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Formerly imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize to finally travel outside Myanmar

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
April 20th, 2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Nobel Peace Prize winner and laureate, as well as pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi is scheduled to travel outside of her native land of Myanmar for the first time in 24 years. The party of the newly elected Member of Parliament has announced that Suu Kyi has accepted invitations to visit Norway and Britain in June.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Myanmar officials say that Suu Kyi had applied to travel, but has not yet been granted a passport. Suu Kyi was invited to visit Britain during a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron in Yangon last week.

"Two years ago I would have said thank you for the invitation, but sorry," she said of Friday's offer by the British leader.

The fact that she is considering the offer, rather than rejecting it outright, showed "great progress" had been achieved in Myanmar she said.

In Oxford, where she formerly attended university in the seventies, will be on the agenda for the Britain visit, Nyan Win, spokesman for her National League for Democracy (NLD) party told Reuters.

Win said the exact route and dates for Suu Kyi's first travels outside the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma, in more than two decades has not yet been set.

The 66-year-old Suu Kyi, first detained in 1989, spent 15 of the last 21 years in detention.

After her release in November of 2010, Suu Kyi refused to leave the country during the brief periods when she was not held by authorities for fear of not being allowed to return.

Suu Kyi's expected travel caps months of change in Myanmar, following a series of reforms under President Thein Sein, a former general. Parts of the new regime's reforms are a historic by-election on April 1 that won Suu Kyi one of her party's 43 seats in a year-old parliament.

After 50 years of military rule, Thein Sein's other reforms included the release of political prisoners, more media freedom, dialogue with ethnic armed groups and an exchange rate unification seen as crucial to fixing the economy.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

Article brought to you by: Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)