Nobel prize ‘cast light on Burma’

Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said yesterday the Nobel Peace Prize she won while under house arrest 21 years ago helped to shatter her sense of isolation and ensured that the world would demand democracy in her military-controlled homeland.

Ms Suu Kyi spoke about her time under house arrest as she began her long-delayed acceptance speech to the Norwegian Nobel Committee inside Oslo City Hall.

She said: “Often during my days of house arrest it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world.”

Receiving the Nobel accolade in 1991 “made me real once again”, she added.

Ms Suu Kyi said the award cast an enduring spotlight on the struggle for political freedom in Burma.

“We were not going to be forgotten,” she said.

Throughout her speech, Ms Suu Kyi explored her views on the ideals of peace, the causes of war, the bonds of common humanity and the power of kindness.

She told the committee: “The First World War represented a terrifying waste of youth and potential, a cruel squandering of the positive forces of our planet. And for what?

“Nearly a century on, we have yet to find a satisfactory answer.

“Are we not still guilty, if to a less violent degree, of recklessness, of improvidence with regard to our future and our humanity? War is not the only arena where peace is done to death. Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.”

Ms Suu Kyi then went on to hail an enlightened age . She said: “We are fortunate to be living in an age when social welfare and humanitarian assistance are recognised not only as desirable but necessary.

“I am fortunate to be living in an age when the fate of prisoners of conscience anywhere has become the concern of peoples everywhere, an age when democracy and human rights are widely, even if not universally, accepted as the birthright of all.”

And she set peace as a common goal for humanity: “Absolute peace in our world is an unattainable goal. But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveller in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation. “Even if we do not achieve perfect peace on earth, because perfect peace is not of this earth, common endeavours to gain peace will unite individuals and nations in trust and friendship and help to make our human community safer and kinder.

“Of the sweets of adversity – and let me say that these are not numerous – I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learnt on the value of kindness.”