The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was once the darling of foreign diplomats, with legions of starry-eyed supporters at home and a reputation for redeeming Myanmar from a history of iron-fisted martial rule.
Her followers swept a landslide victory in Myanmar’s last elections in 2020 but the military voided the vote, dissolved her National League for Democracy (NLD) party and has jailed her in total seclusion. As she disappeared and a decade-long democratic experiment was halted, activists rose up — first as street protesters and then as guerilla rebels battling the military in an all-consuming civil war.
The octogenarian — known in Myanmar as “The Lady” and famed for wearing flowers in her hair — is set to remain under lock and key as her junta jailers hold polls starting Sunday to overwrite the 2020 vote.
Suu Kyi’s reputation abroad is heavily tarnished over her government’s handling of the Rohingya crisis.
But for her many followers in Myanmar her name is still a byword for democracy, her absence on the ballot an indictment it will be neither free nor fair.
Accidental icon
Suu Kyi has spent around two decades of her life in military detention — but in a striking contradiction, she is the daughter of the founder of Myanmar’s armed forces.
She was born on June 19, 1945, in Japanese-occupied Yangon during the final weeks of World War II.
Her father, Aung San, fought for and against both the British and the Japanese colonisers as he sought to secure independence for his country.
He was assassinated in 1947, months before the goal was achieved, and Suu Kyi spent most of her early years outside Myanmar — first in India, where her mother was an ambassador, and later at Oxford University, where she met her British husband. After General Ne Win seized full power in 1962, he forced his brand of socialism on Myanmar, turning what was once Asia’s rice bowl into one of the world’s poorest and most isolated countries.
Suu Kyi’s elevation to a champion of democracy happened almost by accident when she returned home in 1988 to nurse her dying mother.