Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to Norway and Britain in June, according to a spokesperson from her opposition party, marking the first time in more than two decades the Burmese prodemocracy leader will be leaving the country.
Nyan Win, spokesperson for the National League for Democracy (NLD), said the 66-year-old Nobel laureate would travel first to Norway, although he said the exact dates and itinerary are yet to be decided.
"Daw Aung San Su Kyi said she plans to go abroad in June,” he told RFA.
“Norway and the U.K. are on her agenda. So far that's all she said."
Aung San Suu Kyi will visit Oxford University, where she graduated with a B.A. in 1969, during her trip to England, Nyan Win said.
A spokesperson from the Norwegian Foreign Ministry confirmed that Aung San Suu Kyi and Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere had discussed her visit to Oslo during a phone call on Sunday.
Agence France Presse quoted an unnamed official as saying that Aung San Suu Kyi had applied for a passport ahead of Buddhist New Year celebrations last week, adding that the opposition leader “is hoping to go to at least three countries.” The official provided no further details.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent most of the last 22 years under house arrest before being freed in November 2010, has not traveled outside of Burma since 1988.
She had returned to Burma from living in Britain that year at first to tend to her ailing mother, but later to lead the country’s pro-democracy movement against the then-ruling military junta. She was jailed in her lakeside residence in Rangoon soon after.
In 1991, while incarcerated, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the opposition leader a Nobel Peace Prize, but she was refused permission by the military regime to travel to Oslo to accept it. She has long said she would like to travel to Norway to pay her gratitude for the country’s support.
And in 1997, while temporarily free from house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi refused to travel to the UK to visit her British husband Michael Aris who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, because she feared that the Burmese government would not let her return to the country.
The ruling military junta would not grant Aris a visa to visit Burma and he succumbed to his illness in 1999, having last seen his wife four years earlier.
British Prime Minister David Cameron had invited Aung San Suu Kyi to visit his country during a brief meeting with her on Friday at her home, where the two discussed the lifting of EU sanctions against Burma to reward recent progress in democratic reforms by the country’s new nominally civilian government.
Ongoing reforms
It is believed that all travel restrictions have now been lifted on Aung San Suu Kyi, who is expected to take office on April 23 after winning a parliamentary seat in by-elections earlier this month.
The by-elections saw a resounding victory for her NLD party, which won 43 of the 45 parliamentary seats up for grabs, and could pave the way for Aung San Suu Kyi to run for the Burmese presidency in 2015, when the next general elections are scheduled to be held.
Allowing the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi to participate in the April 1 polls was the latest in a series of economic and political reforms by the government of Burmese President Thein Sein, who this weekend will make the first visit to Japan by a leader of the Southeast Asian nation in nearly three decades.
The five-day trip comes amid growing interest from Japanese companies in exploring investment opportunities in Burma since the country began those reforms, bringing it out of isolation.
President Thein Sein’s government has also released a number of political prisoners and improved dialogue with ethnic minority groups since taking power a year ago, and Western nations that have long held sanctions in place against Burma are taking note.
The United States Treasury Department on Tuesday eased financial sanctions on Burma to enable private U.S.-based groups to do charity work in the impoverished country in areas such as democracy-building, health and education, sport, and religious activities.
And European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said Tuesday that the EU would ease its sanctions imposed on Burma following decisions made by the foreign ministers of member states at their next meeting in Luxembourg on April 23.
"In January, we suspended the visa bans on the Government of [Burma]. At the end of this month, we will do more," Ashton told the European Parliament, without elaborating.
In February, the EU lifted a travel ban on 87 Burmese officials, including Thein Sein, but kept a freeze on their assets. It also maintains an arms embargo, a ban on gems, and an assets freeze on nearly 500 people and 900 entities in Burma.
Reported by RFA’s Burmese service. Translated by Khin May Zaw. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
