 Wait, the microphone, could you say your name and your organisation? Hello, nice to meet you. I'm from Hong Kong TV News Channel. I'm Cecilia Kwok, Kwok Wingsi. Nice to meet you on Sanshu TV. Actually, you have been fighting for democracy and freedom of people for many years. What are your advice to Hong Kong people for those who are striving for democracy in Hong Kong? And secondly, do you think that Hong Kong people are losing their freedom and democracy under the one-country-two-system policy? Thank you. I think if people really want freedom and democracy, they get it. I've always believed that people always get what they really want. The mind, when they find it, it might not be quite what they expected. But we have to believe in what we are doing if we are to succeed. So the first requirement is that the people of Hong Kong should know what they really want and believe in it. If they believe in it, they will get it. It's very simple, but of course that means a lot of hard work. Hello, I'm Amrita Chiba, Deutsche Welle Television from Germany. Great to see you looking so well after one year's coming out of your isolation. My question is, you said that you want to stand for president in the next elections, but the Constitution needs to be amended. What steps are required to amend the Constitution? How hopeful are you that it will be done? Well, I'm told that this is the most difficult Constitution in the world to amend. First of all, it has to be any... It's not all the points in the Constitution, but the major ones. If you want to change them, more than 75% of the members of both legislatures have to vote for it. And that's not the end of the story and then it has to be put to a referendum and it has to be approved by more than 50% of those who are eligible to vote. So that's a very difficult process. Don't forget that 25% of the members of both legislatures are military appointees, unelected military appointees. So in order to get more than 75%, first of all, all the civilian seats will have to be filled and all the civilian representatives would have to agree that they want to amend the Constitution. And then, as I keep saying, at least one brave soldier must say, I will side with the civilian representatives. So it's very, very difficult, but it's not impossible. And I think it was in an RAF outfit somewhere I heard that during the Second World War they had a motto, which was, we do the impossible every day, miracles take a little longer. The question is right there first. Joe Dain from Voice of America, Burmese Service, Ndidi Mawa. Thank you very much. Last year in Bangkok, 2012, World Economic Forum, you talked about youth unemployment in Burma. You said that it was like a time bomb. And your main message was, I believe, to the foreign investors coming to Burma was to create jobs. What is your main message to the foreign investors this year in this place? Thank you. It's the same thing because this issue has not been addressed adequately. Everywhere I go in this country, there are six requirements that people keep repeating to me. It's amazing how it's the same everywhere. I get the same message everywhere. When I go to the villages, whether it's in the south of Burma or north-south-east-west, I always try to ask them. I try to speak to as many of the people in the towns and villages as possible and I ask them what they need most. And always the answer is, first of all, jobs. They won't work. They don't want handouts. They want the dignity of being able to work for their own living, to earn their own living. Number one is jobs. Number two, water. Number three, roads. Number four, electricity. Number five, education. Number six, health. This is repeated everywhere, everywhere. And so jobs are a priority and especially jobs for our youth. In my constituency, 75% of our graduates are unemployed. And I have been told by independent surveyors that this is very much the national average for youth unemployment. About 70% of our youth are unemployed. And as I keep saying, it's not joblessness that is so worrying as much as hopelessness. When they get to a point where they lose hope in the future, then these young unemployed people will be a social problem for us. Daw Martin, sunk from CNBC over here. The question is just in front of you, the question is related. And that is right now there seems to be almost like a gold rush. A lot of foreign companies want to come in, win contracts, wind tenders, do business, do trade, etc. Which is good in a way. Myanmar needs the money. But what parts of this frenzy were you? Actually, there isn't that much investment coming in. I think it's more investigations than investment. People are coming here to investigate the possibility of investing here. But yes, it is a frenzy and frenzy is never attractive. I keep saying cautious optimism and something that I'm a wet blanket because I talk about cautious optimism. But I think that's just practical. And I think those who come here and look, they're always the same problems. First of all, they worry about rule of law. And that's one of my main concerns, not just because I'm the chair of the rule of law and Tranquility Committee. Because I believe that without rule of law, we can't get anywhere. We can't get economic development either because that's what the serious businesses are looking for, rule of law. How safe are the investments going to be? That's one thing. And the other is infrastructure, which goes back to what our villagers tell us, roads, electricity. So this is why investments are not pouring in, just investigations are pouring in. And let's stop the frenzy a bit. We're going to go to the back there first. Hello, this is Adit from the Associated Press. If we weren't content with your answer before this morning, so I need to ask you again. If you succeed in amending the constitution and if you become the president of Myanmar, what will you do for the ethnic minorities and with the special regard to the Rohingya people and the Muslim, the people who believe in Islam in this country? Thank you. First of all, as I said, I believe in rule of law. And everybody in this country should be entitled to the protection of the law. Everybody, all ethnic groups, all religious groups. But with regard to the ethnic nationalities, that is to say those who are now in the states, we'll have to go for a federal system. This has always been the policy of our party that we need federalism to keep our union intact. For decades, actually, the propaganda of the authoritarian government had been that federalism equals right to secession. And we've always had to explain that federalism does not mean secession, that in fact federalism is a way of preventing secession because it's a way of removing the grievances that lead people to call for secession. We are very weak in negotiated compromise in this country. It's partly to do with our culture and partly to do with the fact that we have lived under authoritarian rule for so long that negotiation is practically unknown. And if you're not used to negotiation, then you don't get to a negotiated compromise. And we have to go in for that. We have to find the answers to our problems together. And what I would like to ask the world to do is to help us to find the solutions to our own problems in our own way, always upholding international standards of human rights. Dossou, you paint quite a bleak picture when you go into the percentages of unemployed youth and this and that and the terrible lack of electricity and roads. You also recently said, I think in Yangon, some quite negative things about the pace of reform under this government and said that the reforms hadn't made as big an impact as they could. Do you feel the government hasn't lived up to promises and could do more or do you feel that? It could do more. What I've said is that I think we've concentrated enough on good intentions. Now what we want to look at are results and the results are not as fantastic as you might expect them to be because don't forget that we're into the third year of the so-called reform process and I keep repeating this, three years is not a short period. I think you can't keep saying, well, you know, it's not been long yet, it's not been long yet. I mean, how long is long? And three years is a long time for somebody who can't get three square meals a day. And so we want results now and the lives of the ordinary people which have not changed. If you ask the average citizen in this country what has changed, they will talk about the fact that there's greater freedom of the media because there is a proliferation of news magazines and journals and then there are those who will say that there are more cars in the streets of Rangoon than ever before but these are not accessible to the great majority of our people who constitute about 60% to 70%. So we want change in the lives of those people, those who live in the rural area and also of course in the lives of our urban poor. So this is what I mean by saying that reform has not brought the kind of changes that our people want and how long will they go on waiting for it? We don't want them to lose faith in the reform process. My name is Christiana with the German Press Agency. My question goes in the same direction. What concretely would you say should the government do or have done to get those changes to the rural people or to put it in another way what would you do as president now to make sure that these people see the benefits of economic opening? Well let me tell you just what I've been doing simply as an MP in my constituency. Now as I said earlier jobs, water, roads, electricity, education, health that's what they always talk about and the most difficult thing of all is the first one jobs. Job creation, this is why when I talk to business people I always try to encourage them to engage in the kind of investment that will create jobs. As you all know the extractive industries do not create too many jobs, they are not strong on jobs but Burma is strong on extractive industries so we have this problem to deal with. I can't create as many jobs as I want in my constituency so I go for what I can do. The first thing I went for was water because that was the easiest and yet this was a great need and as soon as I became I was elected I started arranging for wells to be dug. It's as simple as all that and yet Burma is supposed to be the country in Southeast Asia with the greatest water resources and we don't have enough water and then I went about roads because this is again a possibility. So what I would like the government to do is first of all to target the greatest needs of our people, our country and then see what can be done first and then go about it. I've often made the complaint that there's no structure to the reform process. We are not aware of a government policy with regard to the reform process, how they're going to go about it, what their priorities are and what the sequencing is going to be. So that is what I would like to see, priorities, sequencing, targeting the most urgent needs of the country. A question from the Straits Times of Singapore. This morning you spoke about the presidency and your interest in it and just now you said it takes one brave soldier to help turn the tide. Oh I think we'd actually like more than one. Actually 300,000 wouldn't be bad. Have you got any indication from the military? There was a former Navy chief referring to you as elder sister at that event. Well don't forget he's a retired. Never mind. Have you got any indication from the military that they may not be averse to having you as president? No, I've had no direct indication of any kind like that from the military. But I do believe that members of the military are as keen as civilians to promote development and growth in our country. Because they know our country is poor. And don't forget that the majority of our soldiers are not wealthy either. Just to go back to your points about... Oh sorry, my name is Simon Ruckney and I file for the Irawadi and a couple of others. To go back to your point about job creation and similar needs. What legislation is being planned and is being debated in Parliament these days with that regard? I know there's a minimum wage law. Is there anything else? And what's the timeline for those? Well of course it was the FTI and we do expect foreign investment to create jobs. And they're now working on a law to promote the interests of farmers and peasants. And this is to create a rural work. And I suppose you do know already about the minimum wage law. We are trying to investigate the possibilities of what we can do as a legislature. But it's not just about laws. It's also about making sure that these laws are observed and implemented. Which goes back to rule of law. And what I personally want to do in the legislature is to make sure that the judiciary becomes independent and clean. Thank you. I am from Skynet. And please write. That's me. You're right. You're right. Right on our right. Yes. Thank you. We all know that you are very emphasizing you also the poverty reduction. The question is that we would like to know your ideas of the poverty reduction or Myanmar. Thank you. Reducing poverty in Myanmar means. Reducing the poverty of the people in our rural areas. Because as I think I'm sure the statistic has been drummed into your head every half an hour since yesterday. Nearly 75 70% of our population live in the rural area. So Burma is basically an agriculture country. And because of that, if we want to reduce poverty, we have to look to our rural population. So it's our agricultural policy. And that starts with land. I think you must have heard about the issue of landlessness in this country and the problem of illegal transfers of land. So this is a legal issue. And there's a committee in the legislature which is looking into the problem of the illegal transfer of land and what we can do to have it transferred back to the rightful owners. This is a very, very complicated business because keeping official papers is also not part of our tradition. So it is very difficult sometimes to establish ownership apart from the fact that we have to sort out how the land was illegally transferred and what it can be done to transfer it back to the original owners. Quite often we have a problem identifying who the original owners are. So I think we have to start with things like land laws, but again, it's not just the laws. It's the implementation of the laws that we have to be concerned about. And if we cannot bring our agriculture population out of poverty, we are going to remain a poor country because it means that 70% of our people will remain poor. Go to Tomas and then we go to Beuda. Hi, Dossu. Thomas Fuller from The New York Times. You've said many times that you do not want to take sides in the Rakhine conflict, but the ledger of casualties and deaths has been overwhelmingly on the Muslim side. It's a one-sided ledger, really. I don't say this critically. I'm hoping to get an insight into your political calculation, your political situation now. Do you feel like you're in a straight jacket politically? I mean, you're someone who's always spoken out for the downtrodden, for the victims. And here we've seen you be reserved. Do you feel like you're a hostage to the political circumstance of the day? No, I don't feel a hostage to the political circumstances of the day. What I am afraid of is aggravating the situation. I do not want to aggravate the situation by saying that one community is wrong or the other community is wrong. And what it does is to aggravate the more extremist elements in these communities. If they feel that they are being targeted, if they feel that they do not enjoy the sympathy of politicians or influential groups, then it makes them more extremist. That is what I'm afraid of, that instead of helping the situation, we will aggravate it further. So what I want to target, I want to target actions rather than communities, which means accountability. Again, that goes back to rule of law. The government must make sure that those who have committed crimes are punished in accordance with the law. There must be accountability. But I do not want fingers pointed at particular communities because it always aggravates the other side. And this seems to start a vicious cycle of people getting more and more aggressive and more and more extremist. That's what I'm afraid of. Hello, my name is Bill Hayton. I'm training journalists at MRTV at the moment. This evening I hope that state television might broadcast you talking about politics for the first time ever. But at the moment they're going to take a sound bite of you speaking in English with a Burmese voiceover. They're a bit shy to ask the question themselves. Could you say the same thing again in Burmese, explaining that you wish to stand for the presidency and the obstacles that stand in your path but in Burmese? I'm getting a little bit tired of this presidency business. And I think the reason why people are so interested is that given to me by the BBC interviewer who said that he'd never come across any politician who admitted to wanting office. And that whenever she asked him, do you want to become the president of the Prime Minister? The answer usually was something like, as well, if the people really want me to, and so on and so on. So I said to her, and do you believe them when they say this? And she said, no, I don't believe them. So I said I might as well be honest and say, yes, I do aspire to the presidency as I should as a leader of a political party that is going to take part in the electoral process. The whole thing? All right. Thank you. Thank you. Tim McLaughlin from the Myanmar Times. I just wanted to get your reaction to criticisms that presidents then saying has used the release of political prisoners as a PR tool generally coming before or after major political events. Well, I think if coincidence happened too often, people no longer believe in them. So I think that they'll have to change this a bit and just release all the political prisoners instead of releasing them before or after important visitors have been to this country. Martin's suing against CNBC. We could get back to the 70% of your people who live outside the cities in rural areas where poverty is the worst. You talked about creating jobs as one way of alleviating poverty. I'm wondering how you feel about whether you think land reform is necessary or important in the sense that, well, it worked very well for China. Not that I'm against factories and creating jobs there, but when you look at the resources Myanmar has, arable land, water, et cetera, it seems fairly straightforward that this would be an area that the government should concentrate on. Is land reform a start? Well, I've been talking about land reform. I was talking about it just now when I said that one of our big problems is landlessness, land ownership. Yes, this is necessary in our country because too many of our farmers have plots of land which are far too small. And on top of that, too many of them are beginning to lose their land now, some through debt and some through illegal transfer or takeover of land. These are legal matters that have to be looked into and as I said earlier, laws are not enough. We have to have free independent judiciaries which will make sure that these laws are observed. My name is Tantai from the GG Press. I'd like to ask about the Rakhine conflicts where some people are saying that this conflict is staged by some people inside the government who wants to turn back this current reform process. And hardliners are doing this because some people said that the problem started from a news report from the state media about a rape case which they published. And this conflict started because of a report in the state newspaper of a rape case. They published their religion and ethnic city in the rape case which is not normal in the news media. So some people speculate that it is staged by some people inside the government and I'd like to ask your opinion about that. Yes, I've heard these speculations. There are many of them. But as a believer in rule of law and justice, I would deem that everybody is innocent until proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. And speculations are not enough to use as accusations. There are always speculations when these kind of incidents emerge. But I do not think that we should go around accusing people of conspiracies because this could be very destabilizing for our country, which is not to say that conspiracies do not exist. Sometimes conspiracies do exist and people talk about them, people speculate. I think what we need is more transparency, more interaction, more engagement between different communities, between the government and the people, between the media and the local government as well as central government so that we are more and more aware of what is going on. And the more we know about the actual situation, the more transparency there is, the fewer speculations there will be. My name is Nati. I'm from nation Thailand. Two quick questions. The first one is Myanmar has built political and economic problems. If you were the president, which one would be your main focus? And the second question would be, by the time of the next election, you would be 70, if I'm correct, and you are a national democracy icon. Have you ever thought about Myanmar without Ong San Suu Kyi? What would it be like? Thank you. To answer the first question, I do not think you can separate the two. You really cannot divorce political development from economic development. In fact, there are those who say that economic growth and development are a result of political change and not something that is separate. So I think these have to go in tandem and you have to find the right mix. Well, you know, Burma has existed very well without me in the past and I'm sure it will go on existing well without me in the future when the time comes. We're almost running out of time. We'll take a few more questions. The one at the back. Hello, Dursu. Kelly McNamara from AFP. Hello. Sorry, I'm hidden behind a couple of cameras. Hi. Talking about youth unemployment. As you go into the election in 2015, what are you going to do to refresh your party? There's often been a criticism that certainly the higher echelons are dominated by kind of old guard. Are you looking to kind of regenerate the party in any way? We have a lot of younger people at the township level, at the village level and even in our central committee. It's true that we do not have enough young people in the central executive committee and this is because we need to build up the capacity of our young people. I think I can say quite openly that the younger people, the younger generations in Burma are less well educated than the older generation and it's through no fault of their own. It's because of 50 years of a very bad education system. I am told that one survey found that Burma is one of the very, very few countries in the world where the young people now are less well educated than those 20 years ago and certainly they are less well educated than those 50 years ago when we had a very, very sound education system. So it is taking us some time to build up the capacity of our young people but that's not the problem of the NLD alone. People talk as though it were the problem of the NLD alone. It's a national problem. We need to build up the capacity of our young people throughout the nation because of those years of a bad education system. One final question over there. Andy Minglao. I'm Dan Sunye from 70 News. I'd just like to ask, under President Dawson Sushi, what would the cabinet look like and whether your government will be liberal, labour or conservative? I would not like to talk about my government now when it has not even been decided that the constitution will be amended to make way for me to go up to the presidency. But I believe basically in liberal politics which means that we are not dogmatic and that we do not think of our party as the most important element in politics. It's the people who should be the most important element in politics and it will be the consideration of what is best for our people which would decide what kind of government we would try to shape. Thank you very much, Dawson Sushi. It's an honor for us all of us. Thank you all very much.