In 1988, she got the phone call that changed their lives: her mother was dying. Before they married, she asked Aris to promise he would not stop her if she needed to return home. She attended Oxford University, met her husband, the British academic Michael Aris, and had two sons. The daughter of independence hero Aung San, who was assassinated in 1947 when she was two years old, Suu Kyi spent much of her young life overseas. Protesters have taken to the streets in her name, calling for the release of 'Mother Suu' despite hundreds of killings and thousands of detentions since the coup.

She now faces a dozen cases with combined maximum sentences of more 100 years.

More serious charges were to follow, including incitement, corruption and breaching the Official Secrets Act. The first criminal cases filed against Suu Kyi included breaching coronavirus restrictions and possession of unlicensed walkie-talkies.

But her second election victory in November unnerved the military - and it seized power on February 1, alleging voter fraud by her National League for Democracy party despite rejection of the army's claims by the election commission and monitors. That hybrid government failed to unite Myanmar's many ethnic groups or end its decade-long civil wars, and Suu Kyi also oversaw tightening restrictions on the press and civil society while falling out with some former allies. She spent 15 years under house arrest in the struggle for democracy, but her administration had to cohabit with the generals who retained control of defence and security. Known as 'the Lady', Suu Kyi had fulfilled the dreams of millions when her party first won a landslide election in 2015 that established the Southeast Asian nation's first civilian government in half a century. Suu Kyi's long struggle for democracy made her a heroine in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, and the mostly Western criticism she faced over the plight of the Rohingya had no negative impact on her popularity at home. Just 14 months before the coup, she had travelled to the UN International Court of Justice in the Hague to defend those same generals against charges of genocide over a 2017 military offensive that drove ethnic Rohingya Muslims out of Myanmar. She was convicted of incitement and violations of a law on natural disasters in the first verdict in more than a dozen criminal cases filed against her since the February 1 military takeover. Put on trial by generals who overthrew her elected government in a coup that cut short democratic reforms she had fought for decades to bring about, Myanmar's ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been sentenced to four years in prison.

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