Posted June 22, 2012 09:25:07
Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has become the first foreign woman to address both houses of the British parliament.
In a landmark speech, Ms Suu Kyi called on Britain's help for Burma, and said her country needed to learn from parliamentary democracies.
"For us in Burma, what you take for granted, we have had to struggle for long and hard," she said.
"So many people in Burma gave up so much in Burma's ongoing struggle for democracy and we are only now just beginning to see the fruits of our struggle."
She said the reforms being put forward by Burmese president Thein Sein should be welcomed.
The 67-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate said her South-East Asian homeland had yearned for democracy for decades, and could not afford to waste its chance to build a "truly democratic and just society" after 47 years of military rule.
"I am here, in part, to ask for practical help, help as a friend and an equal," Ms Suu Kyi said.
Since World War II, United States president Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI, South African president Nelson Mandela and French president Charles de Gaulle are the only other foreigners to have addressed both houses in Westminster Hall.
"We have an opportunity to re-establish true democracy in Burma," Ms Suu Kyi said.
"If we do not use this opportunity, if we do not get things right this time around, it may be several decades more before a similar opportunity arises."
She also encouraged "democracy-friendly investment" in her impoverished homeland, two days after Mr Sein pledged to follow dramatic political changes with economic reforms.
But Ms Suu Kyi warned Burma's development was continuing to suffer at the hands of the violence that has gripped parts of the country since independence in 1948, and urged aid for the tens of thousands displaced in recent months.
"In the immediate term we also need humanitarian support for the many people in the north and west, largely women and children, who have been forced to flee their homes," she said.
She earlier held talks with British prime minister David Cameron at his 10 Downing Street office, and with heir to the throne Prince Charles and his wife Camilla at their Clarence House residence, where she planted a tree in the garden.
Mr Cameron defended his decision to invite Mr Sein to Britain for talks, given that he was, until last year, a member of the junta which ran Burma for more than two decades.
"There is a process of reform in Burma. In order for that to succeed we have to work with the regime," he said.
At a press conference, Ms Suu Kyi backed the decision to invite the president.
"We don't want to be shackled by the past. We want to use the past to build up the future," she said.
Suu Kyi heads to France on June 26 for the last leg of her European tour.
ABC/AFP
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, government-and-politics, world-politics, united-kingdom, asia, burma