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Her assistant at the time, Win Htein, a former army captain, recalls how she had 'a real
ability to connect to the people', while a diplomat quoted in the New York Times said her
very name was 'magic' among the public. In April 1989, while campaigning in the town
of Danubyu, she came up against soldiers who threatened to shoot her and her support-
ers; with great courage she continued to move forward and calmly asked that they be al-
lowed to pass. Only at the last minute did a senior officer step in and order the men to
lower their guns (it's a scene reimagined in the movie Beyond Rangoon ).
In July 1989 Aung San Suu Kyi, who by now had become the NLD's primary spokes-
person, was placed under house arrest for publicly expressing doubt about the junta's in-
tentions of handing over power to a civilian government, and for her plans to lead a
march in Yangon to celebrate Martyr's Day. Her status as Aung San's daughter saved her
from the fate of many other NLD members, who were imprisoned in the country's no-
torious jails.
With her husband and sons by her side, Suu Kyi went on a hunger strike for 12 days to
gain an assurance that her jailed supporters would not be tortured. None of this stopped
the NLD from decisively winning the general election of May 1990.
Suu Kyi's interviews in 1995 and 1996 with journalist and former Buddhist monk Alan
Clements, described in The Voice of Hope ( www.worlddharma.com/wd/products/voice-
hope.html ), often intermingle politics and Buddhism.
A Prisoner of Conscience
Aris left Yangon with their sons on 2 September 1989. Suu Kyi would note see either Al-
exander or Kim for over two and a half years. Her husband was allowed to spend one
more fortnight with her over Christmas in 1989, a time he described as 'among the hap-
piest memories of our many years of marriage'.
At any moment during her years of arrest, Suu Kyi knew that the authorities would let
her walk free to board a flight to return to her family in the UK. But once she left Burma
she knew she would never be allowed to return, and she would not accept permanent ex-
ile. It was a sacrifice in which her family supported her, acting as her proxies to accept
from the European Parliament in January 1991 the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of
Thought, and the Nobel Peace Prize in October of the same year.
As the international honours stacked up (the Simón Bolivar Prize from Unesco in June
1992; the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in May 1995), Suu
Kyi maintained her strength and spirits by meditating, reading (in Letters from Burma
she writes how she loves nothing more than relaxing over a detective story), exercising,
 
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