A military junta locked her up in 1989, after which her National League for Democracy won elections that were ignored by the dictatorship. In 1991, she won the Nobel Peace Prize “for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
During house arrest in her crumbling villa for a total of 15 years, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi kept to a strict schedule. She listened to BBC radio news reports. She practiced the piano. And she meditated in the Buddhist way, intent, she said, on transcending earthly concerns. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi missed her two sons growing up, and the death of her husband, a British academic, from cancer.
But the virtues that served Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi so well during house arrest — her straight-backed dignity and the psychological bunker she built around herself — may be what has led to her failure, so far, to fight for true, representative democracy in Myanmar.
The line is thin between resolve and recalcitrance, conviction and condescension.
“It is ironic that while the international community used its liberty to promote hers, she is using some of the very same legal mechanisms as the military to stifle freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly,” said Bill Richardson, the former American ambassador to the United Nations and a longtime ally of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.
The New York Times