Myanmar’s Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to

Myanmar’s Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to the United States in September on her first visit since spending years under house arrest, a think-tank said on Tuesday.

Suu Kyi, who was elected to parliament this year in a dramatic sign of Myanmar’s reforms, has indicated that she will attend a dinner in New York on September 21 to accept an award from the Atlantic Council, said Taleen Ananian, a spokeswoman for the think-tank.

It would be the 67-year-old Suu Kyi’s first visit to the United States since the 1980s. She spent most of the past two decades under house arrest after a military junta refused to accept her party’s victory in 1990 elections.

Suu Kyi did not travel abroad again until May this year, when she visited Thailand. Last month, she made an extensive tour of Europe, where she was feted in major capitals and admitted that she felt exhausted.

State Department officials said that they had no announcement to make on Suu Kyi’s travels, but it would be highly unlikely that she would visit the United States without meeting her supporters in President Barack Obama’s administration and Congress.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invited Suu Kyi to visit when the top US diplomat paid a landmark visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, in December.

The Atlantic Council dinner takes place in New York at the same time as the United Nations General Assembly, which each year brings leaders from across the world to the global body’s headquarters in Manhattan.

The Atlantic Council said it would present its “Global Citizen” awards to Suu Kyi along with Japan’s Sadako Ogata, a former UN high commissioner for refugees.

Source AP