Suu Kyi prepares for US visit

[Poi]

Fort Wayne's Burmese community is trying to arrange a visit to the city by Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy leader of their native Myanmar.

Two local Burmese activists said Monday they are hoping the Nobel Peace Prize winner will travel to Fort Wayne in late September. Suu Kyi, 67, has announced plans to be in New York on Sept. 21 to accept an award from the Atlantic Council, which advocates trans-Atlantic cooperation and international security.

UTun Oo said local Burmese have been in contact with a representative for Suu Kyi, about her making a public appearance in Fort Wayne during her U.S. trip.

"She wants to come here," Tun Oo said.

He predicted the former political prisoner might attract 10,000 or more people if she comes to town.

Tun Oo said, "not only Burmese but all Americans would have a chance to honor her" for promoting democracy and liberty in Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma.

Ko Win Shwe said Burmese residents will meet today with city government officials about the potential visit. Both he and Tun Oo said a site has not been selected should Suu Kyi travel to Fort Wayne.

Karen Davis, a public information officer for Mayor Tom Henry's administration, said a meeting is scheduled today involving city officials and Burmese representatives. But she said the U.S. State Department would likely take the lead if Suu Kyi were to visit.

"We haven't had any confirmation from her people or the State Department," Davis said.

Noel Clay, a spokesman for the State Department in Washington, D.C., said he had no details on Suu Kyi's itinerary while she is in the U.S.

"We would leave her traveling plans up to her; it's her trip," Clay said.

The State Department did say in July that Suu Kyi would be invited to meet with federal officials during her U.S. visit, according to news media reports. Congress plans to give her its highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, on Sept. 19.

Win Shwe and Tun Oo are members of a 70-person Suu Kyi welcoming committee that has formed in Fort Wayne. The group has met at Foster Park on two recent Sundays, according to an announcement sent to The Journal Gazette.

The committee is making posters in anticipation of a Suu Kyi visit, the announcement said, and would greet her arrival with posters, flags and flowers.

More than 3,800 Burmese live in Allen County, according to the 2010 census. The majority of the state's roughly 7,900 Burmese are residents of either Allen or Marion counties.

Many local Burmese are refugees brought here by Catholic Charities of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese or who relocated from other U.S. cities.

Amid gradual political reforms, Myanmar's ruling military freed Suu Kyi in 2010 after she had spent much of a quarter-century under house arrest. In recent months, she was elected to a seat in the nation's year-old parliament, went to Oslo, Norway, to collect the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991 and visited Switzerland, France, Britain, Ireland and Thailand.

President Obama this year eased certain investment sanctions against Myanmar and appointed an ambassador to the country, the first in 22 years.

Full Story: Journal Gazette

[KoKo]

One of the world's best known political activists, Burmese democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, will come to the Bay Area next month during her first visit to the United States in decades.

The Sept. 29 visit by the 67-year-old Suu Kyi is expected to attract thousands of people, many of them Burmese exiles who consider the former political prisoner a hero for her long refusal to bend to an oppressive military regime.

"She's encouraging, acknowledging, supporting us," said Nyunt Than, an Albany resident who heads the Burmese American Democratic Alliance. "This is her way to show her appreciation for what the community has done for her."

Suu Kyi spent nearly 15 years under house arrest before she was freed in 2010 and in April won election to the Myanmar Parliament. Her election has symbolized Myanmar's shift from military rule to more democratic governance, but Than said "she will need much more support to make democratic reform in Myanmar a reality."

Myanmar's military rulers changed the country's name from Burma in 1989 but many exiles still use the old name.

The Bay Area has the nation's largest Burmese population, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, which counted more than 8,500 residents who describe themselves as Burmese. Some came as economic migrants decades ago, others fled as student dissidents in the 1980s and 1990s or are refugees escaping more recent turmoil.

Suu Kyi's visit unexpectedly answered a plea made by Santa Clara software engineer Yasmin Vanya when she visited her homeland this spring and met with the Burmese leader.

"I said 'please come to America, and please come to the Bay Area. She said, not now, but maybe sometime in the future,'" Vanya said.

Turns out sometime is happening sooner than the Santa Clara resident expected.

Suu Kyi had not left her country for 24 years until this spring, when she met with refugees in neighboring Thailand and attended an economic summit in Europe.

The U.S. State Department is sponsoring Suu Kyi's travel to Washington, D.C., on Sept. 19 to pick up the Congressional Gold Medal lawmakers awarded her in 2008 while she was still under house arrest.

Than said Suu Kyi might also visit other Burmese hubs including Fort Wayne, Ind., Los Angeles and New York City, where she lived in her 20s while working for the United Nations.

Her local hosts expect to set a place where Suu Kyi can give a talk.

Suu Kyi knows of the support she has had in the activist region, said Vanya, secretary of the Burmese American Women's Alliance. Area activists organized 1990s Berkeley and San Francisco boycott movements against the Myanmar regime and a Palo Alto birthday celebration held in her honor in June.

Source: Mercury News

[Saiua]

Myanmar's democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to the United States next on Sunday, a spokesman for her party told AFP, in a trip that will see her awarded Washington's highest honour.

It will be her first visit to the US since she was put under house arrest in 1990.

"The lady will travel on September 16," said Nyan Win, spokesman for the Nobel laureate's National League for Democracy (NLD) party, without adding further details.

As part of her visit Suu Kyi, who was elected to parliament this year in a dramatic sign of Myanmar's reforms, will travel to Washington to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.

The medal is the top honour bestowed by the US Congress, which voted to award it to Suu Kyi in May 2008 when the prospect of her leaving Myanmar looked remote.

Secretary of state Hillary Clinton invited the democracy champion to Washington when she paid a landmark visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, in December.

Suu Kyi, 67, made her first forays outside Myanmar in more than two decades earlier this year, with visits to Thailand, Switzerland, Norway, Ireland, Britain and France, receiving rock star welcomes along the way and being lauded as a model of peaceful resistance to dictatorship.

The trip allowed her to finally give her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo and to receive awards granted during the almost two decades she spent under house arrest.

Myanmar was for decades ruled by an iron-fisted junta, but a reformist government under ex-general President Thein Sein has freed political prisoners and allowed Suu Kyi's party back into mainstream politics.

Thein Sein is expected to head to the United States during a UN summit, at roughly the same time as Suu Kyi.

US President Barack Obama last month waived visa restrictions so that Myanmar's leader could travel freely during the UN General Assembly.

The Obama administration, hoping to encourage further reforms, has sent a US ambassador to Myanmar for the first time in more than two decades and has eased restrictions on investment by US companies.

Source: The Times Of India

[Pear]

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a longtime pro-democracy activist in Myanmar who spent nearly two decades under house arrest, will speak Sept. 24 at the University of Louisville.

Suu Kyi’s visit — organized by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a fierce critic of Myanmar’s military junta — comes amid reforms in the former Burma that recently led the United States to restore full diplomatic relations.

In April, Suu Kyi was elected to the country’s parliament, more than 20 years after she was placed under house arrest in the violent crackdown that followed a short-lived pro-democracy movement.

McConnell, who has championed Suu Kyi’s cause and was among the U.S. leaders, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to recently visit the once-closed Southeast Asian nation, invited Suu Kyi to stop in Louisville, university officials said.

“Daw Aung San Suu Kyi symbolizes the peaceful struggle for freedom, democracy and reconciliation in Burma,” McConnell said. “Having her visit the University of Louisville and the Commonwealth of Kentucky is a great honor. I appreciate that she accepted my invitation, and we look forward to welcoming her to the Bluegrass State.”

The visit is also particularly important in Louisville, where hundreds of mostly ethnic Karen refugees have been resettled from Myanmar since 2006. Many have despaired of ever returning home, and some are still skeptical of the regime’s reforms.

“The last thing they’d ever expected would be that Suu Kyi would be coming to Louisville,” said U of L political science professor Jason Abbott, who holds the Aung San Suu Kyi Endowed Chair and directs the Center for Asian Democracy.

“It will be an enormous boost to their confidence in the reform process” and could provide a “glimmer of hope” for those wishing to return without facing persecution.

Suu Kyi, who has become an international symbol of the struggle for human rights and democracy, is scheduled to receive a Congressional Gold Medal, Congress’ highest civilian honor, in Washington on Wednesday. She’ll also get the Atlantic Council’s Global Citizen Award in New York City Sept. 21.

In Louisville, she is slated to speak at 9 a.m. in Comstock Hall at the university’s School of Music as part of a distinguished speaker series offered by U of L’s McConnell Center.

Source: courier-journal

[Poi]

Democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi left Myanmar Sunday for a landmark trip to the United States, set to see her feted by the US president and quizzed on the progress of reforms.

The Nobel laureate, who was elected to parliament this year, flew out of Yangon accompanied by new US ambassador to Myanmar Derek Mitchell, according to an AFP reporter at the scene.

Suu Kyi's high profile visit, the first to the US since she began her democracy struggle in 1988, will include a trip to Washington to meet US President Barack Obama whose government has been at the forefront of Western re-engagement with the long-time military dominated country.

She will also be showered in awards including the Congressional Gold Medal, the top honour bestowed by the US Congress, and meet Burmese diaspora groups as far apart as New York and San Francisco.

During her near three-week trip Suu Kyi is likely to be questioned about reforms that have seen Myanmar take tentative steps onto the global stage after decades under a secretive military regime.

"I think Daw Suu can talk at least about the reforms situation in Myanmar. She will get this opportunity," Nyan Win, a spokesman for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party told AFP, using a common honorific for the opposition leader.

Suu Kyi will travel with just three other people, he added, and is expected to arrive in Washington on Monday.

Despite the predicted red carpet welcome her visit is laced with potential political trouble.

Suu Kyi's stay coincides with that of Myanmar's President Thein Sein, who is due in the US later in the month to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

"There is a risk that she will overshadow this significant first US visit by Thein Sein -- who has not yet really gotten the international recognition that he deserves for the remarkable reform process that he has put in place," according to Richard Horsey, an independent Myanmar analyst.

Horsey said it would be "particularly unhelpful" if the US president chose to meet Myanmar's democracy champion but not its leader, "which unfortunately looks to be the case".

The 67-year-old could also face tricky questions on the treatment of stateless Rohingya Muslims after a wave of deadly communal violence in western Myanmar.

Suu Kyi has remained cautious in her comments about the group, who many in Myanmar believe are foreigners and therefore not entitled to citizenship.

Last week the US embassy in Yangon expressed its "great concern" at the humanitarian situation in Rakhine state.

Following sweeping moves to lift or suspend sanctions by other Western nations this year, Washington in July gave the green light to US companies to invest in Myanmar, although a ban on all imports from the country remains.

Suu Kyi lived in New York between 1969 and 1971, according to her Nobel prize biography, where she worked at the United Nations secretariat.

Source: Radio Netherlands

[KoKo]

Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi will be honored in Washington this week and presented Congress’s highest award, the latest milestone in her remarkable journey from political prisoner to globe-trotting stateswoman.

The Nobel Peace laureate’s 17-day US tour, starting Monday, which will include meetings at the State Department and likely the White House. She then goes to New York, the American Midwest and California. The trip comes as the Obama administration considers easing its remaining sanctions on the country also known as Burma.

Since her release from house arrest in late 2010, Suu Kyi has transitioned from dissident to parliamentarian as Myanmar has shifted from five decades of repressive military rule, gaining international acceptance for a former pariah regime.

After being confined to her homeland since 1989 because she was either under detention or afraid she wouldn’t be permitted to return, Suu Kyi has in the past four months spread her wings. She has traveled to Thailand and five nations in Europe, where she was accorded honors usually reserved for heads of state.

Revered by Republicans and Democrats alike, Suu Kyi will get star treatment too in the US, although her schedule is being carefully planned to avoid upstaging the itinerary of Myanmar President Thein Sein, who arrives in the US the following week to attend the UN General Assembly’s annual gathering of world leaders in New York.

“The idea that she will be at the Rotunda of the US Capitol, to receive the highest award Congress can give, just a couple of years after she was under house arrest in her own country, is just remarkable,” said Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley, one of the lawmakers who sponsored her 2008 award of the Congressional Gold Medal.

For years, some of Washington’s most powerful politicians have been among Suu Kyi’s strongest advocates, and it’s been a rare area of bipartisan consensus. Both when sanctions against the Myanmar junta were imposed, and over the past year when they have been suspended, Democrats and Republicans have found common cause.

The Obama administration is now considering easing a ban on imports from Myanmar into the US, the main plank remaining in the tough economic sanctions that Washington has chipped away at this year to reward the progress toward democracy.

While Congress last month renewed the sanctions for another year, President Barack Obama could waive its provisions. He may, however, look for further concrete action by Myanmar to earn it — such as the releases of hundreds of political prisoners who remain in detention despite the freeing of hundreds of other dissidents this year.

Suu Kyi is under political pressure from Thein Sein’s government to press the US to remove the restrictions — and it’s a step that she appears open to, although many of her longtime supporters in exile oppose it, saying Myanmar should not be rewarded at a time when ethnic violence is escalating in some parts of the country.

“We don’t want to say whether the US should maintain the import ban or not,” Suu Kyi’s party spokesman Nyan Win said ahead of her visit. “I understand the US is keeping the import ban because they want to keep a watch on the country’s political and economic reform and I think the U.S should continue to observe (the situation).”

Combining high-level meetings with award ceremonies and get-togethers with Burmese expatriates, Suu Kyi will have a frenetic schedule in the US.

She spends four days in Washington, where she will meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — who made a landmark visit to Myanmar last December — and House and Senate leaders. The White House has yet to announce whether she will meet President Barack Obama. Suu Kyi will also address human rights activists and meet Burmese journalists at Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

She then travels to New York, where she worked from 1969-71 at the United Nations. Her schedule is carefully arranged not to clash with Thein Sein’s but she is slated to attend a high-level meeting organized by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a day before the Myanmar leader addresses the General Assembly.

Suu Kyi will then go to Kentucky — home state of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell — to address the University of Louisville, before traveling to meet with one of America’s largest Burmese communities in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She will also visit San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Source: Firstpost

[Saiua]

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi warned on Tuesday that reforms in her country had cleared only the "first hurdle" and said she supported an easing of U.S. sanctions as part of a broad partnership with Washington.

The Nobel laureate said the economic sanctions were a useful tool for putting pressure on Myanmar's military government in the past, but now the people need to consolidate democracy without outside help.

"I do support the easing of sanctions, because I think that our people can start taking responsibility for their own destiny," she said at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington on the opening day of a two-week tour of the United States.

"I do not think we should depend on U.S. sanctions to keep up the momentum of our movement to democracy. We have to work at it ourselves and there are very many other ways in which the United States can help us," said Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi did not specify which of the complex web of sanctions that Washington began phasing out this year she wanted removed. State Department officials did not indicate that she had made any formal requests on sanctions during talks on Tuesday with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"We are going to do this in a measured way as we see progress, and the secretary did lay out the list (of what more needs to be done)," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters after the meeting.

"We will continue to watch that and make our decisions as we see more progress," she added.

GUARD AGAINST BACKSLIDING

Suu Kyi, who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for championing democracy in opposition to a military junta that held her under house arrest for years, began her tour with talks with Clinton and a speech hosted by the USIP and the Asia Society.

"We have crossed the first hurdle but there are many more hurdles to cross," she said in the speech, her first public appearance in the United States.

Clinton told the same event Myanmar still "had a lot of work to do."

"Political prisoners remain in detention. Ongoing ethnic and sectarian violence continues to undermine progress toward national reconciliation, stability and lasting peace," she said.

Suu Kyi's followers and the quasi-civilian government needed to work together to heal past wounds and "guard against backsliding because there are forces that would take the country in the wrong direction if given the chance," said Clinton.

She later visited the office of Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-funded broadcaster, and addressed the conflict between ethnic Rakhines and Muslim Rohingyas that in June erupted in violence that killed 80 people and displaced thousands.

"Hate and fear are very closely related," Suu Kyi told RFA's Burmese language service in an interview.

"You have to remove the roots of hatred — that is to say you have to address these issues that make people insecure and that make people threatened," RFA quoted her as saying.

Suu Kyi, whose last stay in the United States was in the 1970s as a United Nations employee, will visit the large emigre community from her country in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and make a series of public speeches from New York to California.

Her U.S. tour will coincide with a visit by Thein Sein, Myanmar's reformist president, who heads to New York on September 24 to address the U.N. General Assembly.

GEOPOLITICS AND MYANMAR

Thein Sein, a former junta general, was scheduled to meet U.S. officials on the sidelines of U.N. meetings and his aides said he would try to convey Myanmar's urgent need for the import ban and other American sanctions to be eased.

Suu Kyi's election to parliament in April helped to transform Myanmar's pariah image and convince the West to begin rolling back sanctions after a year of dramatic reforms, including the release of about 700 political prisoners in amnesties between May 2011 and July.

The 67-year-old Suu Kyi, striking a professorial tone in her first U.S. speech, said the rapid normalization of U.S.-Myanmar ties over the past 18 months was "particularly illustrative of the dimensions of geopolitics and history."

Many people around the region are asking, she said, whether U.S. engagement with Myanmar - a country of 64 million people that lies between China and India - "was aimed at containing the influence of China in Asia."

She said Myanmar's engagement with the United States did not mean that Myanmar-U.S. ties "in any way can be seen as a hostile threat to China" and that she sought good ties with both countries as well as with India.

BIG TEST IN 2015

Before Suu Kyi arrived in the United States on Monday, Myanmar announced a pardon of more than 500 prisoners in an amnesty that included at least 80 political detainees, according to activists.

The announcement, seen as a step that could strengthen the former military state's growing bonds with Washington, did not make clear if any of the 514 were political prisoners, but two activist groups who monitor dissidents jailed in Myanmar said more than 80 were given presidential pardons.

The U.S. State Department reacted cautiously to news of the amnesty, repeating its call for the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners.

John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said he wanted to hear more from Suu Kyi about a looming showdown in the next election in 2015, which will determine whether the generals who have run the country since 1962 will peacefully hand over power to civilians.

"You can be a politician or you can be a human rights activist who speaks frankly, but I don't think you can be both," he said.

"The full and frank assessment of human rights groups is that she's not prepared to play a very critical role with the government, nor does she speak the underlying truth about the political situation - the huge test that's coming up in 2015," added Sifton.

Source: Reuters

[Pear]

[KoKo]

Myanmar’s state broadcaster has aired footage of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi overseas for the first time.

Thursday night’s news report showed her accepting the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in Washington, D.C.

US medal.jpg (79.75 KiB) Viewed 740 times

Suu Kyi has been feted as a heroine of democracy during travels this year that followed two decades of isolation at home. She collected her Nobel Peace Prize and addressed Britain’s parliament while visiting Europe in June.

Suu Kyi was a virtual non-person in Myanmar’s state media until a reformist, elected government took office last year. Thursday’s broadcast reported that Suu Kyi praised President Thein Sein for initiating the reforms.

The congressional award was not reported in state newspapers Thursday. Deputy Information Minister Ye Htut said the news came too late and would be in Friday’s editions.

Source: Washington Post

[KoKo]

Worrying about military rule doesn't keep Myanmar's democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi up at night, but just a little bit of noise does.

Suu Kyi offered a rare glimpse into her personal side Thursday when she took questions and offered advice to young human rights activists in Washington.

One activist asked what challenges and problems keep the 67-year-old Nobel peace laureate up at night.

Suu Kyi confided that's she's a very light sleeper. She said every little noise disturbs her, but serious issues — of which the former prisoner has encountered many during two decades of political upheaval in Myanmar — usually don't.

She said she's learned that, in time, even what looks like the most horrible event in your life will appear less serious.

Suu Kyi was speaking to a gathering organized by Amnesty International USA a day after receiving Congress' highest honor for her peaceful struggle for democracy, the ceremonial highlight of a landmark trip across America.

Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest in the country also known as Burma, separated from her family, and unable to see her husband, British academic Michael Aris, before his death from cancer in 1999. Suu Kyi was released in late 2010 and has since joined hands with members of the former ruling junta that detained her to push ahead with political reform.

"I honestly never despaired although there were times when I was very very worried about our people outside," she said, referring to supporters of her political party that won 1990 elections but was barred from power. "Because house arrest is a lot easier than in prison."

She said she loved reading and that enabled her to feel as free as anyone else.

"Through my books I could get to wherever I wished to," she said.

Despite the cruelties committed during 50 years of military rule — including bloody crackdowns on protesters and wars on ethnic minorities — Suu Kyi said she always retained a deep affection for Myanmar's army, because her father, independence hero Aung San, was its founder.

"Although they kept me under house arrest they treated me well. Most of them treated me as my father's daughter," she said. "That is they treated me as a member of the family, albeit a rather troublesome one."

She urged the several hundred young activists assembled in front of her not just to campaign for the release of political prisoners but to try to change the mindset of the jailers, by disabusing them of the emotion that motivates them: their own fear.

Suu Kyi goes next to New York, where 40 years ago, she worked for the United Nations. She'll then travel to Kentucky, Indiana and California to speak on campuses and meet Burmese expatriates.

Source: Seattle PI