AUNG SAN SUU KYI
356
her, acting as her proxies to accept from the European Parliament in
January 1991 the Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought, and the Nobel
Peace Prize in October of the same year.
As the international honours stacked up (the Simón Bolivar Prize from
Unesco in June 1992; the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Un-
derstanding in May 1995), Suu Kyi maintained her strength and spirits
by meditating, reading (inLetters from Burmaa she writes how she loves
nothing more than relaxing over a detective story), exercising, practicing
piano, and listening to news on the radio. From May 1992 until January
1995 she was also permitted regular visits from her husband and sons.Five Years of Freedom
Much to the joy of her supporters at home and abroad, as well as her
family, the government released Suu Kyi from house arrest in July 1995.
She was allowed to travel outside Yangon with permission, which was
rarely granted. During her subsequent fi ve years of freedom, she would
test the authorities several times with varying degrees of success.
The last time she would see her husband was in January 1996. A year
later he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which would prove to be
terminal. Despite appeals from the likes of Pope John Paul II and UN
Secretary General Kofi Anan, the generals refused to allow Aris a visa to
visit his wife, saying that Suu Kyi was free to leave the country to tend to
him. Aris died in an Oxford hospital on 27 March 1999, his 53rd birthday;
over the telephone he had insisted Suu Kyi remain in Burma where many
political prisoners and their families also relied on her support.
The following decade was marked by more extended periods of house
arrest punctuated by shorter spells of freedom. A couple of intercessions
by UN special envoys resulted in talks with military leaders and the re-
lease of hundreds of political prisoners, but no real progress on the politi-
cal front – nor release for the woman who had become the world’s most
famous prisoner of conscience.Run-Up to Elections & Release
On 22 September 2007, at the height of the failed ‘Saff ron Revolution’
(p 304 ), the barricades briefl y came down along University Ave, allowing
the protestors to pass Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. In a powerful scene, later
recounted by eyewitnesses and captured on mobile-phone footage, theTHE SWIMMERFor an example of how a visitor’s actions, well-meaning or otherwise, can aff ect a local
in Myanmar, you need look no further than John Yettaw’s unauthorised meeting with
Aung San Suu Kyi. On 3 May 2009, the 53-year-old Vietnam vet, retired bus driver and
Mormon strapped on homemade fl ippers and paddled his way across Inya Lake to the
democracy leader’s home; he had attempted a meeting the year before, but had been
blocked that time by her two housekeepers. This time, however, Suu Kyi took pity on the
exhausted American and allowed him to stay, even though she knew such a visit violated
the terms of her house arrest.
Speaking to a reporter for the New Yorker in 2010, she said ‘I felt I could not hand over
anybody to be arrested by the authorities when so many of our people had been ar-
rested and not been given a fair hearing.’ When he left two days later, Yettaw was fi shed
out the lake by government agents. Following a trial, he was sentenced to seven years
in prison, only to be released a few days later to return to the US. Aung San Suu Kyi and
her two housekeepers, meanwhile, were sentenced to three years of hard labour, com-
muted to 18 months of house arrest – suffi cient to keep the NLD leader out of the way
during the 2010 elections.