Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was sworn in as a member of parliament Wednesday, assuring she will work for “what is best for the people” after two decades of personal struggle against an authoritarian regime.
The 66-year-old Nobel peace laureate stood and took the lawmakers’ oath at the national assembly building in Naypyidaw along with 33 other members of her party newly elected to the lower house, having ended a deadlock with authorities over the oath in a surprise compromise days before the session.
Surrounded by reporters at the end of the ceremony, Aung San Suu Kyi said that her National League for Democracy (NLD) had made the decision to enter parliament because it was what the people wanted, as the country looks toward national reconciliation.
Burma’s former military junta stepped down in March last year, paving the way for a new nominally civilian government to institute a number of democratic reforms.
"What we want is not the priority, but the main thing is to do what is best for the people. We hope to serve the best interests of the people,” she said.
The NLD, after having swept nearly all of the seats up for grabs in a landmark April 1 vote, boycotted their first parliamentary sessions last week over the wording of the swearing-in oath, which requires legislators to vow to “safeguard” the military-written constitution.
After the ceremony, she said her party would “consult with our colleagues” about making revisions to the oath from within parliament.
“The key to all this is flexibility,” she said.
Military-dominated government
Aung San Suu Kyi, who won 1990 elections by a landslide but was prevented by the then-ruling military junta from taking office, is now positioned as the leader of the largest opposition bloc in a parliament dominated by members of the military and military-backed parties.
She said it did not bother her “at all” to sit in parliament alongside members of the military, the same institution responsible for keeping her under house arrest for most of the past two decades, because she had “tremendous goodwill” toward her fellow parliamentarians.
“We would like our parliament to be united. It’s not that we want to remove anybody, we just want to make improvements,” she said.
The NLD, with about 7 percent of the seats in parliament, is expected to work with other members of the opposition and ethnic minority parties to push for changes to the constitution, which reserves a quarter of the seats in parliament for members of the military.
She noted it was ethnic minority parties, which represent groups long on the fringe of the country’s politics, that had “smoothed the way” for the NLD’s decision to join parliament without revisions to the oath.
With NLD members now in office, their position as the main opposition force could set the stage for a challenge to the current government in the upcoming general elections in 2015.
The international community greeted Aung San Suu Kyi’s entrance into parliament as a step toward democracy in Burma, with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcoming it as “an important moment bur Burma’s future.”
“A genuine transition toward multiparty democracy leading to general elections in 2015 will help build a more prosperous society,” she said in a statement.
Reported by RFA’s Burmese service. Translations by Khin May Zaw. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.