U.N.'s Gambari set to return to Myanmar, hopes low

By Aung Hla Tun

BANGKOK (Reuters) - U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari is due to arrive in Myanmar on Thursday amid waning optimism about his mission to get the ruling military junta to start talks with the opposition on political reform.

"We cannot expect an immediate change for the better out of his visit," Nyan Win, a spokesman for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), told Reuters on Wednesday.

It will be Gambari's fifth visit to the former Burma since he was appointed in early 2006 and his third since a crackdown on monk-led protests in September last year.

It will also be his first chance to hold face-to-face talks with the generals since their shock announcement last month of a constitutional referendum to be held in May, to be followed by a general election in 2010.

The continued house arrest of NLD leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and the opposition's boycott of the constitution-drafting process, have led many foreign governments to reject the charter and election timeline as a sham.

The NLD has criticised it, but stopped short of calling on supporters to vote no in the referendum.

"Our leaders will tell him some bare essentials we would like of the referendum to be held by the regime in May when we meet him," Nyan Win said, without elaborating.

Gambari's message to the junta on his previous visits has been to release all political prisoners, Suu Kyi included, and include the opposition and Myanmar's host of ethnic groups in the constitution-drafting process.