For a government which has been so coldly indifferent to world opinion in the past, the Burmese junta is suddenly showing remarkable signs of sensitivity (or perhaps it is nerves) in the way it is handling the current trial of Aung San Suu Kyi charged with ''breaking the terms of her house arrest'' after a US citizen swam across a lake to her home in Rangoon in May. A (guilty) verdict had been expected yesterday; instead, judges have reportedly decided to conduct a review of the case before handing down their decision on August 11.
The junta has strong motives for wanting to keep Suu Kyi under lock and key next year's elections being the most obvious but the cynical methods it has employed to engineer her continued house arrest have outraged Burmese pro-democracy advocates. First there was the timing. The American staged his swim across to Suu Kyi's lake-side home just days before her latest term of detention (six years) had been due to expire leading some to speculate that he might have been in the pay of the regime. In addition to the obviously dubious nature of the charges, the trial judges allowed just two witnesses for the defence, and 22 for the prosecution. An open and shut case, it might be presumed, but the judges' inability to hand down a quick decision suggests a growing realisation by the junta that its crude stunt could seriously harm its efforts to legitimise its rule through the ballot box.
Next year's elections represent the fifth step in Burma's seven-step ''roadmap'' to democracy by which the junta hopes to ''build a modern, developed and democratic nation''. Stages three and four involved drafting a new constitution and its formal adoption after a referendum in May 2008, controversially held in the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 100,000 people in the Irawaddy delta.
For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times
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