Suu Kyi urges freedom through reconciliation

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/11/2010 (5821 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar’s democracy heroine, Aung San Suu Kyi, is vowing to press ahead in her decades-long fight for political liberty while also calling for compromise with other political parties and the ruling junta after taking her own first steps back to freedom.

Suu Kyi, who was freed from house arrest Saturday amid a divided political landscape and days after widely criticized elections, made clear she faces a precarious position: manoeuvring between the expectations of the country’s pro-democracy movement and the realities of dealing with a clique of secretive generals who have kept her locked up for much of the past two decades.

“I’ve always believed in compromise,” the Nobel Peace laureate told reporters Sunday in the dilapidated offices of her party, the National League for Democracy. “I am for national reconciliation. I am for dialogue. Whatever authority I have, I will use it to that end… I hope the people will support me.”

This Southeast Asian nation, once known as Burma, has been ruled by the military since 1962, leaving it isolated from much of the international community and battered by poverty.

Earlier Sunday, Suu Kyi spoke to a rapturous crowd of as many as 10,000 people who jammed the street in front of the office.

She urged her followers to work for national reconciliation.

“If we want to get what we want, we have to do it in the right way; otherwise, we will not achieve our goal however noble or correct it may be,” she cautioned.

— The Associated Press