UN special envoy to visit Myanmar

May 10,2011
Yangon - United Nations special envoy to Myanmar Vijay Nambiar is to visit the country this week, a government official said Tuesday.
'Nambiar will visit here on Thursday,' an official who
requested anonymity told the German Press Agency dpa. 'He will stay in Myanmar for three or four days and is scheduled to meet both government and opposition figures.'
Nambiar is expected to meet Myanmar's new president, Thein Sein, and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, according to the official.
It would be Nambiar's first meeting with Suu Kyi, who
was only released from six years of house detention on November 13. She has spent about 15 of the past 21 years under house arrest.
The UN special envoy last visited Myanmar five months ago, following the November 7 general election which brought the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party to power.
The polls were generally slammed by Western democracies as a sham, since they excluded democracy heroine Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
Myanmar has been under military rule since 1962. An election in 1990 was won by the NLD but they were blocked from assuming power by the ruling junta.
The NLD boycotted the November polls after the military passed regulations that would have forced them to drop Suu Kyi from their party in order to contest the elections.