Aung San Suu Kyi: One woman’s battle to restore power to the people of Burma

AS the daughter of a Burmese independence hero, it was perhaps inevitable that Aung San Suu Kyi would be thrust under the political spotlight.

She was born in 1945 and was just two years old when her father, General Aung San, was assassinated. She went to Oxford University where she met Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar. The pair married in 1972, going on to have two sons. The boys were raised in England, but Ms Suu Kyi returned to Burma in 1988 to care for her mother.

She became involved in an uprising against military rule and was appointed general secretary of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in September 1988, the month after up to 5,000 demonstrators were killed by the military.

Ms Suu Kyi became a prominent figure and was placed under detention by the military in 1989 and banned from standing in the general election the following year.

The NLD went on to win 82 per cent of the seats in parliament, but the military refused to hand over power. Ms Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, remained under house arrest until July 1995. Her husband died of prostate cancer in 1999, aged 53. In 2000, she was placed under house arrest again after trying to leave Rangoon.

Two years later, she was released and given the freedom to travel around the country.

In 2003 an attempt was made on her life. She was still in detention when elections were held in Burma in November 2010, the first since 1990. Later that month her 15 years of detention finally came to an end.