SINGAPORE — A state-run newspaper in Burma accused the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi of tax evasion yesterday for spending the money that she won for the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, and other foreign awards, overseas rather than inside the country.

The newspaper, the New Light of Burma, said the government was “very considerate” to keep her under house arrest rather than to jail her for life for what it said were many offenses.

Aung San Suu Kyi, 61, has been under house arrest for 11 of the past 17 years in the former Burma, including the year that she won the peace prize.

The accusation by the paper is the latest, and one of the more imaginative, of periodic verbal assaults against her by the government.

“She avoided paying taxes to the State by asking her family members abroad to spend all her cash awards provided by international organizations and honorariums presented for her works she had created abroad instead of spending the money in the country,” the English-language newspaper said.

“It was very considerate of the government to put only restriction on her, instead of punishing her in accordance with law for the acts she had committed,” the newspaper said.

“If she is sentenced to prison terms for all the offenses she has committed, she will never get out of the jail in her life.”

The government regularly accuses her of collaborating with foreign governments and undermining national unity.

“On one level it sounds ridiculous,” the coordinator of the regional human-rights group Altsean-Burma, Debbie Stothard, said, referring to the accusation of tax evasion. “But on another level, it could actually hint at another onslaught against Aung San Suu Kyi.”

She added: “The woman has been under such strict conditions of detention, it’s not as though she was free to go on a shopping spree.”

In 1992, Aung San Suu Kyi announced that she would use the $1.3 million in Nobel Prize money to establish a health and education trust for the people of Burma. Among many other awards, the Freedom Forum, a foundation based in Virginia that supports free speech, awarded her a $1 million “free spirit prize” in 2003 for her advocacy of democracy.

The attack follows the defeat last week in the U.N. Security Council of a resolution sponsored by America that condemned Burma as a threat to international peace and security. The resolution, which among other things accused Burma of human-rights abuses, human trafficking, and dealing in drugs, was defeated in a rare double veto by China and Russia. The two nations argued that the Security Council was not the proper forum to air these issues.

In a statement read that evening on Burma radio stations, the government said, “The failure to adopt the United States resolution is a victory of truth and a victory for the Burma people and the people who love the truth.”

In a commentary on Wednesday, the New Light of Burma set forth its theory for Washington’s opposition to the junta and its support for Aung San Suu Kyi. “It is quite clear,” the newspaper said. “It aims to set up its military bases, help its businessmen gain a foothold and monopolize the domestic business world, and enable its spies to meddle in the internal affairs of Burma to make a mess of things in the region.”

The daughter of one of the nation’s independence heroes, U Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi came to prominence in 1988 during pro-democracy demonstrations that were crushed in a military massacre and brought the junta to power.