Myanmar's detained Suu Kyi has talks with junta

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Detained Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi held talks with a representative of the ruling junta for more than an hour on Thursday, state television said.

It said nothing about what she discussed with Aung Kyi, a senior member of the junta appointed go-between after the United Nations sent a special envoy to Myanmar, also known as Burma, to promote reconciliation and reform in the wake of the army's crackdown on pro-democracy protests in September.

Suu Kyi was taken from her villa and de facto prison of the last four years to a state guesthouse to meet Aung Kyi, and state television said the talks had lasted 75 minutes.

It gave no further details, but a security source said the 62-year-old Nobel laureate had been returned to her lakeside villa, where she has spent more than 11 of the past 18 years under house arrest.

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), which won a 1990 election by a landslide only to be denied power by the military, said it did not know what had happened at the guesthouse, where she had earlier met U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari on October 2.

The barbed wire barricades that have sealed off the road outside her home since protests started in August against fuel price rises and 45 years of military rule remained in place, scuppering hopes Suu Kyi might be about to be released.

Aung Kyi, a trusted regime fixer, was appointed two weeks ago after Gambari flew in at the height of a crackdown on the biggest protests in two decades with a message from the U.N. Security Council telling the generals to talk to Suu Kyi about reform.

After his departure, junta leader Senior General Than Shwe made a highly conditional offer of talks with Suu Kyi, although given his widely known loathing for "The Lady", as her supporters call her, many doubt his sincerity.

BEIJING BAULKS

On the latest leg of a regional tour to build a united Asian diplomatic front against the secretive generals who run one of the world's most isolated regimes, Gambari held talks with China's communist rulers on Thursday.

However, Beijing -- one of Myanmar's key trading partners and the closest it has to an ally -- gave no indications it was willing to exert tougher pressure, stressing that words, not sanctions, were the way forward.

"The Myanmar issue, after all, has to be appropriately resolved by its own people and government through their own efforts of dialogue and consultation," State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan told Gambari.

China expressed rare concern about the crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in which the government admits 10 people were killed, but also made clear it would not allow concrete action or legally binding U.N. resolutions against the junta.

Gambari, who is expected to return to Myanmar in early November, did not talk to reporters in Beijing before his scheduled departure to Japan.

India, another regional giant with its eyes on Myanmar's huge natural gas reserves, also baulked at Gambari's request for a tougher line against the junta, the latest incarnation of 45 years of unbroken military rule.

(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley in Beijing)