Aung San Suu Kyi has faced conflict and opposition for most of her life. However, she has prevailed against one of the most oppressive authoritarian regimes in history. Read her story and consider the challenge that follows.
Female Leaders: Aung San Suu Kyi
Aung Sang Suu Kyi was born in Burma (now Myanmar) in 1945. Her father was the prominent and inspirational politician and military leader General Aung San, who was partly responsible for negotiating Burma’s independence from the UK in 1947. This was also the year he was assassinated, when Suu Kyi was just 2 years old. She left Burma as a teenager with her diplomat mother, Khin Kyi, and lived for a while in India before taking a degree at Oxford University and settling in the UK, where she married an English academic and gave birth to two children.
Suu Kyi returned to Burma in 1988 to care for her mother after she had suffered a stroke. At the time Burma was on the cusp of emerging from 26 years of oppressive dictatorship under Ne Win, but instead of the promised referendum and initiation of a parliamentary democracy, he instituted a military coup and reinforced further dictatorship. Following massacres of pro‐democracy demonstrators, Suu Kyi began to speak up. Just a few months after her return she helped found the National League for Democracy (NLD) and in 1990 she was elected prime minister in a general election with 59% of the popular vote. Her party won 82% of the available seats. Tragically, the military junta refused to accept the result and persisted with its illegal dominance over the country, and the now opposition NLD party. Suu Kyi was arrested without charge in 1989 and remained a political prisoner, detained or imprisoned for 14 out of a total of 20 years. When under arrest she was denied access to her family and supporters and the junta even attempted to bribe or threaten her in to try to silence her influence on the people of Myanmar.
Detention did not prevent Suu Kyi from speaking out, though, and she carried on a difficult and determined fight for her people and her country’s freedom. In 1989 she stood alone before an army unit while they trained their rifles on her. She refused all help from the military junta and endured hunger strikes that left her malnourished and ill. When her husband became seriously ill, the military government refused to allow him to travel to be by her side before his death in 1999, and her children grew up without their mother. Each time she was released from house arrest (in 1995 and 2002) she spoke out against the government, calling for liberty and democracy to be reinstated, and as a result was immediately placed back under house arrest, with her telephone lines cut and her letters vetted or intercepted. As a result of her courage, in 1990 she was awarded the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and in 1991 the Nobel Peace Prize, with the committee chairman describing her as an outstanding example of the power of powerlessness. In 1992 she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding by the government of India.
The military government in what is now Myanmar has tried to bribe Suu Kyi with offers of freedom in return for her permanent departure from the country, but she has refused to be moved in the hope of drawing international attention and aid to her country’s plight. Her writings show her as an ‘ordinary person fighting for the freedom of the ordinary people of her country’. She did not see herself as a martyr or hero or as exceptional, although she has maintained an optimistic and undiminished passion for her cause in the face of persistent, lengthy and cruel treatment at the hands of the military junta.
In November 2010 Suu Kyi was granted what Barack Obama has called her ‘long overdue’ release from house arrest, and joined thousands of joyful supporters outside her home in Rangoon, where she immediately spoke out against the dictatorship. The release came six days after the country’s first election in 20 years, in which the political party supported by the military junta won in what is widely regarded as a sham election. However, progress is being made, and Suu Kyi has called for the people of Myanmar to work for unity. In 2012 she was successfully elected to the Myanmar Parliament’s lower house and in 2015 her NLD party won 86% of the seats in the Assembly of Union, opening the door for Aung San Suu Kyi to remain in a political leadership position for some years. She continues to work for the development and growth of Myanmar.
Challenge: Suu Kyi has sacrificed much of her own personal freedom and family life in a struggle to gain recognition for the plight of the people in Myanmar and to have democracy brought to life. She has faced serious and real personal dangers and risked much to stand up for her beliefs and convictions. Fearless in the face of a harsh and compassionless dictatorship, she has remained active and vocal in the pursuit of her own and her country’s fight for liberation. When have you found the courage to stand up and fight or struggle for the things you believed in or that are important to you?
