Aung San Suu Kyi summary

Aung San Suu Kyi, (born June 19, 1945, Rangoon, Burma [now Yangon, Myan.]), Opposition leader in Myanmar (Burma). Daughter of nationalist leader Aung San, she studied in Burma and India and at the University of Oxford. She lived quietly in Britain until 1988, when she returned to Burma. Moved by the brutality of U Ne Win’s military regime, she began a nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights. The 1990 electoral victory of her National League for Democracy (NLD) was ignored by Ne Win’s government, and she was held under house arrest from 1989 to 1995. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Peace. She subsequently continued her opposition activities and was subject to varying degrees of government harassment, including more periods of house arrest beginning in 2000. She was released from house arrest in 2011 and won a seat in the lower house of the national legislature in 2012. The NLD won a majority of legislative seats in 2015, and her close friend and fellow NLD member Htin Kyaw was elected president the next year. (Suu Kyi was constitutionally barred from being president.) She held multiple government posts in Htin Kyaw’s administration and that of his successor, Win Myint. She faced international condemnation over the persecution of the Muslim Rohingya people in Myanmar. She and the NLD-led government were deposed by the military in February 2021.