Top UN envoy to visit Myanmar

Wednesday, 11 May 2011 03:04

YANGON: A top UN envoy left for Myanmar yesterday to hold the first talks there since the dissolution of the junta and the appointment of a nominally civilian government, UN sources said.

Vijay Nambiar, chief of

staff to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, will hold talks with government members and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the sources said.

Nambiar met Suu Kyi shortly after her release from house arrest in November. During that visit he also urged the government to address concerns over the election that month, which was widely dismissed as a sham.

Nambiar is “likely to meet with government officials and the opposition as well as with political parties,” a Myanmar official said, declining to be named.

The meetings with government officials and Aung San Suu Kyi were confirmed by officials at the UN headquarters in New York.

Official sources in Naypyidaw said new President Thein Sein was not scheduled to meet Nambiar, but foreign minister Wunna Maung Lwin would meet him today.

The envoy is to meet members of some political parties in Yangon on Friday, including the National Democratic Force (NDF), a breakaway party from Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. “Our party chairman Dr Than Nyein will go there. We have no idea yet what we have to discuss,” said Khin Maung Swe, an NDF leader.

The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana, last visited the country in February 2010. He was not allowed to meet Suu Kyi, and his requests to go there since have been rejected by authorities.

AFP