Suu Kyi’s supporters banned from visiting her sick housekeeper

Burmese authorities have sealed off a Rangoon hospital to prevent outsiders from visiting a sick woman companion of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, writes Edward Loxton for The First Post.

Members of her opposition National League for Democracy, who were denied entry to the hospital by security guards, said it appeared that the authorities wanted to prevent the woman reporting on the condition of Suu Kyi, who is said to be on a hunger strike.

Win Ma Ma, who has helped Suu Kyi with housekeeping duties for the past five years, was admitted to Rangoon's Muslim Kutho Pyit hospital on September 6, with an undisclosed illness. NLD members who tried to visit her said even family members and close friends were being turned away. "She is in complete isolation," said one. "It's a very ominous development."

The NLD, which has organised regular deliveries of food and household supplies to the Rangoon lakeside house where Suu Kyi is detained, said she told them late last month to suspend the service. Since then fears have grown that she is staging a hunger strike, but nobody has been able to visit her to check on the reports,

Win Ma Ma's elderly mother is also living in Suu Kyi's rambling house. She, too, is a prisoner, denied access to the outside world. She and her daughter have been living periodically with Suu Kyi since 1997, but continuously since September 2003, when the democracy leader began her current term of house arrest.

On Tuesday the US State Department expressed concern about Suu Kyi's well-being and said her isolation made it impossible to check on the reports that she is on a hunger strike.

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 10, 2008