Suu Kyi vows to bring exiled countrymen home

BANGKOK: Aung San Suu Kyi vowed on Friday to work towards bringing home hundreds of thousands of Myanmar people who fled her impoverished and war-torn country under its former military leaders.

The democracy champion was speaking during her first visit as a state leader to neighbouring Thailand, where legions of low-paid Myanmar migrants prop up the economy with back-breaking labour.

Over 100,000 refugees who fled ethnic conflicts with the Myanmar army are also kept in Thai camps along the border.

"What we want is that all people displaced from our country should come back to us and should come back to the kind of conditions which they will never want to move again," Suu Kyi told a press conference in Bangkok. "For this we will need to do a lot of work," she cautioned, stressing that it would take time to revive an economy battered by mismanagement under the former junta, whose five-decade reign plunged the country into brutal poverty.

"Job creation is of the greatest importance for our country.  After a decades-long campaign against Myanmar’s repressive military leaders that included years under house arrest, Suu Kyi is now steering the country’s first civilian government in generations after sweeping historic November polls.