Aung San Suu Kyi receives her Nobel Peace Prize
Updated June 17, 2012 06:51:39/ABC News
Suu Kyi accepts Nobel Peace Prize Photo: Aung San Suu Kyi received a thunderous standing ovation as she accepted the award (Reuters: Lise Aserud)
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Map: Norway
Twenty-one years after she was first awarded it, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has finally received her Nobel Peace Prize.
Ms Suu Kyi spent much of the past two decades under political house arrest, before being finally released in 2010.
Introducing the democracy icon, the chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, said the award stood for democracy and peaceful ethnic conciliation.
He said the Burmese opposition leader upheld those principles.
"It is you Aung San Suu Kyi who translated the committee's words into reality through your inspiring tenacity, sacrifice and firmness of principle," he said.
Ms Suu Kyi looked emotional as she received a thunderous standing ovation in the cavernous Oslo City Hall, packed with dignitaries, royals and Burmese exiles.
The Oxford University-educated daughter of General Aung San, Myanmar's assassinated independence hero, said that in 1991 the award made her feel part of the real world again at a time of intense isolation.
"The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart," Ms Suu Kyi said.
"As the days and months went by and news of reactions to the award came over the airwaves, I began to understand the significance of the Nobel Prize.
"It had drawn me back into the wider human community. And what is more important, it had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma."
The opposition leader, who spent a total of 15 years under house arrest between 1989 and her release in late 2010, never left Burma even during brief periods of freedom after 1989, afraid the military would not let back in.
Her sons, Kim and Alexander had accepted the Nobel prize on her behalf in 1991, with her husband Michael Aris also attending the ceremony.
A year later Ms Suu Kyi announced she would use the $1.3 million prize money to establish a health and education trust for Burmese people.
And she was unable to be with Mr Aris, an Oxford academic, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and died in Britain in 1999.
But despite the sweeping reforms that have accompanied her release, Ms Suu Kyi said that full political freedom in her country was still a long way off.
Although the government has signed ceasefires with scores of ethnic rebel groups, she pointed to continued bloodshed - conflict with the northern Kachin Independence Army and communal unrest between Buddhists and a Muslim minority.
"Absolute peace in our world is an unattainable goal," Ms Suu Kyi said in her acceptance speech.
"Hostilities have not ceased in the far north; to the west, communal violence resulting in arson and murder were taking place just several days before I started out the journey that has brought me here today."
Fifty people have been killed and scores wounded in the recent communal clashes in Rakhine state, state media said Saturday, as the United Nations warned of "immense hardship" faced by thousands displaced by rioting.
Ms Suu Kyi also advocated caution about transformation in Burma, whose quasi-civilian government continues to hold political prisoners.
"There still remain such prisoners in Burma. It is to be feared that because the best known detainees have been released, the remainder, the unknown ones, will be forgotten," she said.
Saying that "one prisoner of conscience is one too many", she urged the audience: "Please remember them and do whatever is possible to effect their earliest, unconditional release." ....<cont>
