beleaguered democratic opposition, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. 

Khin Nyunt is considered Suu Kyi's nemesis. She has accused him of directing
a campaign led by military intelligence to destroy her political party, the
National League for Democracy. 

Hundreds of NLD members have been arrested and are languishing in the
country's jails for opposing military rule. 

Mandela, on the other hand, is someone Su that while the military placed her
under six years of house arrest from 1989-95 for her democratic activities,
she took strength in reading Mandela's autobiography. 

An advocate of political change through nonviolence, Suu Kyi also idolizes
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. 

Mandela supported economic sanctions against South Africa to bring down
apartheid, the country's system of racial segregation. But he has refused to
join the United States and the European Union in similar moves against
Myanmar aimed at ending military rule, saying there is not enough
international support. 

The military has ruled Myanmar since 1962. It crushed a nationwide democracy
uprising in 1988 by gunning down more than 3,000 protesters and ignored the
results of a 1990 election that the NLD won by a landslide.