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YANGON : Myanmar's detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has accepted food rations for the first time in a month, an official said Tuesday, after her doctor found her so weak that he placed her on a drip.
The doctor administered intravenous fluids Sunday to the 63-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has been confined to her lakeside Yangon home for most of the last 19 years, the official said.
"She accepted her food supplies Monday evening, after she was given a drip by her doctor, who found that she was too weak on Sunday," the official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Her lawyer Kyi Win on Monday described her as "malnourished" after she had refused to accept her daily rations since August 16.
The Myanmar official said that Aung San Suu Kyi had been allowed to receive copies of magazines such as Time and Newsweek, but so far she had not been allowed to receive any messages from her family.
She has had no communication from her two sons since 2003, according to her National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
Both the government official and NLD spokesman Nyan Win said that she would likely meet with the government’s liaison officer later this week, if her strength improves.
"We hope there will be some progress and good results after the meeting," Nyan Win said.
"We are also expecting to develop to higher-level talks between Daw Suu and senior leadership from this dialogue," he added, referring to Aung San Suu Kyi by an honorific.
Concerns for her health had mounted after she began refusing to accept her food rations, and she and her two maids have been relying on the small stocks of food that she kept in her home, Kyi Win said.
The lawyer said she was not on a hunger strike, but had stopped accepting food deliveries to press for greater human rights.
Aung San Suu Kyi has refused to meet with anyone other than her lawyer and her doctor since early August, declining to hold talks with visiting UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari and with the liaison officer, Labour Minister Aung Kyi.
But the military has allowed her to have an unusual series of meetings with her lawyer as they discuss filing a formal legal appeal against detention.
Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD won a landslide victory in a 1990 election but the government never allowed it to take office. The military has ruled Myanmar since 1962.
- AFP/vm
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