Nobel Peace Prize shattered my isolation: Suu Kyi

Suu Kyi received standing ovations inside Oslo's city hall as she gave her acceptance speech.

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi declared today that the Nobel Peace Prize she won while under house arrest 21 years ago helped to shatter her sense of isolation and ensured that the world would demand democracy in her military-controlled homeland.

Suu Kyi received two standing ovations inside Oslo’s city hall as she gave her long-delayed acceptance speech to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in front of Norway’s King Harald,Queen Sonja and about 600 dignitaries. The 66-year-old champion of political freedom praised the power of her 1991 Nobel honor both for saving her from the depths of personal despair and shining an enduring spotlight on the injustices in

distant Myanmar.

“Often during my days of house arrest,it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world,” she said to a silent chamber,which had been lined with rainbows of fresh cut chrysanthemums and towers of orchids for the occasion. “There was the house which was my world. There was the world of others who also were not free but who were together in prison as a community. And there was the world of the free. Each one was a different planet pursuing its own separate course in an indifferent universe.

“What the Nobel Peace Prize did was to draw me once again into the world of other human beings,outside the isolated area in which I lived,to restore a sense of reality to me It had made me real once again … And what was more important,the Nobel Prize had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.