The occasion of Aung San Suu Kyi's return to Burma in 1988 was, characteristically enough, not the political situation but her old mother's illness. The political turbulence had just begun, however. There had been demonstrations and confrontations with the police with some two hundred killed. The unrest continued while she was nursing her dying mother. That was the situation in which she resolved to take an active part in what she herself called "the second struggle for national independence".