With the fourth anniversary of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's current term of house arrest coming up on May 27, the international community and her supporters in Burma are going out of their way to prove she is not forgotten.
Last week, in an unprecedented gesture, 59 former world leaders, including three US past-presidents and 15 Asian ex-presidents and premiers, signed a letter to Burmese junta leader Senior General Than Shwe appealing for Suu Kyi's immediate release.
The United Nations has also done its part. On January 8 the UN Secretary-General called for Suu Kyi's release along with all other political prisoners and on May 10, the call was reiterated by 14 UN human rights mandate holders.
Protests outside Burma embassies can be expected this week in countries around the world and some non-violent demonstrations such as mass prayers are likely to mark the anniversary inside the country. Anything too demonstrative gets one arrested in Burma.
There is something inherently sad about all these expressions of outrage over the ongoing incarceration of a delicate 61-year-old Nobel peace prize laureate, who has spent 12 out of the past 17 years in prison, in that they are unlikely to achieve their aim.
Although a miracle is always possible, most long-time Burma-watchers believe that the likelihood of Burma's military leaders releasing Suu Kyi this month or any time soon is close to nil.
It doesn't help her case that May 27 also happens to mark the anniversary of the 1990 general election which Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won by a landslide. The NLD has been barred from assuming political power ever since.
"If the government released her now is would seem like a late victory for Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD, and the SPDC certainly doesn't want that," said one Rangoon-based western diplomat.
More likely would be for the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the Burmese junta styles itself, to release Suu Kyi on a more arbitrary date, to make it obvious that they have not bowed to international pressure.
Likelier still is that they will just keep her under house arrest until they've finished drafting a new constitution, held a referendum on it and staged a new election, a process that could take up to five years.
But the regime's need to keep Suu Kyi under lock and key indefinitely is the greatest testament to her ongoing political clout as Burma's foremost symbol of its struggle for democracy.
"I am sure that the great majority of people still trust her and follow her, partly because she is Aung San's daughter but also because she represents the very idea of hope in this otherwise demoralized country," said one diplomat.
Suu Kyi, the only daughter of Burmese independence hero Aung San, who was assassinated by political rivals in 1948 when she was two years old, returned to Burma on April 2, 1988, to care for her ailing mother Khin Kyi.
After spending much of her adult life in the United Kingdom, where she attended Oxford and married British don Michael Aris with who she had two sons, Suu Kyi's role as the torch bearer for Burma's pro-democracy movement was largely coincidental.
As the recently published "warts and all" biography Perfect Hostage, by Justin Wintle, details, when student demonstrations started to rock the capital that year and Suu Kyi's first impulse was to offer her services, as Aung San's daughter, as a mediator between the protestors and the military.
Instead she became the leader of the opposition, and over the years, the embodiment of everything the junta fears, starting with her status as the offspring of Aung San, the founding father of Burma's military.
Although it was Aung San who arguably won Burma, it's independence from Great Britain in 1948, it was General Ne Win who won the military political power with a coup d'etat in 1962.
Some argue that it was Suu Kyi's public criticisms of Ne Win and his disastrous 26-year rule that won her her first taste of house arrest on July 20, 1989. She was only released in 1995.
"Now there have been nearly 20 years of acrimonious relations between Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the army leadership and rolling back so much history is a huge task which would require one side or the other to give way," said Robert Taylor, a former Oxford professor who has been described as sympathetic to the regime.
Taylor faults Suu Kyi for expecting too much, too soon, and for having been "imprecise" in her demands from the junta. Others say the junta had no intention to listen to her no matter what her demands were.
In Burma, while there is growing criticism of Suu Kyi's NLD for having done so little for the past four years, the criticism tends to stop there.
"The NLD with Suu Kyi and without Suu Kyi are two different things," said Win Naing, a self-described "independent politician."
"The present NLD leadership are very reluctant to take on the kind of leadership role that Aung San Suu Kyi has taken before, and I believe she will do the same again once she has been released," he said.
That, apparently, is what Burmese military leaders believe as well.