Aung San Suu Kyi to be Myanmar foreign minister

Myanmar's president-elect Htin Kyaw has named Aung San Suu Kyi as foreign minister, her National League for Democracy (NLD) party said, giving the Nobel laureate a formal role in government despite her being blocked from the presidency.

The NLD achieved a landslide election win in November, but she is barred from becoming president by a clause in the military junta’s constitution that disqualifies anyone with close foreign relatives.

The veteran rights activist’s late husband, the scholar Michael Aris and her two sons, are British.

NLD spokesman Zaw Myint Maung told reporters that she would assume the foreign minister role and would also hold several other roles, widely expected to include minister of the president’s office, of electric power and energy, and education.

“She will be the foreign minister, mainly. If she wants to share the duties she has in other ministries with qualified people, she can assign them,” he told reporters.

Ms Suu Kyi will be required to give up all her NLD work and her seat as an MP if she becomes a minister. She will also be the only woman in the cabinet.

The incoming government will take power next month.

The foreign ministry position will give her international profile and also a seat on the security council, which is dominated by the military.

Expectations are high among Myanmar’s 51.5 million people that Ms Suu Kyi will be able to resolve the country’s many problems, from the need for faster economic growth to ethnic tensions.

While the military junta has ceded power to the NLD, which won 80 per cent of the vote in November, it remains influential, retaining three key ministries and a veto over any changes Ms Suu Kyi tries to implement to the constitution.

A wildly popular figure in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), Ms Suu Kyi vowed she would rule "above" the next leader, and earlier this month she named Htin Kyaw, a close ally, as the country's first head of state who does not hail from a military background in 53 years.

Myanmar has been undergoing a major transformation from an isolated southeast Asian state, shunned by the international community, into a democracy that is opening up to the world.

However, the transition has not been entirely smooth, and talks with the military to find a way around the constitution failed.

The negotiations have not been without tension. After she and the NLD won a general election in 1990, Ms Suu Kyi spent 15 of the next 22 years under house arrest after the junta annulled the election.

There is also growing optimism that tense relations between Myanmar’s ethnic groups may improve under Ms Suu Kyi’s leadership.

This optimism was underscored by news from the United Nations, which said that about 25,000 members of the Rohingya Muslim minority group have left camps for displaced people in west Myanmar and returned to the homes they fled during sectarian violence in 2012.

The number of people still in camps has fallen to about 120,000 from 145,000 in Rakhine state, Vivian Tan, regional spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency, told Reuters.

In May last year, 30 bodies were found in graves, including Rohingya refugees, near a human-trafficking camp close to the Thai-Malaysian border, as well as in Malaysia itself.

Additional reporting: agencies