I

ndonesia has called on Myanmar to allow Aung San Suu Kyi to join the upcoming election after the military junta issued a new regulation, barring the opposition leader from running in the first poll in two decades.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said "the new regulations were regrettable because the poll should be inclusive."

"The new regulation may undermine the poll because it will result in an election that fails inclusivity," he said.

The new political parties registration law excludes anyone convicted by a court of law from joining a political party and reportedly may push Suu Kyi out of her National League for Democracy.

Suu Kyi has spent 14 of the past 20 years in detention and will be released at the end of this November. The exact date of the election has not been announced.

Muhammad Najib, a lawmaker from the National Mandate Party (PAN), said the military junta should stop making up new excuses to ban the Nobel laureate from contesting the long-awaited elections as it would only isolate it more on the international political stage.

"The junta was under international scrutiny for its promise to enforce democracy as they reiterated in regional forums in ASEAN," said Najib.

"They should no longer create new laws or anything to bar Suu Kyi. It will not make the election look more eligible.

Evan A. Laksmana, Centre for Strategic and International Studies researcher, said the new move by Myanmar would be counterproductive.

"They should allow an inclusive system in the election because it will backfire, resulting in more sanctions and isolation."

He said Indonesia and other members of ASEAN had spent little effort to push Myanmar to enforce democratization because they were preoccupied with their own domestic problems.

"Indonesia, as the largest country in ASEAN, is busy engaging major powers, leaving Suu Kyi and Myanmar democratization on the backburner," he said.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported Myanmar's military government Thursday officially annulled the results of the country's 1990 general election, a poll it chose to ignore at the time when the main opposition party won by a landslide.

The 1990 polls were declared null and void because they did not comply with a new parliamentary election law enacted this week, the junta said in a statement published in Thursday's official newspapers.

"It must be deemed that the results of the multiparty democracy elections held under that annulled law have also been annulled automatically since they are not consistent with this new law," it said in the announcement in state media.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) party, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, won the 1990 election, taking 392 of the 485 seats in parliament, but it was not allowed to rule.

The military junta, meanwhile, announced that it had allowed the party to reopen regional branch offices, which have been closed since May 2003.