* State oil/gas firm "lacks transparency, accountability" 
 
 * Suu Kyi taken ill at press conference 
 
 * First visit to Europe in nearly quarter century 
 
 By Stephanie Nebehay and Tom Miles 
 
 BERN/GENEVA, June 14 (Reuters) - Myanmar's Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi on Thursday urged foreign governments not to let their companies form joint ventures with her country's state-owned oil and gas company until it improved its business practices. 
 
 Suu Kyi spoke on the first full day of her first visit to Europe in nearly a quarter of a century - a trip that was disrupted when she briefly fell ill at a press conference in the Swiss capital Bern. 
 
 The 66-year-old, who spent two decades under house arrest before being elected to parliament in April, halted the event after vomiting and excusing herself saying "I'm so sorry". 
 
 An official Swiss dinner in her honour was cancelled although she did attend a cocktail reception later, Swiss foreign ministry spokesman Jean-Marc Crevoisier said. "She is tired and has gone to her hotel to rest," he told Reuters. 
 
 Suu Kyi, who minutes before complained of jet lag and tiredness, arrived in Geneva late on Wednesday at the start of her 17-day trip to Europe which will include stops in Norway, Britain, Ireland and France. 
 
 In Bern, Swiss foreign minister Didier Burkhalter said Switzerland was partially lifting sanctions against Myanmar except for an embargo on military weapons that could be used for the "purpose of repression". 
 
 Earlier in Geneva, she received a standing ovation at the International Labour Organization (ILO), whose director-general Juan Somavia praised her "remarkable courage and determination". 
 
 "The Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise ... with which all foreign participation in the energy sector takes place through joint venture arrangements, lacks both transparency and accountability at present," she said in a speech to the ILO's annual conference. 
 
 "The (Myanmar) government needs to apply internationally recognised standards such as the IMF code of good practices on fiscal transparency. Other countries could help by not allowing their own companies to partner MOGE unless it was signed up to such codes," she said. 
 
 Responsible investment was the key to helping her resource-rich country along the path to democracy after nearly 50 years of military rule, she said. 
 
 The hugely popular leader of Myanmar's opposition had been fearful until now that if she left Myanmar, the junta whose rule she fought against for two decades would block her return. 
 
 But after months of cautious rapprochement with Thein Sein, a former general who convinced her to run in by-elections, she accepted an offer to go to Thailand to attend the World Economic Forum on East Asia two weeks ago in one of the clearest signs yet of her confidence in Myanmar's reforms. 
 
 LACK OF TRANSPARENCY IN CONTRACTS 
 
 Myanmar has granted Chinese state-owned oil firm CNPC oil and gas pipeline concessions that will enable Middle East energy supplies to a take short-cut on the route to China, cutting out the extra expense and journey time of using the Malacca Strait. 
 
 "Quite frankly none of us know what's in those contracts, this is what I mean by lack of transparency in the country," Suu Kyi told a news conference. "Lack of transparency leads to all kinds of suspicions that shore up trouble for the future." 
 
 Asked about Chevron and Total, the big Western oil firms with investments in Myanmar, she said: "I have to say that I find that Total is a responsible investor in the country, even though there was a time when we did not think they should be encouraging the military regime by investing in Burma. 
 
 "They were sensitive to human rights and environmental issues and now that we've come to a point in time when we would like investors who are sensitive to such issues, I am certainly not going to persuade Chevron or Total to pull out." 
 
 A day after the ILO, a United Nations agency, lifted its more than decade-old restrictions on Myanmar in recognition of progress including a new law on trade unions and pledge to end forced labour, Suu Kyi said foreign direct investment that created jobs should be welcomed. 
 
 As sanctions are lifted, investment should be responsible and help the process of democratisation, she said. 
 
 "Burma is a land with a lot of energy resources. We do not want to dissipate it. I would like to see a sound effective energy policy in Burma and this should be related to the kind of extractive investments that we invite in." ||||| Story highlights Suu Kyi and 33 other members of her party were elected to the lower house 
 
 They had delayed their parliamentary debuts over the wording of the oath of office 
 
 The oath of office is a historic moment in Myanmar's recent reforms 
 
 A previous election success by Suu Kyi's party in 1990 was ignored by the military rulers 
 
 Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was sworn in Wednesday as a lawmaker for the first time, a key step in the country's recent shift toward democracy after decades of repressive military rule. 
 
 Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy campaigner who spent years under house arrest, traveled to the parliament in the capital, Naypyidaw, to take up the seat she won in elections last month. 
 
 It was a historic moment for the Nobel laureate, who has spent decades campaigning for, and being deprived of, human rights in Myanmar. 
 
 Suu Kyi led her party to a landslide victory the previous time Myanmar held multiparty elections, in 1990. But the military junta ignored the results and kept her under house arrest. 
 
 She and 33 other newly elected members of her party, the National League for Democracy, took an oath of office for the lower house of parliament that they had initially refused to accept because of its wording, which called for protection of the country's constitution. 
 
 The NLD considers the constitution undemocratic and has said it wants to change it. 
 
 JUST WATCHED Myanmar looks for economic revival Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Myanmar looks for economic revival 02:02 
 
 JUST WATCHED British PM's historic visit to Myanmar Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH British PM's historic visit to Myanmar 02:40 
 
 JUST WATCHED Rushing to do business in Myanmar Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Rushing to do business in Myanmar 02:17 
 
 The party had asked the Myanmar authorities to adjust the wording of the oath to say that lawmakers would "abide by" the constitution rather than "protect" it. 
 
 Suu Kyi and the other recently elected NLD members delayed their debuts in parliament over the issue, but the government of President Thein Sein, a former military official, made no sign of moving to accommodate the request. 
 
 On Monday, Suu Kyi and the NLD backed down from the demand to have the wording changed, ending the impasse. 
 
 Suu Kyi said she would take the oath "for the country and for the people." She added that her decision had been encouraged by voters, parliament members and representatives of Myanmar's ethnic minority groups. 
 
 During a visit to Myanmar this week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed support for Suu Kyi's climbdown over the oath. "Real leaders demonstrate flexibility for the greater cause," he said after meeting with her at her lakeside residence in Yangon. 
 
 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton congratulated Suu Kyi and her party on the occasion of their swearing-in. 
 
 "This is an important moment for Burma's future. A genuine transition toward multi-party democracy leading to general elections in 2015 will help build a more prosperous society," Clinton said in a statement, using the other name for Myanmar. "I encourage all political parties, civil society representatives and ethnic minority leaders to work together to address challenges and seize new opportunities for a more democratic, free, peaceful, and prosperous future." 
 
 Myanmar's authoritarian military rulers are loosening their grip on power after decades of stifling dissent and limiting freedoms. 
 
 Thein Sein's civilian government was sworn in just over a year ago. 
 
 In the past 12 months, the government has pardoned hundreds of political prisoners, secured a cease-fire with Karen rebels and agreed to negotiate with other ethnic rebel groups. 
 
 The success of Suu Kyi and her party at the by-elections last month -- the NLD won 43 seats, 34 of them in the lower house -- was welcomed by the United States and European Union as a sign of progress toward democracy. 
 
 Her presence in parliament Wednesday illustrates the pace at which Myanmar is changing: She was released from house arrest less than a year and a half ago. 
 
 Next month, she will make her first trip overseas in more than two decades. She plans to visit Norway to make a belated acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize she was prevented from collecting in 1991 because she was in detention. 
 
 She took her seat in the chamber Wednesday alongside incumbent legislators, many of whom are former military officials. 
 
 Myanmar's legislature has 664 seats, more than 80% of which are still held by lawmakers aligned with the military-backed ruling group, the Union Solidarity and Development Party. 
 
 Control of parliament will not change, but the entry of the NLD members nonetheless gives the party a notable presence. 
 
 Many Western governments have taken steps to ease sanctions on Myanmar, also known as Burma, in response to its political reforms. But international officials have also cautioned that the country still has a long way to go. 
 
 Speaking last week ahead of his trip, the United Nations' Ban said that Myanmar's "fresh start is still fragile." ||||| President Obama hasn’t enjoyed many great foreign-policy triumphs as president, so it’s no surprise that he and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, rather precipitously chalked up Myanmar up in their win column, with Clinton calling her 2011 opening to the long-isolated East Asian regime “a high point of my time as secretary.” But as Obama spends an unprecedented three days in Myanmar this week—perhaps uncomfortably attired in traditional Burmese garb at the U.S.-ASEAN summit—he can’t help but come face to face with the serious moral and practical shortcomings of his three-year-old policy. 
 
 Those shortcomings are sadly embodied in the faded figure of Aung San Suu Kyi, the once-lionized Nobel Peace Prize winner whom Obama made a central part of his Myanmar policy, and whose own ethical issues are casting doubt on the entire U.S. effort. Indeed, when Suu Kyi, the former Burmese democracy leader, warned the United States at a press conference last week not to be “overly optimistic” about Myanmar’s democratic reforms, she might as well have been asking for lower expectations for herself as well. 
 
 The deficit of optimism applies not just to Myanmar’s failure to continue its fitful crawl out of the shadow of two decades of military autocracy. Or to grant Suu Kyi any real power, despite allowing her to leave house arrest and join parliament. The most pressing off-stage drama at the summit is an appalling human rights issue that everyone there—including Obama and Suu Kyi—would probably prefer to ignore: the plight of the minority Rohingya Muslims in the country who are being displaced and brutalized en masse but who have no real defenders in Myanmar, including Suu Kyi. 
 
 So Obama has reason to feel considerable discomfort this week visiting a country that he once eagerly courted. The United States essentially crafted its crippling economic sanctions and subsequent strategic opening to Myanmar under the moral and practical guidance of Suu Kyi. Today, it seems, American foreign policy in the region is tethered to a Nobel Laureate and victim of human-rights oppression who appears to be too timid—or or perhaps too political— to denounce ethnic cleansing in her own country. 
 
 *** 
 
 Last summer, I traveled to Myanmar and met both representatives from the Rohingya community and veterans of the nearly quarter-century-old democracy movement that Suu Kyi eventually became the spiritual leader of. Suu Kyi’s group is called The 88 Generation Peace and Open Society, a political organization founded by student leaders during the 1988 protests against Burma’s then-socialist regime. Most of those we spoke to, including the group’s spiritual leader Min Ko Naing, have spent the bulk of their time since then in prison, just as Suu Kyi endured nearly two decades of house arrest. And yet even these victims of the military junta, when asked about the Rohingya problem, demurred, saying lamely that their organization was focused on political rights and couldn’t be expected to take a stand on every issue—even if the Rohingya situation constitutes “crimes against humanity” and “ethnic cleansing” as Human Rights Watch put it in a 2013 report. 
 
 Ko Ko Gyi, the political leader of the 88 Generation who is expected to run for parliament in 2015, has gone even further, managing to sound very much like the regime itself by declaring that “the Rohingya people are not an ethnic group of Burma and they are invading our country and sovereignty.” Speaking with Rohingya community leaders, it became clear to me that this oppressed and orphaned minority people is politically stuck. The activists I spoke with knew that if Aung San Suu Kyi were to publically denounce the Buddhist rioters who have been brutalizing the Rohingya and press the government for more assistance, her National League for Democracy (NLD) party might face backlash from Burmese Buddhists that don’t view Rohingya Muslims as legitimate citizens of Myanmar (though most scholars agree that a majority of the Rohingya community has been present in historical Burma for hundreds of years). Many Rohingya and other human rights supporters secretly hope that, if the community can hold out until the next election in 2015, the NLD will take power and, under the leadership of Suu Kyi, pursue an unpopular reconciliation. But one leader of a Rohingya community organization I recently contacted hoped that the United States would threaten to reinstate sanctions unless the abuse of the Rohingya stopped. 
 
 That is unlikely. The new relationship with Myanmar has become a key building block in Obama’s Asia policy, which is sometimes called a “pivot” but which is, in truth, part of a tacit and broad power play against China’s influence in the region. Keeping Naypyidaw on the side of the United States is clearly part of that long-term goal. 
 
 Not surprisingly, when I asked U.S. Amb. Derek Mitchell at a Yangon gathering of Luce scholars in July whether the U.S. government would consider reinstating economic sanctions, he suggested that sanctions were too blunt a tool because discrimination against Muslims, and against Rohingya in particular, by the nation’s majority Burman Buddhists (including Suu Kyi) is so prevalent. 
 
 To be sure, the U.S.-forced democratic reforms of 2010-2012 were substantial. They included a release of political prisoners, the unwinding of restrictions on the press and civil society, and the conduct of free and fair elections. But they are incomplete and the human rights violations that have followed are substantial as well—and appear to be getting worse. “The government has already picked most of the low-hanging fruit [of democratic reform] and difficult structural reforms remain,” Lynn Kuok, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, told me. Little has been done since most of the U.S. sanctions were lifted in 2012 and the far less severe sanctions that remain in place are a poor bargaining chip for further reform. Only the next days’ meetings will tell whether the United States has any leverage to extract significant concessions from the country’s leaders. The outstanding question is whether the United States will use whatever influence it might still have to advocate on behalf of the Rohingya, or simply on behalf of its favorite Burmese politician, Aung San Suu Kyi. 
 
 ***
– Aung San Suu Kyi visited the UN's European headquarters in Geneva today, and amidst pleasantries, made a serious call for the world to boycott Burma's state-run oil and gas companies. "The Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise … lacks both transparency and accountability at present," she said, speaking before the UN's International Labor Organization. Burma currently has contracts with several foreign firms, including Chevron, Total, and China's CNPC. "Quite frankly, none of us know what's in those contracts," Suu Kyi said, according to Reuters. Suu Kyi did, however, allow that, despite having struck a deal with the junta, Total "is a responsible investor in the country" and was "sensitive to human rights and environmental issues." She also called for a "democracy-friendly development policy" coupled with various business reforms. "No country can claim genuine development until all its peoples can enjoy the basic freedoms. Freedom from want, and freedom from fear," she said, according to this video. The visit is part of Suu Kyi's first trip to Europe in decades.