Sunday, June 17, 2012
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| Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi gives her Nobel Lecture at City Hall in Oslo June 16, 2012. Aung San Suu Kyi finally accepted her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Saturday after spending a total of 15 years under house arrest and said full political freedom in her country was still a long way off. |
Sat Jun 16, 2012
By Balazs Koranyi
OSLO (Reuters) - Myanmar
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi finally received her 1991 Nobel
Peace Prize in Oslo on Saturday after spending 15 years under house
arrest, and said her country's full transformation to democracy was
still far off.
"What the Nobel Peace Prize did was to draw me
once again into the world of other human beings outside the isolated
area in which I lived, to restore a sense of reality to me,"
Suu Kyi said as the packed crowd, led by Norway's King Harald and Queen
Sonja, rose in a standing ovation.
Suu Kyi, 66, the Oxford
University-educated daughter of General Aung San, Myanmar's assassinated
independence hero, said much remained to be resolved in her country.
"Hostilities have not ceased in
the far north; to the west, communal violence resulting in arson and
murder were taking place just several days before I started out the
journey that has brought me here today," Suu Kyi said at the ornate Oslo
City Hall, on her first visit to Europe in nearly 21 years.
"There still remain (political)
prisoners in Burma. It is to be feared that because the best known
detainees have been released, the remainder, the unknown ones, will be
forgotten," she said, wearing a purple traditional Burmese dress and
looking strong and healthy after falling ill on Thursday.
Still, Suu Kyi - elected to
parliament in April - said she was confident President Thein Sein wanted
to put the country on a new path.
"I don't think we should fear
reversal," she told public broadcaster NRK. "(But) I don't think we
should take it for granted there is no reversal."
Suspending rather than lifting
sanctions was also the right move to keep pressure on the government,
she said a day after arriving from Switzerland to a jubilant, dancing
and chanting crowd, which showered her with flowers.
"If these reforms prove to be a
façade, then the rewards will be taken away."
INSTRUMENTAL
Suu Kyi, who spent a total of 15
years under house arrest between 1989 and her release in late 2010,
never left Myanmar even during brief periods of freedom after 1989,
afraid the military would not let back in.
Her sons Kim and Alexander
accepted the Nobel prize on her behalf in 1991, with her husband Michael
Aris also attending the ceremony. A year later Suu Kyi said she would
use the $1.3 million prize money to establish a health and education
trust for Burmese people.
She was unable to be with Aris,
an Oxford academic, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and died
in Britain in 1999.
On Saturday, Kim and Anthony
Aris, her late husband's identical twin brother, attended the ceremony.
Suu Kyi thanked Norway, a nation
of just 5 million people, for its support and the instrumental role it
played in Myanmar's transformation.
In 1990, the Bergen-based Rafto
Foundation awarded its annual prize to Suu Kyi, after a Norwegian aid
worker in South-East Asia highlighted her work.
The award provided lasting
publicity for her non-violent struggle against Myanmar's military junta,
putting her in the international spotlight and setting the stage a year
later for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Norway has also provided a home
to the Democratic Voice of Burma, an opposition television and radio
outlet, which broadcasts uncensored news into Myanmar.
Suu Kyi acknowledged that recent
violence between Rakhine Buddhists and stateless Muslim Rohingyas in
the northwestern Rakhine region was a test of Myanmar's transformation
but she blamed lawlessness for the escalation.
The violence, which displaced
30,000 people and killed 50 by government accounts, flared last month
with a rampage of rock-hurling, arson and machete attacks, after the
gang rape and murder of a Buddhist woman that was blamed on Muslims.
"The very first time a crime
was committed... they should have taken action in accordance with the
rule of law," Suu Kyi told the BBC.
"If they had been able to do
that, and to satisfy all parties involved that justice was done ... I do
not think these disturbances would have grown to such proportions."
Tensions stem from an
entrenched, long-standing distrust of around 800,000 Muslim Rohingyas,
who are recognized by neither Myanmar nor neighboring Bangladesh, and
are largely considered illegal immigrants.
Suu Kyi is also due to visit
Ireland, Britain and France.
(Editing by Sophie Hares and
Ralph Gowling)
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