Aung San Suu Kyi received two standing ovations inside Oslo’s city hall as she gave her long-delayed acceptance speech 21 years after she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her unflagging support for democracy in the face of arrest and imprisonment in her military-controlled homeland of Myanmar.
The 66-year-old champion of political freedom praised the power of her 1991 Nobel honor both for saving her from the depths of personal despair and shining an enduring spotlight on injustices in distant Myanmar.
“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. … And what was more important, the Nobel Prize had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma. We were not going to be forgotten,” she said during her 40-minute oration — part of her first European visit since 1988.
(READ the story in the CS Monitor)