AUNG SAN SUU KYI

Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is revered in Burma and by campaigners around the world as the embodiment of the country’s fight for democracy.

The daughter of assassinated independence hero Aung San, she returned to Burma in 1988 from the UK and quickly became the figurehead of the growing resistance to the ruling junta.

But since leading the opposition to victory in a 1990 election, she has spent 11 years confined to house arrests, with only brief spells in which she was given restricted freedom.

Born in Rangoon in June 1945 to Burma’s nationalist leader General Aung San, Suu Kyi was only two years old when her father was assassinated.

She studied in India and the UK, and while at Oxford, she met her future husband Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar.They settled in the UK and had two sons.

But Suu Kyi returned to Burma in 1988, initially to nurse her dying mother.

While there she became heavily involved in the year’s widescale protests which were brutally repressed by the military rulers.

She became the figurehead of the burgeoning pro-democracy movement, leading the newly-formed National League for Democracy.

When the regime was forced into calling an election in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi, despite being placed under house arrest, helped the democracy movement to victory.

The National League for Democracy pulled in 60% of the popular vote and won 82% of the seats in parliament.

Instead of becoming leader of her nation, Aung San Suu Kyi found herself denied power and denied liberty by the ruling junta.

Since then, she has spent more than a decade confined to her house and denied communications to the outside world.

In 1991 she won the Nobel Peace Prize, with her sons accepting the award in Oslo on her behalf.

Aung San Suu Kyi used the prize money to set up a health and education trust for the Burmese people. Her husband was diagnosed with cancer in 1997.

He petitioned the Burmese authorities to be allowed to visit his wife, but was denied. Aung San Suu Kyi was told that if she left Burma she would not be allowed back in.

Her husband died in 1999, while Suu Kyi was in Burma.

Having been placed under house arrest from 1989 to 1995 and 2000 to 2002, Aung San Suu Kyi was again detained and confined in 2003.

On Saturday she was seen in public for the first time in three years, when around 2,000 monks forced their way through barricades to pray near her house, where she joined them in prayer.