YANGON, Myanmar, and NEW DELHI — Myanmar’s main opposition party, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, agreed Monday to end its week-long boycott of Parliament and swear an oath to a constitution it has resisted.
The decision came as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon praised the country’s transition to democracy and called on the West to lift economic sanctions.
Officials with the opposition National League for Democracy said the newly elected lawmakers planned to take their seats in Parliament Wednesday.
Suu Kyi said she was not backing down. “Politics is an issue of give and take,” she told reporters. “We are not giving up. We are just yielding to the aspirations of the people.”
The apparent reversal suggests the group wasn’t making progress in getting the oath changed. Its leaders might have decided that the issue wasn’t worth making a prolonged stand over and that it risked making them look petty in the eyes of the 2 million supporters who voted for them, analysts said.
“The wording in the oath doesn’t matter,” said Maung Wuntha, the Yangon-based editor of the People’s Age, a weekly journal. “The most important thing is Aung San Suu Kyi and her party’s candidates should enter the Parliament. … I don’t think that the Parliament will resent her and make it more difficult for her to do reform.”
Suu Kyi’s long-banned party, which boycotted the 2010 general election, won 43 out of 45 seats in by-elections in April. Party members balked at taking their seats when Parliament opened April 23, insisting the government change the wording to “respect” rather than “safeguard” the constitution.
But digging in too hard over the oath could have raised questions among foreign aid groups, overseas governments and hard-liners at home concerning the party’s willingness to engage in practical politics rather than political grandstanding, analysts said.
“Disarray in the reform process will only strengthen the hands of conservatives who have grave misgivings,” said Carl Thayer, professor emeritus with the Australian Defense Force Academy. “They will say, ‘We told you so.’ “
