Officials suggest poll postponement: Suu Kyi party
Play
Yangon - Myanmar election authorities on Tuesday suggested postponing landmark November polls, a spokesman for Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party said, throwing doubt over the timing of the first credible elections in generations.
Election authorities have not publicly announced a delay to the November 8 vote, but a spokesman for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party said officials raised the idea to parties at a meeting in the capital Naypyidaw.
"They asked what we thought about postponing the election," said Win Htein, a spokesman for the NLD, which is forecast to make major gains in the polls -- the first nationwide vote it has contested in a quarter century.
News of the meeting sent ripples of alarm through the former junta-run nation which is already gripped by election fever.
Any attempt to stall the much-anticipated vote would be a major upset in the strife-torn nation whose gradual emergence from junta rule has been widely hailed by the West.
Win Htein did not give a reason for the Union Election Commission's suggestion to postpone the vote.
But he said the NLD and Suu Kyi vehemently opposed it while the ruling party was supportive. The UEC was not immediately available to comment.
Nobel laureate Suu Kyi won a seat in parliament in 2012 as the army eased its grip on power but is forbidden from seeking the presidency under rules which bar the post to a person who married and had children with a foreigner.
Ethnic rebels fight on
Myanmar is still recovering from massive floods over the summer that damaged infrastructure across the country, but the date of the polls was not believed to be threatened.
Officials did however say they had cancelled voting in swathes of northern Shan and Kachin states bordering China because of ongoing fighting with ethnic rebels.
The move had been anticipated and mainly affects areas battered by war or beyond the government's writ, in a country where several ethnic minority armies still resist control by the state.
"Some village areas have security restrictions and we have security concerns about those. Others are in the control of Kachin (rebels) where we are not capable of holding elections," Tun Aung Khaing, a senior election official in Kachin State, told AFP.
The UEC said elections cannot be held in over 400 village areas in total, largely in Kachin and Shan in the north and Karen state in the east. Officials did not say why polls in Karen were cancelled.
A ceasefire between the army and Kachin rebels collapsed in 2011 under a new quasi-civilian government.
The move comes as Myanmar prepares to sign a limited ceasefire on October 15 as it tries to end decades of fighting before elections.
The ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party, an army proxy, swept polls in 2010, unopposed by the NLD and Suu Kyi who was still under house arrest.
The NLD won elections in 1990 but the military rejected the results and repeatedly put Suu Kyi under house arrest until 2010.
