For eight years Aung San Suu Kyi has been prevented by Burma’s vindictive military rulers from seeing her two sons, who live in the West. Her telephone has been taken away. Isolated from the world in her lakeside home, it is not clear whether she has a shortwave radio, let alone a television. Last year she suffered health problems. But, against all the odds, at the age of 62, the world’s most famous political prisoner since Nelson Mandela is still struggling to make Burma a better place.

The present protests against military rule echo Burma’s last great uprising against the generals in August 1988 when Suu Kyi’s struggle to bring freedom to her country first began.

She had just returned from Britain to nurse her ailing mother. When students rose up and blood flowed in the streets, her sense of duty propelled her not to rejoin her family in Britain but to stay in the land where her father, Aung Sang, died a hero when she was a child.

Aung Sang, Burma’s national leader, was murdered by rival politicians in 1947 on the eve of independence from Britain. Though she left Burma at the age of 15, Suu Kyi was never allowed to forget that she was his daughter.

Who will win? Can the world help?

What can the world do about the situation in Burma? Will it make any difference? Who, if anyone, can really have an influence?

Multimedia

• In pictures: Burma violence

• Video: protests in Rangoon

BACKGROUND

• A troubled future for Burmese generals

• Comment: China and India hold the key

• Burmese Days

Related Links

• Burma junta divided over Suu Kyi talks

• Junta crushes Buddha's army

• ‘Blood’ rubies bankroll Burmese junta

Multimedia

• In pictures: Burma violence

• Video: the killing of Kenji Nagai

The brutally suppressed 1988 uprising was the single best opportunity Burma has had to rid itself of decades of impoverishing military rule. There is a tragic and obvious truth as to why the struggle was lost, and Suu Kyi may have contributed to the failure. Highly principled and believing in Buddhist pacifism, she steadfastly rejected violence. The opportunity to force change was lost. If her voice could be heard today, she would do the same again.

I met Suu Kyi in 1988. She had youth, beauty, integrity and huge popular support and was full of hope for her country. Wherever she appeared she was feted. As she crisscrossed the beautiful land, a demure figure in a Burmese longyi, with an orchid in her hair, nothing seemed to intimidate her.

Once, when soldiers took aim and warned they would shoot if she continued walking down the middle of a road, she kept on walking. It was courage such as this that made the military realise she was their gravest political threat.

Two years after the crackdown, the generals allowed an election.

Her party, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory – but the military ignored the result. Since then, the party has split and many of its leaders have been imprisoned or killed.

As well as a political story, Suu Kyi’s is ultimately a family tragedy. After she was first put under house arrest in 1989, her husband Michael Aris, an Oxford academic, worked tirelessly behind the scenes on her behalf. Throughout, he did not share his agony and despair over their separation, bringing up Kim and Alexander, their two sons, virtually on his own.

Because of his retiring nature few outside their close family circle knew how wonderfully effective he was. The fact that Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1991 largely came down to his tireless efforts behind the scenes.

In 1999 Aris was on his deathbed with prostate cancer, and Suu Kyi made the heartbreaking decision to stay in Burma, knowing that if she were to leave the junta would never let her back.

On his 53rd birthday, Aris died without saying goodbye to the wife he adored. I remember his telling me that, at their wedding, there was a recital of Kipling’s poem Mandalay: “I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! On the road to Mandalay . . .”

Aris loved those words, which perfectly described Suu Kyi.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president