THE detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed out of her home in Rangoon to pray with hundreds of Buddhist monks on the sixth day of their peaceful protests against Burma’s military junta yesterday.

Witnesses said she was in tears as she met the monks in her first such appearance since her house arrest in 2003. The monks also marched on the Chinese embassy, the regime’s strongest supporter.

Suu Kyi, 62, wore yellow, a colour associated with reverence in southeast Asia, when she stepped out of the house and joined the robed protesters in chanting Buddhist sutras calling for love and kindness.

“The monks just walked past chanting holy scriptures peacefully. I saw Suu Kyi inside the compound,” said a young man who followed the monks.

She has been kept out of public view and denied all but a handful of visitors for 11 out of the past 18 years, so her move was seen as a huge symbolic boost for the protests that gripped Burma all last week.

Military intelligence agents did not intervene and soldiers even moved aside the barricades that normally block access to her home on Rangoon’s University Avenue to allow the monks to pass.

The daily demonstrations by monks, who are revered in Burma, seem to have caught the generals off guard. Up to 10,000 clergy also marched in the streets of Mandalay, a city of 200 monasteries in upper Burma, according to a report in an exile magazine yesterday.

The protests were set off by fuel price rises but have rapidly turned into an expression of loathing for the junta.

The military has so far hesitated to resort to the violent repression with which it has crushed all such challenges since it extinguished Burma’s democracy in 1990.

Leaders of the monks have called on the whole population to pray in the doorways of their homes on Tuesday evening. The tempo of this peaceful challenge – the most significant in almost two decades – is due to quicken.

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