UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari met junta chief Than Shwe and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday at the end of a four-day mission to Myanmar to try to halt a bloody crackdown on democracy protests.
As Gambari left, there was no word on whether his single meeting with the 74-year-old Senior General, who rarely heeds the outside world, had persuaded him to relax his iron grip or start talks with Suu Kyi.
Gambari, despatched to the former Burma amid the clampdown on the biggest democracy protests in 20 years, arrived in Singapore on Tuesday and was due to meet the city-state's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, on Wednesday. The Singapore government statement gave no further details.
In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council condemned "violent repression" in Myanmar and called on the junta to allow its investigator to visit for the first time in four years. "It's time for the government of Myanmar to respond to this truly universal appeal," Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, UN special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, told the council.
Gambari will return to New York to brief Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations said. The envoy met Than Shwe and other members of the junta's senior leadership to "discuss the current situation in Myanmar," it said, adding Gambari also met Suu Kyi but providing no details.
Last week's monk-led protests in Myanmar's largest city, Yangon, of up to 100,000 people and marches in other areas were halted by security forces who raided monasteries, imposed curfews and killed 10 people, by the official count. The death toll is likely far higher, human rights groups and Western governments say.
Many feared a repeat of 1988, when the army crushed a nation-wide uprising and killed an estimated 3,000 people over several months. Witnesses reported slightly fewer troops on the streets of Yangon on Tuesday.
But raids on homes by pro-junta gangs looking for dissident monks and civilians suggested Gambari's shuttle diplomacy and international calls for restraint had made little difference.
"They are going from apartment to apartment, shaking things inside, threatening the people," a Bangkok-based Myanmar expert with many friends in Yangon said. "You have a climate of terror all over the city." US charge d'affaires Shari Villarosa told Reuters from Yangon that arrests continued throughout Gambari's mission.
"We have heard that arrests are continuing at night, like at 2 o'clock in the morning," she said. "This government keeps power through fear and intimidation and they are trying to intimidate people to stay off the streets."
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, which won an election landslide in 1990 only to be denied power by the army, said 130 of its members and other activists had been detained. In another sign the army felt it had halted its most serious threat since the 1988 uprising, it shortened by two hours a night curfew imposed last week during the protests against decades of military rule and deepening economic hardship.
Gambari had flown to Naypyidaw, the new jungle capital, to convey international outrage at last week's crackdown, which prompted "revulsion" in Southeast Asian neighbours and a rare Chinese call for restraint.
Having met three minister-generals and Suu Kyi at the weekend, the former Nigerian foreign minister was made to wait until Tuesday for his audience with Than Shwe, a delay that did not augur well for those urging reconciliation.
The UN Security Council, which backed Gambari's emergency visit, had hoped for some sort of dialogue between a military that has been in charge for 45 years and Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, in detention for nearly 12 of the last 18 years.
At UN headquarters on Monday, Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win accused "political opportunists" of trying to create a showdown with foreign help to exploit the ensuing chaos. In a speech to the annual General Assembly, he said "normalcy" had returned and urged the international community to refrain from measures he said would add fuel to the fire.
One shocking picture of the body of a maroon-robed, shaven-headed monk lying in a pond has been posted on dissident news Web sites and there are unconfirmed reports of monks caged at a technical institute in north Yangon on hunger strike.
One of Asia's brightest prospects and the world's largest rice exporter when it won independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar is now one of the region's poorest countries despite an abundance of timber, gems, oil and natural gas.
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