BURMESE POLITICAL LEADER
1945–

Aung San Suu Kyi, like the former South African leader Nelson Mandela (b. 1918), is an international symbol of peaceful resistance to an oppressive regime that has kept her under house arrest for years and also confined her to Myanmar's most notorious prison. In 1991, she won the Nobel Peace Prize for leadership of Myanmar's pro-democracy movement, which opposed a military junta that took control of the Texas-sized country in 1988.

Aung San Suu Kyi was born in the capital city of Rangoon in 1945. Her father, nationalist leader General Aung San, negotiated Burma's independence from the British. Her mother, Daw (Ma) Khin Kyi, was a senior nurse at Rangoon General Hospital who became a prominent public figure after the assassination of Aung San in 1947.

Suu Kyi was educated in India, where her mother was the Burmese ambassador, and at Oxford University in...