Myanmar piles on Aung San Suu Kyi with an extension of her house arrest

THE farce in Myanmar continues. Aung San Suu Kyi, 64, who has been under house arrest for most of the past 20 years, has been sentenced by Myanmar's military regime to 18 more months of house arrest.

Her original "crime" was that she led a political movement to replace the generals with a democratic government.

In 1990, when she was already under house arrest, the generals called a free election, expecting to win it. Her party won it. She should have been prime minister. Instead, the generals annulled the election, arrested the winners and kept the power themselves.

Since then, this slender, soft-spoken woman has been an icon of human rights. She has won the Nobel Peace Prize. She has the world's sympathy. What she does not have is her freedom, or freedom for her country.

She is the daughter of a national hero and is one herself. The generals are too afraid to kill her and too afraid to let her out. When she breaks one of their rules, they extend her sentence.

Her recent "crime" was not turning in an American man who swam across a lake to her house uninvited and pleaded that he was too exhausted to swim back.

The man, John Yettaw, 53, said he was bearing a message from God that she was in danger of assassination. She put up with this fool for two days, made him leave, and he was caught.

For crashing the home of a political prisoner, Yettaw has been sentenced to seven years at hard labor. It is a grim prospect.