The Lady Lives

Twenty years after she was first put under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi is still the inspiration of Burma's would-be opposition.

"It's like taking a sledgehammer to a nut," a Rangoon friend said of the military junta's attempt to sideline Aung San Suu Kyi. Few Burmese doubt that the nearly three month-old trial of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate represents anything more than a clumsy attempt to keep her off the streets in parliamentary elections provisionally scheduled for next year.
Suu Kyi had been a fixture of Burma's political scene for little over a year when her new party, the National League for Democracy, surged to victory in the country's last parliamentary elections in 1990. Fourteen years of house arrest followed. Each time she was released, the crowds converged upon her with a cultishness that has raised anxieties among some Burmese. She remains untested, they say. But even they agree that her star endures as a worthy opponent to one of the world's most repressive regimes. For more...

And thus the ruling military junta fear her, jealous of her legitimacy in a country where theirs is dead, conclusively destroyed with the order to beat up Buddhist monks who took to the streets in Aug.-Sept. 2007, and buried a few months later with their bungled response to Tropical Cyclone Nargis, the country's most devastating natural disaster in modern times.