Aung San Suu Kyi

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (ေအာင္ဆန္းဆုဳကည္) (born June 19, 1945 in Rangoon, Burma, now known as Yangôn, Myanmar) is a nonviolent pro-democracy activist in Myanmar. In 1990 she won the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and in 1991 she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

She is the daughter of General Aung San, who negotiated Burma's independence from Britain in 1947 and was assassinated by rivals in the same year.

She studied at Oxford in the United Kingdom and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. While in England, Suu Kyi met and married Michael Aris, a scholar of Tibetan culture. They had two sons, Alexander and Kim.

She returned to Myanmar in 1988 to care for her ailing mother. In that year, the long-time leader of the socialist ruling party, General Ne Win, stepped down, leading to mass demonstrations for democratization, which were violently suppressed. A new military junta took power.

Heavily influenced by Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence, Aung San Suu Kyi entered politics to work for democratization and was put under house arrest in 1989. She was offered freedom if she would leave the country, but she refused.

The military junta called general elections in 1990, which Aung San Suu Kyi's party "National League for Democracy" won decisively. Under normal circumstances, she would have assumed the office of Prime Minister, however the results were nullified and the military refused to hand over power. This resulted in an international outcry and partly led to Suu Kyi winning the Sakharov Prize that year and the Nobel Peace Prize in the following one. She used the Nobel Peace Prize's $1.3 million prize money to establish a health and education trust for the Burmese people.

She was released from house arrest in July 1995, although it was made clear that, should she leave the country to visit her family in the United Kingdom, she would be denied re-entry. When her husband Michael Aris, a British citizen, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, the Burmese government denied him an entry visa. Aung remained in Burma, and never met her husband again. He died in March 1999. She remains separated from their children in the UK.

She was repeatedly prevented from meeting with her party supporters, and in September 2000, she was again put under house arrest. On May 6, 2002, following secret confidence-building negotiations led by the United Nations, she was released; a government spokesman said that she was free to move "because we are confident that we can trust each other." Aung San Suu Kyi proclaimed "a new dawn for the country." However at the end of May 2003 she was arrested again. After a period of imprisonment and undergoing an operation in September she was placed again under house arrest in Yangôn.

On December 2, 2004, the United States pressured the Burmese government to release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi after a recent announcement that her house arrest would be extended. (BBC)

External links

• An extensive story of her life
• Nobel Prize press release
• Homepage made by supporters (of the Free Burma Coalition?)
• "Freed Burmese Democracy Leader Proclaims 'New Dawn'" by Seth Mydans, for The New York Times, May 7 2002, A3 (only abstract available)
• On the role of Buddhist meditation and contemplation in Aung San Suu Kyi's politics