Aung San Suu yi: Burmese hungry for justice June 13, 2011 09:41 AM EST AP

GENEVA Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu yi said Monday her nation hunger s for justice and progress and the international community must help lift its wo rkers' grim conditions. "Burma must not be allowed to fail and the world must not be allowed to fail Bur ma," the 65-year-old Nobel laureate told a U.N. labor conference by videolink, r eferring to Myanmar. Myanmar's pro-democracy icon, freed last November after spending much of the pas t 20 years under house arrest, said her nation once seemed the most likely succe ss story in Southeast Asia but "has fallen behind almost all the other nations i n the region." Suu yi won the 1991 Nobel Peace prize for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and led her National League for Democracy to victory in 1990 elections, but the military junta that led the government refused to recognize the results. The former junta changed the nation's name to Myanmar, but many democracy suppor ters and Suu yi still call it Burma. After elections in November that were swept by a party close to the ruling junta , military leaders turned over control to a nominally civilian government in Mar ch. And in recent months Suu yi has been turning to videolinks and other means to get her message out, fearing as she has for years that if she were to leave t he country she might not get back in. Suu yi, seeking to revive her party, said its members and other groups and peop le struggling for political change created a "people's network" six months ago t o focus on social and humanitarian projects that spread democracy and human righ ts. "The growth, rapid beyond our expectations, of this network is evidence of the i ndivisibility of social, economic and political concerns, and of the hunger of o ur people for a society secured by acceptable norms of social justice joined to political and economic progress," she said.