Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi spent fifteen years under house arrest, won a Nobel Peace Prize, governed Myanmar for five years, and was deposed by the army she had defied. Born in Rangoon in 1945, she is the daughter of Aung San, who negotiated Burmese independence and was assassinated in 1947 when she was two. She was educated in India, where her mother was ambassador, and at Oxford, worked at the United Nations in New York, and lived in England with her husband Michael Aris and their two sons. She returned in 1988 to nurse her dying mother and arrived in the middle of a nationwide uprising. She addressed a crowd of several hundred thousand at the Shwedagon Pagoda and became the leader of the National League for Democracy. She was placed under house arrest in 1989. The NLD won about eighty per cent of seats in the 1990 election and the junta annulled it. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and did not leave to collect it, knowing she would not be readmitted. Her husband was refused a visa and died of cancer in 1999 without seeing her again. She was released in 2010 and the NLD won overwhelmingly in 2015. Barred from the presidency by a constitutional clause about foreign spouses, she governed as State Counsellor. In 2017 the army drove some 740,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh in operations the UN described as having genocidal intent. She defended the military at the International Court of Justice in 2019, and her international standing collapsed. The army seized power in February 2021 and imprisoned her on charges carrying decades.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history