Profiles of Heroes and Heroines - Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma

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Standing five feet four inches and weighing 100 pounds probably soaking wet, our heroine this week is Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma or the Republic of Myanmar.

This heroine was elected to parliament in Burma in a historic election April 1, a first step toward democracy that could lead to her election as president in the next couple of years.

Since few people know her story here is a profile from the BBC News published April 1, 2012.

Profile: Aung San Suu Kyi

Like the South African leader Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi has become an international symbol of peaceful resistance in the face of oppression.

The 66-year-old spent most of the last two decades in some form of detention because of her efforts to bring democracy to military-ruled Burma.

In 1991, a year after her National League for Democracy won an overwhelming victory in an election the junta later nullified, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The committee chairman, Francis Sejested, called her "an outstanding example of the power of the powerless".

She was sidelined for Burma's first elections in two decades on 7 November 2010 but released from house arrest six days later.

On 1 April 2012, she stood for parliament for the first time, arguing it was what her supporters wanted even if the country's reforms were "not irreversible".

Political pedigree

Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of the country's independence hero, General Aung San.

He was assassinated during the transition period in July 1947, just six months before independence.

Aung San Suu Kyi was only two years old at the time.

In 1960 she went to India with her mother Daw Khin Kyi, who had been appointed Burma's ambassador to Delhi.

Four years later she went to Oxford University in the UK, where she studied philosophy, politics and economics. There she met her future husband, academic Michael Aris.

After stints of living and working in Japan and Bhutan, she settled in the UK to raise their two children, Alexander and Kim.

But Burma was never far from her thoughts.

When she arrived back in Rangoon in 1988 - to look after her critically ill mother - Burma was in the midst of major political upheaval.

Thousands of students, office workers and monks took to the streets demanding democratic reform.

"I could not, as my father's daughter remain indifferent to all that was going on," she said in a speech in Rangoon on 26 August 1988.

Ms Suu Kyi was soon propelled into leading the revolt against the then-dictator, General Ne Win.

Inspired by the non-violent campaigns of US civil rights leader Martin Luther King and India's Mahatma Gandhi, she organised rallies and travelled around the country, calling for peaceful democratic reform and free elections.

But the demonstrations were brutally suppressed by the army, who seized power in a coup on 18 September 1988.

The military government called national elections in May 1990.

Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD convincingly won the polls, despite the fact that she herself was under house arrest and disqualified from standing.

But the junta refused to hand over control, and has remained in power ever since.

House arrest

Ms Suu Kyi remained under house arrest in Rangoon for six years, until she was released in July 1995.

Aung San Suu Kyi

• 1989: Put under house arrest as Burma junta declares martial law
• 1990: NLD wins election; military disregards result
• 1991: Wins Nobel Peace Prize
• 1995: Released from house arrest, but movements restricted
• 2000-02: Second period of house arrest
• May 2003: Detained after clash between NLD and junta forces
• Sep 2003: Allowed home after medical treatment, but under effective house arrest
• May 2007: House arrest is extended for another year
• Sept 2007: First public appearance since 2003, greeting protesting Buddhist monks
• May 2008: House arrest extended for another year
• May 2009: Charged with breaking detention rules after an American swims to her compound
• August 2009: Sentenced to 18 months further house arrest
• November 2010: Released from house arrest
• April 2012: Stands for parliament for first time

She was again put under house arrest in September 2000, when she tried to travel to the city of Mandalay in defiance of travel restrictions.

She was released unconditionally in May 2002, but just over a year later she was put in prison following a clash between her supporters and a government-backed mob.

She was later allowed to return home - but again under effective house arrest.

During periods of confinement, Ms Suu Kyi busied herself studying and exercising.

She meditated, worked on her French and Japanese language skills, and relaxed by playing Bach on the piano.

At times she was able to meet other NLD officials and selected diplomats.

But during her early years of detention, she was often in solitary confinement. She was not allowed to see her two sons or her husband, who died of cancer in March 1999.

The military authorities offered to allow her to travel to the UK to see him when he was gravely ill, but she felt compelled to refuse for fear she would not be allowed back into the country.

Her last period of house arrest ended in November 2010 and her son Kim Aris was allowed to visit her for the first time in a decade.

When by-elections were held in April 2012, to fill seats vacated by politicians who had taken government posts, she and her party contested seats, despite reservations.

"Some are a little bit too optimistic about the situation," she said in an interview before the vote. "We are cautiously optimistic. We are at the beginning of a road."

However she added: "Many people are beginning to say that the democratisation process here is irreversible. It's not so."

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Burma Freedom Fighter Aung San Suu Kyi Released after years of house arrest

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On occasion we offer you glimpses of the world in hopes of broadening our understanding of the diversity of cultures and the character of people.  In Asia there are few women prominent in fighting for freedom and opposing opressive rule. Aung San Sun Kyi of Burma is the exception to the rule and hearing her story should reassure you that people throughout the world share in our fierce determination to protect liberty and individual ights.  The following is a particularly good article about her from the Guardian in the UK.

Aung San Suu Kyi: Burma's opposition leader is a new Mandela

Universal symbol of courage has endured years as a prisoner for heading the fight for democracy in her country

Jon Henley, guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 November 2010

In her own country she's an uncrowned queen; a slight, fragile but unbending figure glimpsed by few but known to all as The Lady. Beyond it, she has become an icon, a universal symbol of courage, endurance and peaceful resistance, a new Mandela.

The word's a commonplace but Aung San Suu Kyi really is a legend: daughter of the man who won Burma its independence from the British, but who was assassinated when she was barely two; a political leader herself who for the past 22 years has headed, with a delicate but compelling charisma and unimaginable determination, her nation's "second struggle for independence"; a prisoner of one kind or another for 15 of the past 20 years; and winner, in 1991, of the Nobel peace prize.

Those who have met her (which isn't many, recently) speak of a beauty every bit as striking as the photographs, a proud poise and a demure gentility acquired, certainly, at the Anglo-Indian finishing school she attended in New Delhi, where her mother was ambassador.

She apparently also has, though, a quick and by no means prim wit and an infectious giggle. Not, by all accounts – including her own – a born political strategist, she knows precisely the system her country needs, if not precisely how to get there. Her Nobel citation called her a shining example of "the power of the powerless".

Born on 19 June, 1945, two years before independence, Aung San Suu Kyi – the name means "a bright collection of strange victories" – left Burma with her mother in 1960. In 1964 she was at St Hugh's, Oxford, studying politics, philosophy and economics. A friend, Ann Pasternak Slater, recalls her "tight, trim lungi [Burmese sarong] and her upright carriage, her firm moral convictions and inherited social grace".

She worked as a research assistant at the University of London and then for the UN in New York. She got engaged to Michael Aris in 1971, and wrote to him every day before their marriage the following year: "I only ask one thing," she said: "That should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them." She added: "I am beset by fears that circumstances and national considerations might tear us apart."

It took 16 years for that need to arise. Michael and Aung San Suu Kyi's first son, Alexander, was born in London in 1973, followed by their second, Kim, in Oxford, where Michael had a junior fellowship. She resumed her own academic career, teaching Burmese studies and taking research assignments first in Japan, and then in India. One evening in Oxford in late March 1988, the boys in bed, Aung San Suu Kyi took the phone call that changed her life: her mother had suffered a severe stroke.

Back in Burma, the military dictatorship that had run the country since 1962 was suppressing a student-led protest movement. On 8 August 1988, soldiers fired into a peaceful demonstration, killing up to 5,000 protesters. Barely two weeks later, Aung Sun Suu Kyi addressed 500,000 people at the great Schwedagon pagoda in Rangoon. As her father's daughter, she said, she could not stand by. "True," she said, "I have lived abroad. It is also true that I am married to a foreigner. These facts have never lessened my love and my devotion for my country." She demanded freedom and democracy, a multi-party government, and free and fair elections.

The rest is as sad as it is familiar. The National League for Democracy was formed with Aung San Suu Kyi as its general secretary.
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"We listened to the voice of the people, that our policies might be in harmony with their legitimate needs and aspirations," Aung San Suu Kyi wrote. "We explained why, in spite of its inevitable flaws, we considered democracy to be better than other political systems. Most important, we sought to make them understand why we believed political change was best achieved through non-violent means."

Despite detentions and intimidation, the NLD won 82% of the seats in Burma's parliament in the 1990 elections, whose results the dictatorship have never recognised. Aung San Suu Kyi was held under house arrest until 1995, and then banned from travelling. In 1999 her husband died of cancer in London; had she left the country to visit him, she would never have been allowed back in. Detained again in 2000, released again in 2002, she was rearrested once more in May 2003. Her phone line cut, her post blocked and her NLD colleagues banned from visiting her, she has lived under house arrest at her home on University Avenue, Rangoon, ever since, writing, reading, exercising and meditating. Not even the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, was allowed to meet her on a visit in 2009.

Then John Yettaw, a confused American, swam across the lake by her house to see her, ensuring she was charged and convicted with breaking the terms of her house arrest and sentenced to 18 months further house arrest – until tomorrow, a convenient six days after Burma's recent elections. "It is not power that corrupts, but fear," Aung San Suu Kyi once wrote. "Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it." But even under the "most crushing state machinery, courage rises up again and again. For fear is not the natural state of man."
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