Aung San Suu Kyi's Freedom Speech Transcript

In army-ruled Myanmar, Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi called for freedom of speech. Get transcript of Aung San Suu Kyi's Freedom Speech.

After taking first steps back to freedom from seven years of house arrest, democracy heroine of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi is eager to work with the generals who incarcerated her and fellow democratic system advocates in her first speech and she is promising to press ahead in her decades-long fight for political liberty. On Saturday, 13 November 2010, she was untied from house arrest. The military junta delivered a victory and backed for a party six days after Myanmar’s first election in 20 years.

Suu Kyi made clear, days after widely criticized elections that she faces a precarious position between the hopes of pro-democracy movement of the country and the realities of dealing with a clique of secretive generals, who have kept her imprisoned for much of the past two decades. After spending fifteen of the past twenty one years in imprisonment, for 65 years old, Suu Kyi, the speech sets the tone to re-engage with her supporters.

According to the Irrawaddy, Suu Kyi plans to pay attention to the views of her fellow citizens and push for national reconciliation in the country previously recognized as Burma, where 2,200 political prisoners are still behind bars. The military has ruled this Southeast Asian nation, once recognized as Burma since 1962, and leaving it remote from much of the international community and battered by poverty.

It has also turn into an increasingly important regional trading hub in recent years, and its natural gas reserves and hydroelectric potentials have taken it close to energy-hungry China and India. Suu Kyi spoke earlier Sunday to an ecstatic mass of as many as ten thousand people, who stuck the street in front of the office. Though, the speech was technically unlawful, any meeting of over a handful of people desires government permission in Myanmar, the authorities made no arrests.

Suu Kyi told the crowd, "I believe in human rights and I believe in the rule of law. I will always fight for these things," and "I want to work with all democratic forces and I need the support of the people." She cautioned, "If we want to get what we want, we have to do it in the right way; otherwise we will not achieve our goal however noble or correct it may be".

Myanmar runs an online magazine based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, The Irrawaddy, according to it, Suu Kyi said in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital, “I am prepared to talk with anyone,” and “I have no personal grudge toward anybody.” On Sunday, the Nobel Peace laureate told reporters in the dilapidated offices of her party, "I've always believed in compromise," and "I am for national reconciliation. I am for dialogue. Whatever authority I have, I will use it to that end ... I hope the people will support me."

Suu Kyi told BBC World Service radio in an yesterday, “I think we will have to sort out our differences across the table, talking to each other, agreeing to disagree, or finding out why we disagree and trying to remove the sources of our disagreement,” and “There are so many things that we have to talk about.”

Comment of Suu Kyi on free speech resounded in a nation, where each song, book, cartoon and planned piece of art needs endorsement by censors rooting out political messages and criticisms of Myanmar's authoritarian system.