12 Far-out Charismatic Leaders (and the Trouble They Caused)

For nearly two decades, activist Aung San Suu Kyi was imprisoned in her Myanmar (formerly Burma) home and became the symbol of liberation for her country. She is the daughter of General Aung San, the founder of the Burmese Independence Army. He originally negotiated the terms of Burmese independence from Britain, but was assassinated shortly before Myanmar gained that independence. Suu Kyi was just 2 years old [source: BBC].

As an adult, Suu Kyi lived an ordinary life in England with her British husband and two children, until in 1988 she returned to Burma to attend her ailing mother. While there, she was asked to lead the pro-democracy movement. That same year, she addressed a half-million people on behalf of the National League for Democracy party in the hopes of bringing democracy to her home country. The country was ruled by a brutal army junta, though, and not surprisingly, it wasn’t in favor of this idea.

Although Suu Kyi’s party won a landslide victory during a 1990 general election, the junta overturned the results, locked up Suu Kyi in her home and stayed in power. The junta offered to release her if she would leave Burma and stay out of politics, but she refused, vowing to serve the people of Burma until death. She rarely saw her family again [source: The Nobel Prize].

But slowly, things changed. After intense international pressure, Suu Kyi was released in late 2010. By then, she was one of the world’s most prominent prisoners of conscience. In 2015, Myanmar held its first openly contested election in 25 years. The National League for Democracy won handily, although Suu Kyi was barred from becoming president because of her sons’ foreign citizenship [sources: BBC, CBC News].

Today, however, Suu Kyi’s reputation as a human rights advocate has been tarnished. She has been criticized by the international community for doing nothing to stop the Myanmar military’s persecution of the Muslim-minority Rohingyas, who were forced to flee in the thousands to Bangladesh. But she is still wildly popular among Myanmar’s Buddhist majority.

In 2020, after her party again won in a landslide, the country’s still-powerful military arrested Suu Kyi and other political leaders. The following year, she was charged with inciting dissent and other matters, and may be imprisoned for life [source: BBC].