Myanmar's detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to be released from house arrest just six days after a military-backed party won her nation's first election in decades, the AFP is reporting.
The now 65-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has spent 15 of the last 21 years incarcerated because of her fight for democracy in the former Burma, is due to be freed on Saturday, Nov. 13, following a proclaimed victory by the proxy regime Union Solidarity and Development Party, which her party slammed as "a sham."
Exiled Burmese academic Win Min told The Australian the regime would probably permit the democracy champion to speak to the media regarding the widely criticized elections. "They can use Suu Kyi to neutralise criticism," he said. "They will have to allow her to talk, and I think she will be ready to talk. She spoke to the press when she was released in 1995, and in 2002. She will do that this time."
Suu Kyi will visit supporters around the country "as soon as possible" if she's freed, Win Tin, a senior member of her party, told Reuters. In August 2009, a court sentenced Suu Kyi to three years with hard labor for violating her detention order after she allowed an uninvited U.S. man swam across Inya lake to visit her last year. The sentence was immediately changed to 18 months of house arrest, believed to have begun in May 2009.