Suu Kyi's party rebuffs Myanmar junta threat

YANGON, Apr 28 (Reuters) Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy rejected today a threat by the military government to ban the party for alleged illegal activities.

''They cannot dissolve the party without sound evidence,'' NLD secretary U Lwin said in rejecting the charges levelled on Wednesday by Information Minister Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan. Kyaw Hsan said the NLD ''has connections with expatriate groups, terrorists and destructive groups'' which had attacked the former Burma, under military rule since 1962.

''The government has firm evidence to declare the NLD unlawful,'' he told reporters during a drug-burning ceremony in Southern Shan State.

''But the government, assessing the situation from all view points and exercising tolerance and patience and farsightedness, still permits the NLD to stand as a legal political party.'' The NLD won a landslide election victory in 1990 only to be denied power by the army. Its offices outside Yangon have been shut since a government crackdown in May 2003 when Suu Kyi, 60, was detained.

Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate who has spent about 10 of the past 15 years in some form of detention, remains under house arrest at her Yangon home, her telephone cut off and visitors restricted.

''If the NLD was dissolved, it would be an insult to the entire people,'' said Pu Chin Sian Thang, spokesman of the Committee Representing People's Parliament (CRPP), a loose opposition alliance.

REUTERS CHND1842