Myanmar sets by-election date ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဧၿပီ ၁ ရက္ က်င္းပမည္

By Hla Hla Htay (AFP) 

YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar is to hold by-elections on April 1, a government official said Friday, which could propel democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi into the army-dominated parliament.

"The by-election will be held on April 1," a Myanmar government official who asked not to be named told AFP.

Suu Kyi, who officially registered her opposition party a week ago, has already said she intends to stand in the polls.

Her National League for Democracy (NLD) was given the green light by authorities to rejoin mainstream politics earlier this month, but is waiting for official approval of its application.

Suu Kyi, 66, has spent much of the past two decades in detention and was released from house arrest a few days after a controversial November 2010 general election.

The upcoming vote will offer her an opportunity to seek a seat in a parliament that remains dominated by allies of the former military junta.

Those who wish to take part will need to register between January 16 and 31, said the Myanmar official, who added that an announcement would be made by the Union Election Commission.

The by-election is to fill seats vacated by those elected in the November 2010 vote who have since become ministers and deputy ministers in the government.

A total of 48 seats are expected to be up for grabs, although this would not be enough to threaten the resounding majority held by the ruling military-backed party.

One quarter of parliament's seats are taken up by the army while the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which is packed with former military men, holds about 80 percent of the remainder.

The NLD was stripped of its status as a legal political party by the junta last year after it chose to boycott the 2010 poll.

But relations between the new government and the opposition have seen a significant thaw in recent months, with high profile dialogue between former generals, including the president, and Suu Kyi.

The Nobel Laureate expressed cautious hope that democracy would come to her country, during a meeting with Hillary Clinton as part of a landmark visit by the US Secretary of State earlier this month.

Myanmar's new government, which came to power in March, has made a series of reformist moves in an apparent attempt to improve its international standing.

These included releasing some of the country's many political prisoners, suspending construction of an unpopular Chinese-backed mega-dam and holding peace talks with the country's main armed ethnic groups.

The NLD won an election in 1990 by a landslide, while the democracy campaigner was under house arrest, but the ruling generals disregarded the result.

Suu Kyi's party refused to take part in last year's poll -- the first in two decades -- mainly because of rules that would have forced it to expel imprisoned members.

But an amendment to a law on political parties has since removed the contentious clause that said prisoners could not be party members, as well as a condition that all parties must agree to "preserve" a controversial 2008 constitution.

The NLD recently chose the image of a fighting peacock craning towards a white star as its new ballot symbol, replacing its trademark bamboo hat, which was used by a breakaway group that participated in the 2010 election.

Further details of the by-elections are expected to be announced in local newspapers on Saturday.

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ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဧၿပီ ၁ ရက္ က်င္းပမည္

ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို လာမယ့္ ၂၀၁၂ခုႏွစ္ ဧၿပီ ၁ ရက္မွာ ျပုလုပ္မွာ​ ​ျဖစ္​ၿပီး​ေနျပည္ေတာ္ေကာ္မရွင္က ျပည္နယ္တိုင္းေဒသႀကီး ေကာ္မရွင္ရံုးေတြထံ စာပို့ အေၾကာင္းၾကားလိုက္တယ္လို့ အမည္မေဖာ္လိုတဲ့ တိုင္းေဒသႀကီး ေကာ္မရွင္လူႀကီး တဦးက ေျပာပါတယ္။

ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၃၀ ရက္ညပိုင္းမွာ အစိုးရသတင္းဌာနေတြက သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ဖြယ္ ရွိတယ္လို့လည္း ေျပာပါတယ္။ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေလာင္း အမည္စာရင္းကို ဇန္န၀ါရီ ၃၁ ရက္ ေနာက္ဆံုးထားၿပီး ေကာ္မရွင္ကို ေပးပို့ရမယ္လို့ အဲဒီ ေကာ္မရွင္လူႀကီးက ဒီဗီြဘီကို ေျပာပါတယ္။

credit DVB