Nobel laureate Suu Kyi back in focus as anti-government protests in Myanmar grow

YANGON, Myanmar: As Myanmar's most sustained anti-government protests in two decades gain critical mass, the focus is again on a woman who until Saturday had not been seen in public in more than four years — detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi — who has spent nearly 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest — greeted more than 500 monks who briefly chanted prayers after they were unexpectedly allowed to pass a roadblock and gather outside her home.

The charismatic Nobel Peace Prize laureate has long been the linchpin in the struggle to bring democracy to Myanmar and an end to the brutal decades-long rule of the ruling generals.

Charismatic, steely-willed and outspoken, it is Suu Kyi's popularity that has made her freedom an unappealing prospect for Myanmar's rulers. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and is currently the only laureate under house arrest.

She is also the head of Myanmar's most popular political party, the National League for Democracy. The generals, who ignored the results of a landslide 1990 NLD election victory to hold onto power, insist they are guiding the country back to orderly democratic rule.

With Suu Kyi under house arrest, the current protests — which began Aug. 19 after the government raised fuel prices — have so far been led by her party faithful and other activists, but gained a boost when thousands of monks rallied to the cause.

"The fact that monks have gone to see Aung San Suu Kyi is really symbolically very important," Myanmar analyst Larry Jagan told The Associated Press in Bangkok.

"The key is the monks and Aung San Suu Kyi have one thing in common; peaceful protest. They want to see change through peaceful means. What we're seeing is a coming together of the main political force in the country, and the main religious leaders," he said.

Suu Kyi, 62, is the daughter of Gen. Aung San, who led Myanmar's nationalist struggle against British colonial rule after World War II.

Except for her name, she was an unknown figure in Myanmar. But as many as a half-million people turned out for her political debut on Aug. 26, 1988, a public speech at the foot of Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda — the country's most revered shrine that has again become a focus of the current protests.

The speech was the high-water mark of a pro-democracy uprising that sort to end military rule that began in 1962. It was ruthlessly crushed by the army, who shot down thousands of people nationwide and later imprisoned Suu Kyi and other pro-democracy leaders.

There are few signs that the ruling junta is willing to pick up the pace of its avowed road map for democracy, which calls for a constitution and free elections at some unspecified point in the future.

Neither is Suu Kyi, incarcerated or not, likely to back away from her insistence that her party play a leading role in determining the country's future.

Despite her forced isolation, Suu Kyi commands world attention and respect, her freedom a major demand of many Western leaders and the United Nations, as well as admirers around the globe.

Suu Kyi has been under detention continuously since May 2003 at her home in Myanmar's biggest city, Yangon.

Allowed no visitors or even access to a telephone, uncovering information about Suu Kyi's life in detention has been difficult.

Her most recent period of detention began after she began making political trips to the countryside, where — despite open intimidation by the government — huge crowds turned out to see her.

It was during one of those trips in northern Myanmar that her motorcade was ambushed by a government-backed mob.

The government — apparently stunned at her popularity — used the violence as a pretext to lock her up, saying that she presented a threat to public order.

She had been freed only a year earlier — in May 2002 — from 19 months of house arrest. In 1989, detained on trumped-up national security charges, she was held until 1995.

Born in Rangoon, now Yangon, in 1945, she was only two years old when her father was assassinated by political rivals in 1947, a year before independence for the country then called Burma.

Raised by her mother, who served abroad in Myanmar's diplomatic corps in the 1960s, Suu Kyi earned a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford in 1967, then worked for the United Nations in New York and Bhutan.