Suu Kyi meets junta liaison: Official
Myanmar's detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi met with the junta's liaison officer at a state guesthouse for 45 minutes yesterday, an official told AFP.
The Myanmar official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, gave no further details of the discussions held between Suu Kyi and the government's official liaison, labour minister Aung Kyi.
It is the third meeting between the pair since the beginning of October. It comes after the country's Supreme Court agreed last week to hear a final appeal against her ongoing detention.
In a separate development, a senior US diplomat said yesterday that there are no signs of progress towards democratic change in Myanmar despite Washington's decision to hold direct talks with the country's military rulers
High-level talks last month in Myanmar between the junta and US officials were "cautious" and made little headway, said Scot Marciel, the US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs.
A lack of progress will make it difficult for the United States to continue its policy of engagement with Myanmar but Washington is willing to give it time to yield results, said Marciel.
"At some point if there's no progress, it will be hard to sustain a dialogue but we're not at that point yet and I think, as I said, we didn't make progress on our trip," he said.
"The problem is there is only one person who makes the decisions and that person has not yet shown a particular amount of openness," Marciel said in reference to Than Shwe, the chief of Myanmar's military government.
Under President Barack Obama, the US government has adopted a policy of engagement after sanctions on the impoverished Southeast Asian country had failed to bring about desired reforms.
Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, 64, was ordered to spend another 18 months in detention in August after being convicted over an incident in which a US man swam to her house. A lower court rejected an initial appeal in October.
Myanmar's military rulers have kept Suu Kyi in detention for 14 of the last 20 years, ever since they refused to recognise her political party's landslide victory in the country's last democratic elections in 1990.
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