Democracy icon reflects on Nobel Prize

A day after Burma's opposition leader and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi gave her Nobel speech and greeted cheering crowds in Oslo, she was to head Sunday to the Norwegian fjords for nuts-and-bolts talks on her country's future.

The veteran activist - on her first European tour in a quarter-century after enduring years of house arrest for her freedom struggle - has been celebrated since she started her five-nation Europe tour in Switzerland this week.

Her visit has been hailed all the more because of the rapid change in her home country, where a former military junta that held the nation for decades in an iron grip has pledged to follow a path to democracy.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate will today visit another human rights organisation that has honoured her, the Rafto Foundation based in the coastal city of Bergen, which gave her its annual award in 1990.

Her prize "for her peaceful struggle under the military dictatorship", like the Nobel the following year, was accepted by her family, as Suu Kyi feared she would not be allowed to return to Burma if she left the country.

"Her visit means very, very much to us," said the foundation's executive director, Therese Jebsen, speaking from Bergen about Suu Kyi, the Oxford-educated daughter of the country's independence hero.

"It's actually the greatest thing that's happened in the history of the Rafto Foundation," Jebsen said.

"She has been part of our history for 22 years. She has been one of our most important sources of inspiration."

Suu Kyi, after morning talks with Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store, was then due to fly to Bergen, a picturesque city with multi-coloured rows of wooden houses on the harbourside that is known as the Gateway to the Fjords.

In closed talks at the Rafto Foundation, Suu Kyi will meet non-government groups and a business school, who will ask how they can support development in her impoverished country as it reopens to the world, Jebsen said.

A topic of special concern will be how Burma goes on to manage its vast natural resources, especially oil and gas, in a way that benefits the people.

Burma's political reforms - from allowing Suu Kyi's party into mainstream politics to freeing political prisoners - have led the United States, European Union and others to roll back or suspend long-standing sanctions.

Some now fear a free-for-all business bonanza in the country, and Suu Kyi herself has said that ethical, transparent and "human-rights friendly, democracy-friendly investment is what we're looking for".

Jebsen said that Norway, a rare liberal democracy among the world's big oil-producing countries, may have lessons and technical advice to help Burma "manage the resources in a democratic way".

Suu Kyi, speaking about her country's broader transformation in her Nobel speech, advocated "cautious optimism . . . not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith".

After her huddle in the Rafto House for Human Rights, of which Suu Kyi is the patron, she will meet the city's Burmese exile community at a hotel, then address a public meeting in the city centre before flying back to Oslo.

Her whirlwind Europe trip - during which she fell ill in Switzerland, citing jetlag and exhaustion - will also see her visit Britain, where she will address parliament and celebrate her 67th birthday, as well as Ireland and France.

Suu Kyi has declared that 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.

She received two standing ovations inside Oslo's city hall as she gave her long-delayed acceptance speech to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in front of Norway's King Harald, Queen Sonja and about 600 dignitaries.

The champion of political freedom praised the power of her 1991 Nobel honour both for saving her from the depths of personal despair and also shining an enduring spotlight on injustices in distant Burma.

"Often during my days of house arrest, it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world," she said to a silent chamber, which was lined with rainbows of freshly cut chrysanthemums and towers of orchids for the occasion.

"There was the house which was my world. There was the world of others who also were not free but who were together in prison as a community. And there was the world of the free. Each one was a different planet pursuing its own separate course in an indifferent universe.

"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."

Suu Kyi, who since winning freedom in 2010 has led her National League for Democracy party into opposition in Burma's parliament, offered cautious support for the first tentative steps toward democratic reform in her country. But she said progress depended on continued foreign pressure on the army-backed government.

"If I advocate cautious optimism, it is not because I do not have faith in the future, but because I do not want to encourage blind faith," she said.

"Without faith in the future, without the conviction that democratic values and fundamental human rights are not only necessary but possible for our society, our movement could not have been sustained throughout the destroying years," she said, referring to the past two decades since Burma's military leaders rejected her party's overwhelming triumph in 1990 elections, one year after Suu Kyi's own imprisonment.

Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, introduced Suu Kyi as a leader of "awe-inspiring tenacity, sacrifice and firmness of principle".

"In your isolation, you have become a moral leader for the whole world," he said from the podium, turning to the seated Suu Kyi.