PHOTO by: HotNYC News.

In 2009 U2 fans
at every show will be reminding the world of the plight of Burma’s democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi.  A Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi has been described as Asia’s Nelson Mandela.  Her party, the National League for Democracy, won elections in 1990 but the ruling military junta refused to hand over power.  Since that day most of her time has been spent under house arrest.

She was born on June 19th, 1945 to Burma’s independence hero, Aung San, who was assassinated when she was only two years old.

Aung San Suu Kyi was educated in Burma, India, and the United Kingdom. While studying at Oxford University, she met Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar who she married in 1972. They had two sons, Alexander and Kim. On March 27 1999, while Aung San Suu Kyi was in Burma, Michael Aris died of cancer in London. He had petitioned the Burmese authorities to allow him to visit Suu Kyi one last time, but they had rejected his request. He had not seen her since a Christmas visit in 1995. The government always urged Suu Kyi to join her family abroad, but she knew that she would not be allowed to return.

Aung San Suu Kyi had returned to Burma in 1988 to nurse her dying mother and was immediately plunged into the country’s nationwide democracy uprising. Joining the newly-formed National League for Democracy (NLD), Suu Kyi gave numerous speeches calling for freedom and democracy. The military regime responded to the uprising with brute force, killing up to 5,000 demonstrators. Unable to maintain its grip on power, the regime was forced to call a general election in 1990.