Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi refuses food for three weeks

The National League for Democracy (NLD) said Suu Kyi had refused to receive food packages from friends for the past three weeks to protest her unlawful detention which has "exceeded the legal limit."

Suu Kyi has been under house detention in her family home in Rangoon since May 2003, on charges of disturbing the peace.

The detention followed an attack by pro-military thugs on Suu Kyi's convoy in Tepeyin, Sagaing division in northern Burma on May 30, 2003. Several of her followers were killed in the melee.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been kept in near complete isolation, allowed monthly visits by her doctor and occasional visits by UN special envoys.

Last month she refused to meet with UN special envoy to Burma Ibrahim Gambari on the grounds that he had done nothing to secure her freedom.

Over the past two months Suu Kyi has been allowed three meetings with her lawyer Kyi Win, which is unusual.

Under Burma emergency law political prisoners can only be kept under detention for a maximum of five years on charges of disturbing the peace, but Suu Kyi's detention was last May extended for another six months, raising legal questions.

Burma's ruling junta has been sending mixed signals about the duration of Suu Kyi's incarceration.

There have been hints that she may be released within six months, but many observers believe it is unlikely that she will be released before the next general election slated for 2010.

Suu Kyi's NLD party won the 1990 polls by a landslide, but the party has been denied power by the military for 18 years and she has been kept under house arrest for around 13 of the past 18 years.

Burma has been under military rule since 1962. Ironically, it was Suu Kyi's father, Aung San, who fathered the military establishment as part of the country's independence movement from its former colonial master Britain.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, is deemed Burma's democracy icon, and one of the few opposition leaders with enough popular and international support to undermine the military's monopoly of political power in the south-east Asian nation.