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Aung San Suu Kyi
Since her release from house arrest in November 2010,Aung San Suu
Kyi has been busy. She has been on the cover of Time and been profi led
in countless other publications; met with ambassadors and addressed
global movers and shakers at Davos (www.tinyurl.com/5wfxzbn); and
even guest-directed the 2011 Brighton Arts Festival (www.brightonfesti
val.org) in the UK. The Lady – as she is known as in Myanmar and by her
millions of supporters around the world – appears as poised, eloquent
and media-savvy as any politician in the digital age.
The daughter of a national hero, Aung San (see p 299 ), the 66-year-old
Nobel Peace Prize winner has spent 15 out of the 21 years since 1989 shut
away from the public as a prisoner of conscience. At the time of research,
while at liberty in Yangon, she is highly unlikely to leave the country,
since the current regime would certainly not allow her to return.
Before circumstances thrust her onto the global stage in 1988, Suu
Kyi was primarily a wife, mother and academic. In 1990 the National
League for Democracy (NLD), the party that she continues to lead, won
the general election by a landslide, yet was denied power by a military
junta that before, and ever since, has sought to demonise, imprison and
sideline Suu Kyi. She is easily the most famous Burmese person alive and
has been compared to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi for herAccording to local
custom, Aung
San Suu Kyi’s
name, like that
of all Burmese,
should be spelled
out in full. It’s
also commonly
preceded by the
honorific title
Daw. Through this
chapter we follow
the international
convention of
shortening her
name to Suu Kyi.AUNG SAN SUU KYI: BOOKS, MOVIES & THE INTERNETThere are many sources of information on Aung San Suu Kyi. On the internet there are
the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Pages (www.dassk.org) and the site of the NLD (www.
nldburma.org).
Suu Kyi’s interviews in 1995 and 1996 with journalist and former Buddhist monk Alan
Clements, described in The Voice of Hope (1997), often intermingle politics and Bud-
dhism; it’s available as an audio book from http://www.useyourliberty.org.
Freedom from Fear (1991) is a collection of Suu Kyi’s writings and those of supporters
on topics ranging from her father to the Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered by her
son Alexander. Letters from Burma (1997) features a year’s worth of weekly essays Suu
Kyi wrote on Burmese culture, politics and incidents from her daily life for the Japanese
newspaper Mainichi Shimbun.
The best biography of several is Justin Wintle’s The Perfect Hostage (2007), an im-
pressively researched account of her life and times, and of modern Burmese history,
which paints a very believable, likeable ‘warts and all’ portrait of Suu Kyi.
On the cinematic front, Luc Bresson’s The Lady is a bio-pic released in 2011 based
on Suu Kyi’s life between 1988 and 1999 when her husband Michael Aris died; it stars
Malaysian actress Michelle Yeo as Suu Kyi.
Covering similar ground, but in documentary format, is Lady of No Fear, directed by
Anne Gyrithe Bonne, which was fi nished before Suu Kyi’s release in 2010 and includes
interviews with close friends and colleagues about the famously private woman.