| Suu Kyi to give lecture 21 years after Nobel |
OSLO More than two decades after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will finally be free to give her long-awaited Nobel lecture in Oslo on Saturday.
“It is without a doubt one of the great moments in Nobel history,” the current head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjoern Jagland, said. “For these 21 years, Aung San Suu Kyi has shown that it was not only justified to award her the prize but she has also shown herself to be a moral leader for the whole world. Even though she spent most of this time in isolation, her voice became increasingly heard.”
On October 14, 1991, the Nobel Committee annou-nced it had awarded the Peace Prize to Suu Kyi “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights,” propelling the petite democracy champion onto the global stage.
Suu Kyi was under house arrest at the time, after the military junta refused to acknowledge her opposition National League for Democracy’s crushing election victory the previous year. “The regime was not opposed to her travelling abroad (to pick up her prize) but she risked not being allowed to return to her country,” said Nobel Committee secretary Geir Lundestad.
Before Suu Kyi, only a handful of Nobel laureates had been prevented from travelling to Oslo to collect their Peace Prizes: German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov and Polish Solidarity opposition leader Lech Walesa.
In Suu Kyi’s case, it was her husband, Michael Aris, and their two sons Alexander and Kim who accepted the prize on her behalf at the formal ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 1991.
Accepting the award in her stead, her elder son Alexander said: “I know that if she were free today my mother would, in thanking you, also ask you to pray that the oppressors and the oppressed should throw down their weapons and join together to build a nation founded on humanity in the spirit of peace.”
Agence France-Presse
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