Aung San Suu Kyi had spent almost 15 of the previous 21 years in detention, most of it confined to her lakeside home in Yangon. Her release came days after the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party swept an election widely condemned as rigged and boycotted by her National League for Democracy. Supporters crowded outside her gate to greet her, and her freedom became an early sign of the cautious opening that later let her party win power in 2015.
By November 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi had become the world's most famous political prisoner, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate held for most of two decades at her home beside Inya Lake in Yangon. Her party, the National League for Democracy, had won a landslide in the 1990 election, which the junta refused to honor, jailing or exiling much of its leadership instead.
The general election of November 7, 2010, the first in twenty years, was boycotted by the NLD and dismissed by Western governments as a sham designed to dress military rule in civilian clothes. The junta-backed USDP won decisively. On November 12 the generals signed the order ending her house arrest, and on November 13 it expired and she walked out to meet the crowds waiting at her gate.
Her release did not end military power, but it opened a narrow door. Suu Kyi won a seat in parliament in 2012 and her party took power after the 2015 election, before the army seized control again in a 2021 coup.
Key people: Aung San Suu Kyi