Aung San Suu Kyi

State counsellor of Myanmar

• Born: June 19, 1945
• Place of Birth: Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar)

Early Life

Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old when her father, General Aung San, died at the hands of assassins. He had led the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, supported democracy, and led Burma (now Myanmar) in protesting those illegally in power. Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother, Khin Kyi, arranged monthly memorial services to keep Aung San’s memory alive. Khin served Burma by assuming her late husband’s seat in parliament, pursuing nursing, and opening her home to nursing students of all nationalities. When Aung San Suu Kyi’s nine-year-old brother Aung San Lin drowned in a local pond in 1953, her grief-stricken mother finished her workday before returning home to join family and to view his dead body. Aung San Suu Kyi learned that duty and others come first.

Aung San Suu Kyi accompanied her mother to New Delhi, where Khin Kyi served as ambassador to India in 1960. After attending high school at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Aung San Suu Kyi entered Delhi University. She studied the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, who often used voluntary starvation, a peaceful practice that affected only himself directly, to show determination and conviction in the fight against British rule in India.

While attending St. Hugh’s College at Oxford University from 1964 to 1967, Aung San Suu Kyi met British student Michael Aris, a Tibetan studies major. She traveled in the summers to Spain and Algeria, where she helped build homes for widows of soldiers in Algiers. From 1969 to 1971, she worked as assistant secretary for the Advisory Committee on Administration and Budgetary Questions at the United Nations and volunteered at Bellevue Hospital. She corresponded with Aris in Bhutan, explained her obligations to the Burmese people, and asked that he help her fulfill these obligations, if necessary. They married in London on January 1, 1972, and traveled to Japan and India. While Aris tutored the royal family in Bhutan and headed the government’s translation department, Aung San Suu Kyi was the research officer on United Nations Affairs for the Bhutan foreign ministry.

Aung San Suu Kyi and Aris had two children: Alexander, born in 1973, and Kim, born in 1977, both in England, where Aris was working on Tibetan and Himalayan studies at Oxford University. Aung San Suu Kyi cataloged Burmese books in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and cared for the family.

Life’s Work

In 1985, Aung San Suu Kyi became a visiting scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan, bringing her son Kim with her. Her husband and son Alexander went to the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla for Aris’s fellowship. The four reunited after Aung San Suu Kyi completed her research, which was published as Aung San (1984), Let’s Visit Burma (1985), Let’s Visit Nepal (1985), and Let’s Visit Bhutan (1985).

In April 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma after her mother suffered a severe stroke. In Burma she found violence and the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) in power. She wrote to the BSPP and urged peace, delivering her first political speech on August 26. Later that year she became secretary of the newly formed National League for Democracy (NLD). She counseled, advised, urged nonviolence, and publicized Burma’s concerns.

The State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), also called the State Peace and Development Council, or SPDC, soon assumed power, opposing the NLD and changing Burma’s official name to Myanmar. The Burmese people were powerless, even when the SLORC agreed to a 1989 election. Aung San Suu Kyi organized her opposition to the SLORC with secret videotapes and shortwave broadcasts. She wore a jacket and hat combination that was to become a fashion statement and a symbol for the NLD. On April 5, 1989, she led a group of NLD members on a march down a city street; six soldiers aimed rifles at her, yet she continued to walk calmly.

Results of the May 1989 election showed that the NLD had won most of the open government seats, but the SLORC ignored the returns. They made illegal all newspapers except one, permitted the detention of “criminals” up to five years without trial or charges, and placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest on July 20. Her calmness and imprisonment became world news. She undertook a hunger strike to demand humane treatment for NLD members.

When the SLORC promised fair treatment for the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi stopped her strike. She had lost twelve pounds in twelve days and had to receive nourishment intravenously. She remained a political prisoner, but the SLORC allowed her to correspond with her family in England. The SLORC finally allowed her husband but not her boys to visit; his luggage was full of food. Malnourished, Aung San Suu Kyi had thin hair, poor vision, spinal degeneration, a weight below one hundred pounds, and heart and breathing problems. When he left, Aris took with him Aung San Suu Kyi’s writings, composed during her captivity.

The SLORC denied Aung San Suu Kyi most visitors. It refused Aris further visits even after he developed prostate cancer. He died on March 27, 1999; he had last seen Suu Kyi in 1995. After her husband’s death, Aung San Suu Kyi continued to urge help not for herself but for her people, who continued to suffer under the oppressive SLORC regime. In July 1995 she was released from house arrest, but her political activity was strictly limited and her behavior closely monitored. From September 2000 to May 2002, she was again placed under house arrest. In May 2003, her motorcade was attacked by pro-government demonstrators, after which she was held by the military before being placed under house arrest. Her house arrest was extended by one year in November 2004, and again in May 2006, May 2007, and May 2008. On May 3, 2009, an American man named John Yettaw approached her lakeside house uninvited after swimming across Inya Lake. He was arrested three days later, and Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and charged with violating the terms of her house arrest due to the intrusion. Her trial on charges of government subversion began on May 18, and she was found guilty and sentenced to eighteen more months of house arrest on August 11. On November 13, 2010, she was released after spending fifteen of the last twenty-one years under house arrest.

In January 2012 Aung San Suu Kyi announced her intention to run for a parliamentary seat in this first multiparty elections in the country since 1990. In April 2012 the NLD won forty-three of forty-five seats up for election in the Pyithu Hluttaw, the lower house of the Burmese parliament, making her the leader of the opposition in the lower house. She took the oath of office on May 2, 2012. She continued to press for constitutional reform, increased protection of Burmese citizens' democratic rights, and the establishment of an independent judiciary. Aung San Suu Kyi expressed a desire to run for president in the 2015 elections, but restrictions that came into effect in 2008—which may have been written in order to disqualify her specifically—prevented anyone who had children who were foreign nationals from seeking the presidency. A constitutional amendment to remove this restriction was proposed in 2015, but the parliament voted against it. Thus, although Suu Kyi remained a major influence in the NLD's presidential campaign plans, she herself could not run. However, the NLD overwhelmingly became the majority party in that year's parliamentary elections.

In 2016 the NLD established the role of state counsellor for Aung San Suu Kyi, giving her a powerful position in the government akin to prime minister. The military strongly opposed this appointment, which they argued represented a breach of the constitutional separation of powers. Yet many international observers hailed her new leadership role as a considerable step forward for Myanmar. She helped the government begin to pass various democratic reforms.

However, soon after her rise to become de facto leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi found herself the target of much international criticism. This was due to her muted response to growing violence inflicted by Myanmar's military upon the country's Rohingya people, a Muslim ethnic minority. The United Nations eventually declared that the violations of human rights seen in the country were crimes against humanity. In late 2018 Amnesty International withdrew Aung San Suu Kyi's Ambassador of Conscience Award, and other international honors were withdrawn as well. Still, she took limited action to stem the violence, and even made defiant statements about the situation. Her government was also accused of persecuting journalists.

Meanwhile, political tensions in Myanmar ramped back up. The NLD won parliamentary elections in November 2020 by wide margins, but the results were criticized by some as unfair due to security issues that hampered certain ethnic minorities' voting power. The military and its Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) political party declared the election invalid, but their appeal to the national electoral commission was dismissed. Then, on February 1, 2021, just as the new parliament was set to meet for the first time, the military launched a coup and declared a state of emergency, taking control of the government. NLD leaders were arrested, including Aung San Suu Kyi, who was initially held on charges of holding illegally imported walkie-talkies.

The coup and Aung San Suu Kyi's detention drew international condemnation and sparked widespread protests in Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi's trial was held largely in secret. Several other charges emerged, including corruption, and she was held mostly out of public view for months. In December 2021, she was sentenced to four years in prison, and another four-year sentence was handed down in January 2022. The trial proceedings and sentences were widely criticized by outside observers and Burmese activists as politically driven and unfair. This was not the end of Aung San Suu Kyi's troubles, however. Charges were filed against her for illegally importing walkie-talkies, violating the country's natural disaster management law during the COVID-19 pandemic, and committing election fraud. In October 2022, Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to spend thirty-three years in prison, but this was later reduced to twenty-seven years. She was seventy-eight years old at the time and still faced additional charges from the Myanmar military. In 2024, she was removed from the prison by the military and sent to an undisclosed location.

Significance

Aung San Suu Kyi's activism and long imprisonment made her a civil rights icon. Although she was offered her freedom if she left her home country, she chose to remain and endured her house arrest with dignity, becoming a symbol of peace and determination to her people.

The international community also recognized Aung San Suu Kyi's many sacrifices in her struggle for democratic reform in Burma. She earned the Rafto Prize for her work promoting human rights, the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the Wallenberg Medal, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize, in addition to several other humanitarian awards. The Nobel committee acknowledged her as a model of human determination and bravery. Although her international reputation declined and some honors were revoked during her time as state counsellor due to human rights abuses in Myanmar, her arrest in the 2021 coup made her a symbol of resistance to political oppression once more.

Bibliography

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Aung San Suu Kyi. Freedom from Fear, and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 1995.

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Paddock, Richard C. "From Hero to Pariah, Aung San Suu Kyi Dashes Hopes about Myanmar." The New York Times, 29 Sept. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/world/asia/myanmar-aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

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Regan, Helen. "Aung San Suu Kyi Sentenced to Four Years in Prison." CNN, 10 Jan. 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/01/10/asia/suu-kyi-conviction-walkie-talkies-intl-hnk/index.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Sui-Lee Wee, and Richard C. Paddock. "Aung San Suu Kyi Falls, but Myanmar’s Democratic Hopes Move On." The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/world/asia/myanmar-aung-san-suu-kyi.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Wee, Sui-Lee. "Aung San Suu Kyi Moved to Unknown Location From Prison by Myanmar Junta." The New York Times, 18 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/world/asia/suu-kyi-moved-junta-myanmar.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Wintle, Justin. The Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi. London: Hutchinson, 2007.