PENGUIN BOOKS
FREEDOM FROM FEAR

Aung San Suu Kyi is the leader of the struggle for human rights and democracy in Burma. Born in 1945 as the daughter of Burma’s national hero Aung San, she was two years old when he was assassinated, just before Burma gained the independence to which he had dedicated his life. After receiving her education in Rangoon, Delhi, Oxford University and the University of London, Aung San Suu Kyi then worked for the United Nations. For most of the following twenty years she was occupied in raising a family in England (her husband, Dr Michael Aris, who was British, died in 1999), before returning to Burma in 1988 to care for her dying mother. Her return coincided with the outbreak of a spontaneous revolt against twenty-six years of political repression and economic decline. Aung San Suu Kyi (‘Suu’ to her friends and family) quickly emerged as the most effective and articulate leader of the movement, and the party she founded went on to win a colossal electoral victory in May 1990.

Aung San Suu Kyi has spent most of the past nineteen years imprisoned either in jail or in her own home. She was arrested in July 1989 and the military junta that now rules Burma refused for six years either to free her or to transfer power to a civilian government as it had promised. Upon her release in July 1995 she immediately resumed the struggle for political freedom in her country. In 2000 Aung San Suu Kyi was imprisoned when she tried to visit Mandalay in defiance of travel restrictions. Although released unconditionally in May 2002, she was put in prison after a clash between her supporters and a government-backed mob in 2003. After an operation in 2003 Suu Kyi was allowed to return home, where she remains under effective house arrest to this day.

Aung San Suu Kyi is an honorary fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In 1990 she was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament, and in 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In its citation the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated that in awarding the Prize to Aung San Suu Kyi, it wished ‘to honour this woman for her unflagging efforts and to show its support for the many people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means’.