After 24 years in Myanmar Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi travels to Bangkok

Bangkok, May 30 (ANI): Burma's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suy Kyi arrived in Bangkok today, making her first trip outside Myanmar for the first time in 24 years.

Suy Kyi was jostled by excited well wishers, while security officials tried to control a surging crowd of mostly Burmese migrant workers on her first day in a foreign country.

Suu Kyi, 66, is visiting a market near Bangkok to see the working conditions of Burmese migrants.

The last time the NDL General Secretary, Suu Kyi was in in Bangkok was in 1988.

According to The Age, she is getting pop-star treatment in the exuberant, traffic-choked Thai capital where she is seeing a booming, sprawling city of skyscrapers, freeways, an elevated railway system and a skyline dotted with massive cranes.

She spent 15 out of the past 24 years under arrest at her two storey colonial house on Rangoon's Inya Lake.

Until now Suu Kyi had refused to leave Burma, fearing the ruling generals would not allow her to return, even after her husband Michael Aris, an Oxford scholar, was diagnosed with cancer in 1999.

However, after the former political prisoner and daughter of Burma's independence hero Aung San was elected to parliament on April 1 this year, and after a year of dramatic reforms in Burma, she has been given permission to travel abroad as frequently as she likes.

She is due to visit Norway, Switzerland and Britain in mid-June, cementing her arrival on the global stage.

She will be in England on June 17, her birthday, where one of her two sons lives and her husband is buried. (ANI)

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