Myanmar Referendum Announcement Slammed

(11 Feb 08 - RV) Myanmar’s biggest dissident group today announced that a referendum announced at the weekend on an army-made constitution in Myanmar will be a "major battlefield".

In a statement the "88 Generation Students" -- named after a brutally suppressed 1988 uprising -- called on the former Burma's 53 million people to reject the charter in the May vote.

The army, which has run Myanmar, formally known as Burma, under various guises since
1962, says the referendum will be followed by "multi-party, democratic elections" in 2010.

The elections would be the first since 1990, when opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won a huge landslide only to see the generals ignore the result.

Director of the Burma Campaign in the UK Mark Farmaner says the referendum is not a genuine commitment to democracy...