Suu Kyi honoured by Oxford University

AFP/London

Aung San Suu Kyi poses for photographers at the Bodleian Libraries after receiving an honorary degree at Oxford University in Oxford yesterday

Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday said she was deeply moved as she was honoured by Oxford University, in the city where she studied and brought up the family she would later leave behind.The Myanmar democracy icon also called on the prestigious seat of learning to help educate a new generation of students that could lead the Southeast Asian country along the road from military rule to democracy.“Today has been very moving,” Suu Kyi, 67, said in a speech after she was presented with an honorary doctorate in civil law in the grand surroundings of Oxford’s 17th century Sheldonian Theatre.“During those difficult years I spent under house arrest I was upheld by my memories of Oxford. They helped me cope with the challenges I had to face,” she said.Wearing a traditional longyi skirt under her scarlet academic robes, and flowers in her hair beneath her black velvet cap, Suu Kyi smiled as she received a scroll from university chancellor Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong. After her speech she received a standing ovation from an audience of more than 1,000 dons and students from the university where she studied politics, philosophy and economics in the mid-1960s. She was awarded the doctorate in 1993 but, like the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1991, she was unable to pick it up at the time, fearing that if she left Myanmar she would not be allowed to return.Patten said, in Latin: “Unbowed champion of liberty, who have given your people and the whole world an example of courage and endurance, I on my own authority and that of the whole university admit you to the honorary degree of doctor of civil law.” Suu Kyi spent nearly two decades in Oxford, southern England, and brought up her sons Alexander and Kim there with her English husband, Michael Aris.When she left for her homeland to care for her dying mother in 1988, she could not have imagined it would be nearly a quarter of a century before she would return. She only saw her husband and two sons a handful of times in the intervening years. When her husband was dying in 1999 he urged her to remain in Myanmar and pursue her struggle.