Restrictions continue
Aung San Suu Kyi remained under military watch and house arrest until July 1995. Afterward the government continued to restrict her movement both inside the country and abroad. During Aung San Suu Kyi's first year of freedom, she was only permitted to take short trips in and around her home city of Rangoon and did not travel outside Myanmar. She continued, however, to serve as the vocal leader of the NLD and push for democracy. The military government, meanwhile, closed schools, ignored the healthcare needs of the people, and forced many citizens into slave labor while torturing and imprisoning others.
In 1999 Michael Vaillancourt Aris, Aung San Suu Kyi's husband, died in England. He had been denied permission by the Myanmar government to visit his wife during the last year of his life. The government suggested she go to visit him, but she remained at home, fearing that if she left, she would not be allowed to reenter the country. In September 2000 she was again placed under house arrest after attempting to travel to rural areas outside Myanmar to meet with NLD members. In December of that year U.S. president Bill Clinton (1946–) awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. honor given to a civilian (nonmember of a military, police, or firefighting unit). The U.S. government also continued the ban on new investment in Myanmar and discouraged companies from doing business there as a protest against the military government's treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi and other citizens of Myanmar.
In December 2001, in Oslo, Norway, Nobel Prize winners gathered to protest Aung San Suu Kyi's continued detention and signed an appeal to the Myanmar government requesting that she and fifteen hundred other political prisoners be set free. In May 2002 Aung San Suu Kyi was finally released from house arrest. Once again free to move about the country, Aung San Suu Kyi drew large crowds wherever she spoke to her followers about freedom in Myanmar. "The NLD is working for the welfare of everyone in the country, not for NLD alone," she told an audience of supporters a few days after her release.
For More Information
Parenteau, John. Prisoner for Peace: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's Struggle for Democracy Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds, 1994.
Stewart, Whitney. Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma. Minneapolis: Lerner, 1997.
Victor, Barbara. The Lady: Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Laureate and Burma's Prisoner. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1998.