In the early 1990s, I wished to invite Aung San Suu Kyi to address the Labour party conference. Of course, I knew that she would be unable to attend so I approached her husband, Michael Aris, and arranged to meet him, wondering if he might take her place. It was only as I prepared to meet him and began reading about the couple in more detail that I discovered the story of their lives together and the sheer scale of their struggle.
Indeed, the more I read, the more I wondered at Suu Kyi's great courage; lonely and sustained, it had shaped her life and resulted in her becoming the world's most renowned female prisoner of conscience. Facing one of the most tyrannous regimes in the world, she had demonstrated that courage by living under house arrest for most of the past two decades, far apart from the husband she loved, and from her beloved children, missing all their years of growing up.
To understand Suu Kyi's courage we need to understand firstly her devotion to duty - and in particular, the influence of her father, Aung San, who secured Burmese independence from the British in 1948 but who did not live to see that independence come into force - and secondly, and most important of all, the strength of Suu Kyi's underlying belief in democracy and human rights. Her courage has shown itself not in the fearlessness of impetuous confrontation, but in a strength of character rooted in passionately held beliefs - beliefs that have sustained her through years of oppression and deprivation and cruel separation from her loved ones.
For Suu Kyi, the turning point in this process occurred in the spring of 1988. "It was a quiet evening in Oxford like many others - the last day of March 1988," her husband recalled. "Our sons were already in bed and we were reading when the telephone rang. Suu picked up the phone to learn that her mother had suffered a severe stroke. She put the phone down and at once started to pack. I had a premonition that our lives would change for ever."
Until that day, Suu Kyi had been an academic and housewife, married to a professor, and bringing up two young sons in the tranquillity of Oxfordshire. The next day, she left England for a Rangoon in the grip of demonstrations and protests. As she tended her critically ill mother, she bore silent witness to the growing restlessness of the country's youth. Within a few weeks of her arriving in the city, General Ne Win's 26-year-long dictatorial rule came to an end as he announced plans to allow the country to decide its fate in a referendum.
Pro-democracy fervour was sweeping from Rangoon across the country and with mass demonstrations drawing millions on to the streets, Ne Win orchestrated not the democratic transition people hoped for, but a military takeover and a human-rights crackdown which culminated on August 8 in what Desmo nd Tutu and Vaclav Havel have subsequently exposed in a report to the UN Security Council as a massacre of the innocents: thousands of unarmed demonstrators - mostly students - were gunned down in the streets.
Suu Kyi had been in Rangoon only for a few weeks. She had no weapons, troops or band of followers, but she had seen at first hand the brutality of the military and she knew the fate awaiting the countless demonstrators rounded up on the streets. It was because she wanted for others in her own country the freedoms she enjoyed in the United Kingdom that at this point, the point of greatest danger, she stepped forward. Within weeks, Suu Kyi and colleagues had established the National League for Democracy (NLD) and she became its general secretary.
For me, Suu Kyi defines the meaning of courage. Once courage was seen chiefly as a battlefield virtue. In most accounts the emphasis is on the physical - physical risk, physical vulnerability or physical triumph. It has been seen as an almost exclusively male, physical attribute: courage as daring and bravado, even recklessness; indeed, in many languages, the word for courage is derived from the word for "man". But Suu Kyi represents the power not of the powerful but of the powerless: a woman, a prisoner of conscience up against a state with one of the worst human-rights violation records in the world; a country of only 20 million people with 1,000 political prisoners, 500,000 political refugees, children as young as four in prison, and poets and journalists tortured just for speaking out.
In the collection of her writings, Freedom from Fear, Suu Kyi describes the courage that she admires the most. It is not fearlessness but conviction, a courage of the mind; not so much a momentous act of daring as a constant condition of the mind defined by strength of belief and strength of will.
Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as "grace under pressure", grace that is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.
The year after Suu Kyi's return to Rangoon, the military formed the State Law and Order Restoration Council (Slorc) and turned the entire machinery of the state against her in an attempt to silence her by intimidation. On April 5 1989, Suu Kyi and her colleagues confronted an army unit whose rifles were raised and aimed at them. She motioned for her colleagues to step aside while she walked on alone towards the soldiers, offering herself as an easy target. An army major finally intervened and the rifles were lowered. This poignant scene, of an unarmed solitary figure advancing towards the aimed weapons of a paranoid military dictatorship, can be seen as an allegory of her struggle for freedom in her land. In those few minutes, Suu Kyi showed extraordinary physical courage in the face of an acute mortal threat.
But I am even more fascinated to think of her courage to withstand the isolation of house arrest and separation from her family that would follow - even when she knew she could walk away.
In July 1989, Suu Kyi and other NLD leaders were arrested without charge, and she was placed under house arrest. Throughout her tumultuous entry into Burmese politics, her family had been her steadfast support. Michael and her young sons had travelled to Burma and stayed with her during the school holidays. They had accompanied her on some of her campaigning rallies. Both sons were with her, in fact, when she was placed under house arrest and began her hunger strike. But Slorc then sought to harness all the bargaining power it could by preventing her family from visiting her.
As soon as the boys had returned to Britain, Slorc stepped between Suu Kyi and her family. Her access to them was no longer a private matter to be negotiated around school holidays and half-terms. Her love for her family would become a weapon that Slorc could turn on her. From then on, her children were denied visas, though the authorities allowed Michael further visits at Christmas with the expectation that he would persuade her to give up the struggle and quit Burma. He wrote of their Christmas as a bittersweet occasion: "The days I spent alone with her that last time, completely isolated from the world, are among my happiest memories of our many years of marriage. It was wonderfully peaceful. Suu had established a strict regime of exercise, study and piano which I managed to disrupt. She was memorising a number of Buddhist sutras. I produced Christmas presents I had brought one by one to spread them out over several days. We had all the time in the world to talk about many things. I did not suspect this would be the last time we would be together for the foreseeable future."
When Slorc realised that her husband would not persuade her to abandon Burma and return to her family in Britain, he too was denied further entry. All phone lines to Suu Kyi were cut and letters from home and supporters, which had initially sustained her, no longer reached her. She would accept nothing from Slorc, not even their offer to be a channel for communication with her family. For Suu Kyi, accepting the help of Slorc, even for survival, would corrupt the clarity of her resolve and dilute the significance of her resistance. These were desperate, lonely days: "Sometimes I didn't even have enough money to eat. I became so weak from malnourishment that my hair fell out ... I couldn't get out of bed. I was afraid that I had damaged my heart. Every time I moved, my heart went thump-thump-thump, and it was hard to breathe. I fell to nearly 90lb from my normal 106. I thought to myself that I'd die of heart failure, not starvation at all. Then my eyes started to go bad. I developed spondylitis, which is a degeneration of the spinal column."
Despite Suu Kyi's imprisonment, the NLD went on to win the elections held in May 1990 by an incredible landslide - taking 82% of the seats. Slorc refused to recognise the results of the election [which, under normal circumstance, would have made Suu Kyi prime minister], and she remained under house arrest.
So the first uncertain weeks of house arrest turned into months, then years. Suu Kyi was completely cut off from the outside world, and completely cut off from her family. She discovered that Slorc might be willing to grant her the right to leave Burma to visit her family in Britain; but she knew that if she left she would never be allowed to return and her work for Burma would be over. To see her family again, she would have to abandon her country in its darkest hour. Yet Suu Kyi knew it was a false choice: the decision was not whether to choose family over country, but whether to abandon the very ideals upon which her love for both her family and country were grounded.
And each month away from her family was a month missed in the lives of her growing children. Each month in isolation marked a severance from the husband who was, in every regard, her life companion. What resources of strength did she have that enabled her to endure the loss of those she most loved? Her oppressors tried to equate her refusal to leave Burma with neglect of her children, claiming she sought personal glory in Burma over and above family duty.
But on the few occasions she has spoken of her separation from her family, we gain glimpses of the scale of her sacrifice. In one essay she wrote of seeing her son, Kim, for the first time after years of separation: "Two years is a long time in the life of a child. It is long enough for a baby to forget a parent who has vanished from sight. It is long enough for boys and girls to grow into young adolescents. It is long enough to turn a carefree youngster into a troubled human being ... When I saw my younger son again for the first time after a separation of two years and seven months, he had changed from a round-faced not-quite-12-year-old into a rather stylish, 'cool' teenager. If I had met him on the street, I would not have known him for my little son."
In 1991, Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel peace prize. She learned of this after hearing it on the BBC World Service while under house arrest. Her 14-year-old son Kim accepted the prize on her behalf.
Seven years later, Michael was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and told that he had not long to live. This devastating news brought about energetic efforts to allow him a final visit to his wife. Appeals from embassies throughout the world failed to move the Burmese military authorities. Instead, they stepped up the propaganda war and offered to assist with arrangements for Suu Kyi to leave the country so that she could be with her terminally ill husband.
It is scarcely possible to imagine the torment the couple must have endured in those months before Michael's death. She was never able to say goodbye to him. He died on March 27 1999.
Suu Kyi realised that her responsibility extended beyond her private life. She fully recognised the wider consequences of imprisonment endured by all the far less well-known prisoners of conscience. Only by fully sharing their privations for herself and her family could she draw international attention to their plight. She was their shield; her imprisonment was their best protection. It was only by bravely sacrificing her own family life that she could do anything to safeguard them.
And it was not enough to believe in a cause; you had to do everything in your power to advance that cause. Alan Clements [an activist who was the first American to become a Buddhist monk in Burma] asked her: "When you reflect upon your people's suffering, what is it that first comes to mind and stirs your heart?" Her response is illuminating and defining: "That we ought to do something about it, whenever we can. That is always my reaction when I see something that should not be. It's no use standing there wringing your hands and saying, 'My goodness, my goodness, this is terrible.' You must try to do what you can. I believe in action."
So Suu Kyi's courage is the courage to sacrifice her own happiness and a comfortable life so that, through her struggle, she might win the right of an entire nation to seek happy and comfortable lives. It is the absolute expression of selflessness. Paradoxically, in sacrificing her own liberty, she strengthens its cry and bolsters its claim for the people she represents.
Her sacrifice is made even more poignant because she seems to be very much in love with liberty and life. She writes movingly and with great joy of ordinary things - the changing seasons, the rituals of traditional Burmese festivals, the arrival of a new baby in someone's family, the spirit of cooperation and friendship that turns ordinary working days into small celebrations of the human spirit. She is alive to the wonder and mystery of the world and rejoices in its pleasures.
Suu Kyi does not see herself engaged in a battle of the titans but in a struggle for the freedom to an "ordinary" life. She knows that the foundation for such an ordinary life is truly radical because it requires a system based on trust, respect, and freedom.
As I write, in March 2007 [after more than a decade of dashed hopes during which Suu Kyi was released, re-arrested, re-released and again put under house arrest by the Burmese authoritites], another period of raised expectations for Suu Kyi's final release has come to yet another frustrating end - with hopes of freedom once again crushed. Once more, Burma's military junta has made it clear that she will not be a free woman. And so, 17 years after an election landslide in her favour, in the fourth year of her third period of house arrest, Suu Kyi remains the world's most prominent prisoner of conscience.
The telephone call she received one night in March 1988 led her far away from the home she loved and the family she cherished. She can never go back and can never reclaim the years she lost from the lives of those she loves. Her husband has died and her children have grown up. Yet detention and imprisonment have not made her less desirous of returning to the ordinary joys of life - a mother spending time with her family - and personal tragedy does not seem to have made her less optimistic about the good that human beings can do.
Even amid personal loss and suffering, the iron has never entered her soul. And hers is an enduring courage, much more than a single act of daring; it is a deep, lasting commitment to a cause that sends a message to the world that no confinement or prison cell, no intimidation of brutality, no personal loss, or even the threat to life itself can destroy the spirit of a true leader, nor her faith in human nature - and it can never extinguish her determination that one day her people will be free.