Suu Kyi meets Myanmar refugees in Norwegian city of Bergen, asks them to build ethnic harmony

OSLO - Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi paid a jubilant visit Sunday to the Norwegian city of Bergen, where she urged refugees from her ethnically divided homeland to build harmony and support cease-fires.
Suu Kyi flew from Oslo to the fjord-studded west coast a day after delivering her acceptance speech for the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. As in Oslo, thousands filled a central Bergen square to hear a concert and speeches in her honour. Teenage Burmese girls, many in native gowns or robes, kissed her on the cheek.
She met leaders of a Bergen-based group that offered her early support, the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights, which awarded her its highest prize in 1990. As with her Nobel, she couldn't personally claim her prize at the time because Myanmar's dictatorship had placed her under house arrest.
At another meeting in a hotel ballroom Suu Kyi, 66, spoke at length in Burmese to more than 100 Myanmar refugees living in Bergen, many of them members of minority groups hostile to the country's military-backed government. She urged them to say nothing to undermine tentative cease-fires negotiated since 2010 between government and ethnic militia forces.
Highlighting the clashes this month in western Myanmar between majority Buddhists and minority Muslims that drove an estimated 30,000 Muslims from their homes, she said Myanmar's exiles abroad could play a greater role in healing divisions. She urged them not to blame other groups for the violence, insisting all factions were culpable, and asked them to offer greater vocal support for the cease-fires.
On Monday, Suu Kyi will speak at an annual Oslo retreat for some of the world's leading peace mediators, then travel to the Irish capital, Dublin, for evening celebrations in her honour. She's scheduled to appear alongside U2 singer Bono, her most high-profile Irish backer, at both the Oslo and Dublin events.
Myanmar's rulers first imprisoned Suu Kyi in 1989, the year before her National League for Democracy swept to victory in national elections. The government annulled that result and kept Suu Kyi under house arrest for most of the next 21 years, freeing her in 2010 following the country's first elections in two decades.
Suu Kyi's party boycotted that election but has pursued reconciliation with the military-backed government of President Thein Sein formed as a result of that vote. Last month Suu Kyi led her party into Myanmar's national assembly as the opposition for the first time.
She launched her European tour after receiving assurances from the government that she could travel freely without risk of being blocked from returning home, her longstanding fear. She has already visited Switzerland and, after Ireland, will spend several days in England, then finish in France.
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Online:
Rafto Foundation, www.rafto.no
© The Canadian Press, 2012

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