YANGON - U.N. envoy Ibrahim Gambari met separately with junta chief Than Shwe and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday, ending a four-day mission to Myanmar to try to halt a crackdown on the biggest democracy protests in 20 years.
Gambari expects to return to the former Burma in early November at the government's request, U.N. sources said.
As he left Myanmar, there was no word on whether Gambari's single meeting with Senior General Than Shwe, who rarely heeds the outside world, had persuaded him to relax his iron grip or start talks with Suu Kyi, a long-detained Nobel laureate.
Gambari, a former Nigerian foreign minister, was returning to New York on Friday after carrying a message from Suu Kyi to the military government, said the U.N. sources, who did not give further details.
Last week's monk-led protests in Myanmar's largest city, Yangon, of up to 100,000 people and marches in other areas were halted by security forces who raided monasteries, imposed curfews and killed 10 people, by the official count.
The death toll is likely far higher, human rights groups and Western governments say. Some feared a repeat of 1988, when the army crushed a nationwide uprising and killed an estimated 3,000 people over several months.
In Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council condemned "violent repression" in Myanmar and called on the junta to allow its investigator to visit for the first time in four years.
"Light must absolutely be shed on what happened," Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, told the council, which adopted a resolution by the European Union deploring beatings, killings and arbitrary detentions.
Gambari arrived in Singapore on Tuesday and was due to meet the city-state's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, on Wednesday. The statement by Singapore, which is current chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations and has been sharply critical of Myanmar's junta, gave no further details.
'CLIMATE OF TERROR'
Witnesses reported slightly fewer troops on the streets of Yangon on Tuesday.
But raids on homes by pro-junta gangs looking for dissident monks and civilians suggested Gambari's diplomacy and international calls for restraint had made little difference.
"They are going from apartment to apartment, shaking things inside, threatening the people," a Bangkok-based Myanmar expert with many friends in Yangon said.
"You have a climate of terror all over the city."
