“If I am asked why I am fighting for democracy in Burma,” Aung San Suu Kyi said in her Nobel lecture on 16 June 2012, “it is because I believe that democratic institutions and practices are necessary for the guarantee of human rights.”
Suu Kyi, dressed in dark purple, was delivering the lecture 21 years late. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while under house arrest, separated from her family thousands of miles away in the UK. Between those two dates, Suu Kyi became one of the world’s most celebrated dissidents. In 2006, a New Statesman readers’ poll named her the greatest “hero of our time”; Suu Kyi received three times as many nominations as the second-placed Nelson Mandela. Celebrities such as David Beckham demanded her release. When it came, in 2010, world leaders including Barack Obama lined up to meet her.
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