One date, May 27, has come to haunt Burma’s military rulers. It marks the occasion when the junta customarily extends the current detention of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. This year the chorus of voices calling for her freedom will include a new list of heavyweights on the global political stage. Former presidents and prime ministers from the developing and developed world figure on this list.

No less than 14 UN officials set the tone this week for a fresh international campaign by releasing a signed statement in Geneva calling on the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the junta is officially known, to free the Nobel peace laureate from house arrest. They included Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the UN human rights envoy for Burma, Hina Jilani, the UN secretary-general’s envoy to protect human rights defenders, and Ambey Ligabo, the UN envoy for the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

“The UN human rights experts believe that the stability of Myanmar is not well served by the arrest and detention of several leaders,” declared the statement. “(Suu Kyi’s) tireless commitment to non-violence, truth, and human rights has made her a worthy symbol through whom the plight of all people of (Burma) may be recognised.”

The 61-year-old Suu Kyi has spent over 11 of the last 19 years as a prisoner of the junta; the current phase beginning end of May 2003, after she and her political supporters were attacked and arrested by goons of SPDC.

Yet, Burma watchers have no reason to feel sanguine that the military regime will depart from its policy of shutting Suu Kyi from public view despite the international pressure. “The military is not showing any signs that she will be released this month,” Aung Naing Oo, a Burma political analyst exiled in Thailand, said in an interview. “They are keeping her in detention because of what she can do and what she represents.”

There is another reason why the regime may be reluctant: her name is associated with May 27 of another year, 1990, a date awash with symbolism for Burma’s pro-democracy movement. It was on that day 17 years ago that Suu Kyi led her opposition party, the National League For Democracy (NLD), to a thumping victory at the first parliamentary elections in over 28 years. Her party secured 81 per cent of the 485-member Constituent Assembly, while the pro-junta National Unity Party won a paltry two per cent of the seats.

The junta — which had crushed a pro-democracy uprising on the streets of Rangoon in 1988, killing thousands of students in a hail of gunfire — refused to recognise the results. Newly-elected parliamentarians, NLD sympathisers and student activists were arrested and thrown into prison. Suu Kyi was also kept captive.

But the spiralling cost of living, a mismanaged economy, spreading public disenchantment in Rangoon and growing international condemnation, including Burma being placed for the first time at the UN Security Council this year, have added to the regime’s discomfort since May, 2006. It is a milieu that has forced Gen. Than Shwe, Burma’s strongman, to be more vigilant. “Releasing Suu Kyi now will only expose the generals to problems that were not there last year,” Win Min, a Burma researcher at Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand, said. “They will drag this on. They have no exit plan.” — IPS