Speaker

 
AUNG SAN SUU KYI is a leading Burmese politician and opposition figurehead. Daughter of independence hero General Aung San, she spent many adult years living quietly in Oxford with husband Michael Aris and sons Alexander and Kim.

In the early months of 1988, however, she returned to her native Burma to care for her ailing mother, and soon became caught up in mass protests known to the world as the 8-8-88 uprising.

Her first major political speech, delivered at Rangoon's landmark Shwedagon Pagoda at the end of August 1988, immediately established her leadership of a diverse democratic movement of students, monks, workers and ordinary citizens.

Although the revolt was crushed in September 1988, she led the National League for Democracy to a landslide electoral triumph in a May 1990 general election.

By this point, though, military leaders had reasserted control, Aung San Suu Kyi herself was held under house arrest, and the country now named Myanmar moved not to build democracy, but rather to consolidate authoritarianism. Only after a tightly-managed November 2010 general election was any attempt made to sponsor political reform through a system of discipline-flourishing democracy closely supervised by senior military figures.

In the period from 1989 to 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was subjected to three terms of house arrest totaling more than 15 years. Her most recent release came several days after the 2010 election, enabling her to work again for the broad-based national reconciliation and vibrant democracy she has long espoused.

For her fierce commitment to these causes, Aung San Suu Kyi has been accorded widespread international recognition. She was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1992, and across the decades since has continued to garner global attention as an icon of freedom, democracy and non-violent political change.