Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Aung San Suu Kyi
Free, free at last: Aung San Suu Kyi, who for 15 of the 21 years between
1989 and 2010 was a prisoner of conscience, is now a member of Myan-
mar's parliament. Chairperson of the National League for Democracy (NLD),
she has been compared to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi for her pa-
tient, nonviolent activism, her life story a source of inspiration not only for
the oppressed and disenfranchised in Myanmar but people battling injustice
around the world.
Family & Influences
Aung San Suu Kyi was born just two years before the assassination in July 1947 of her
father, Aung San, leader of the Burma Independence Army and the key architect of the
country's independence. Aung San had met Suu Kyi's mother, Ma Khin Kyi, a nurse,
while recuperating from malaria in Rangoon General Hospital in 1942.
Her father's premature death was not the only family tragedy: in 1953 Suu Kyi's elder
brother Lin drowned accidentally at the age of eight (there was also an elder sister Chit,
but she had died when only a few days old in 1946, a year before Suu Kyi's birth). Later,
Suu Kyi would become estranged from her eldest brother Aung San Oo, an engineer who
emigrated to the US; in 2001 he unsuccessfully tried to sue her for a share of their moth-
er's home - 54 University Ave, Yangon (Rangoon), where Suu Kyi has spent the many
years of her house arrest.
Her parents' political activism and example of public service had an enormous influen-
ce on Suu Kyi. 'When I honour my father, I honour all those who stand for the political in-
tegrity of Burma,' she writes in the dedication to her book
Freedom from Fear
. In the es-
say
My Father,
she says he was 'a man who put the interests of the country before his own
needs' - something Suu Kyi has also done.
Suu Kyi's mother was also a prominent public figure in newly independent Burma,
heading up social planning and policy bodies, and briefly acting as an MP, before being
appointed the country's ambassador to India in 1960. Suu Kyi finished her schooling in
New Delhi, then moved to the UK in 1964 to study at Oxford University. It was in London
at the home of Lord Gore Booth, a former ambassador to Burma, and his wife that Suu
Kyi met history student Michael Aris.
