Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi to Make Historic Overseas Trip

Posted April 18th, 2012 at 10:00 am (UTC-5)
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A spokesman for Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi says she will visit Norway and Britain in June, on her first trip outside Burma in 24 years.

Nyan Win told reporters in Yangon Wednesday that the 66-year-old Nobel laureate will visit the Norwegian capital of Oslo, home to the Nobel prizes, and the British city of Oxford, where she attended university in the 1970s.

Aung San Suu Kyi has long said Norway would be her first destination if and when she could travel. And British Prime Minister David Cameron invited her to Britain during a visit with her in Burma last Friday.

Aung San Suu Kyi spent much of the past two decades in detention under Burma's former oppressive military government, which stepped aside last year. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 but was unable to travel to Oslo to accept it because she was under house arrest.

In 1999, she refused an opportunity to travel to Britain to visit her husband, who was dying of cancer, saying she feared she would not be allowed back into Burma afterward.

Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in November 2010. She was elected to parliament in Burma's April 1 by-elections, in which her National League for Democracy Party claimed a landslide victory.

She and her allies will take their seats on April 23, becoming the main opposition party in a parliament dominated by military-backed political parties.

Since taking office a year ago, President Thein Sein has enacted a series of democratic reforms, including greater press freedom and the release of many political prisoners.

Several Western nations, including the United States and Britain, have rewarded those reforms by lifting some of the many long-standing sanctions against Burma.

On Sunday, Norway's foreign ministry announced it was lifting economic sanctions on Burma. But its arms embargo and limitations on military cooperation with Burma remain in force.