The prize must be small comfort to the fiery daughter of a Burmese independence hero-if she even knows she has won. Suu Kyi has been under house arrest without a telephone for more than two years. A military junta, which took over in 1988, rules with a brutal hand; it has ignored democratic elections, in which Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won 80 percent of the vote, and arrested as many as 3,000 activists.
Soldiers still ring Suu Kyi’s villa, and a sign tells passersby not to come near. Suu Kyi, 46, reportedly has spent her time reading, doing aerobics, studying Japanese and meditating. When neighbors stopped hearing her play Mozart on her piano, they speculated that she had sold it to pay bills. The government offered to let her leave the country, provided she stayed out of polities. She declined, demanding the release of political prisoners and the transfer of power to the NLD.
Though she was educated in Burma, India and then at Oxford University, the high-spirited politics graduate seems to have always known she was destined to return to her homeland. Suu Kyi asked her husband to promise never to stop her if she decided to go back. In 1988, she went home to nurse her ailing mother. Within months, Suu Kyi had leapt onto center stage. “Democracy is the only ideology which is consistent with freedom,” she told a cheering crowd.
Burma, now calling itself Myanmar, is more of a backwater than ever. Gen. Ne Win, who ruled from 1962 until he stepped aside in 1988, set out on “the Burmese road to socialism,” sealing the country off from the world. Mismanagement has reduced it to one of the 10 poorest nations, with a per capita annual income of $210. But opposition activists hope international pressure might force the leaders to relax their repressive policies. In choosing Suu Kyi, who was nominated by Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, himself a Nobel candidate, the Nobel Committee may have served notice to Asia’s other oppressive governments. The world will not easily forget Myanmar’s silenced laureate, who has likened her dream to a traditional Burmese poem:
Emerald cool we may be As water in cupped hands But oh that we might be As splinters of glass In cupped hands.
