Aung San Suu Kyi: Myanmar democracy icon
A symbol of peaceful resistance in the face of repression, Aung San Suu Kyi remains a beacon of hope for many in military-ruled Burma, despite the junta’s efforts to silence her.
Her father was General Aung San, the founder of the army and the father of modern Burma, who was assassinated in 1947 a few months before independence. After growing up in Burma and India, where her mother was the Burmese ambassador, Mrs Suu Kyi went to Oxford where she met her future husband, the Englishman Michael Aris. For many years they lived together in Oxford, where Dr Aris was a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. People who knew her in those days describe a school ma’am-ish figure with strong moral convictions. The couple had two sons and Mrs Suu Kyi wrote guidebooks to Nepal, Burma and Bhutan in the Let’s Visit series.
In 1988 her life was transformed when she returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother. By chance, it was the year of mass protests when thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were shot dead on the streets of Rangoon.
A month after the massacre Mrs Suu Kyi addressed a crowd of half a million people on the steps of Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda. With a group of allies – mostly former generals – she founded the National League for Democracy and won a landslide election victory in 1990. Mrs Suu Kyi should have become prime minister but the army, which has ruled Burma since 1962, ignored the result. Alarmed by her popularity they had already placed her in custody in 1989 – she has now spent 14 of the last 20 years in jail or under house arrest.
During that period her husband was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. He was denied a visa to visit Burma and she refused to leave, fearing that she would be prevented from returning. In 2003 she narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when thugs attacked her convoy, killing dozens of supporters.
Awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1991, she has become the world’s most famous political prisoner and a touchstone of Western liberal conscience. Some critics have argued that Mrs Suu Kyi’s saintly image, her rigid stance and her status as the only Burmese most foreigners have ever heard of has helped create a stalemate which benefits the isolationist junta. Yet by keeping her locked up the generals have shown that – perhaps more than anything – they fear Aung San Suu Kyi. Mrs Suu Kyi’s lawyers have said that her current term of house arrest is due to end on Saturday and Burmese officials have said that her release was imminent. She has said little about her plans for after her release, apart from a desire to join Twitter to reach out to supporters worldwide, but few expect her to abandon her long struggle.
