Reuters) - Aung San Suu Kyi, who went from English housewife to Myanmar's opposition leader and world famous political prisoner, is a powerful symbol of the struggle against dictatorship in one of the world's most oppressive countries.
Yet despite her steely determination in confronting the generals, the former Burma has moved no closer to democracy after 48 years of brutal military rule, holding an election on Sunday that the military junta's party won easily.
Detained for 15 of the past 21 years, the 65-year-old pro-democracy leader appears on the cusp of freedom.
Her latest term of house arrest expires on Saturday. Hundreds have gathered outside her party headquarters, but the country's reclusive military rulers have not indicated whether she will walk free or face yet another extension of her house arrest.
Slightly built and soft-spoken, she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and plays a crucial role in keeping world attention on Myanmar's military junta and its human rights record.
Known simply as "The Lady" by millions of her countrymen, she refuses to give up on the resource-rich country. "For me, real freedom is freedom from fear and unless you can live free from fear you cannot live a dignified human life," she once said.
Her National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country's last elections, in 1990, by a landslide, but has never been allowed to govern. After deciding not to contest Sunday's election, her party was disbanded by the junta.
She was due to be released on May 27 last year. That changed when an American intruder swam to her lakeside home just weeks before she was to be freed, claiming God had sent him to warn her she would be the target of an assassination plot.
She was sentenced to house arrest the following August for allowing the intruder, John Yettaw, to stay two nights, which was deemed to be an infringement of security laws.
She was last freed in May 2002 and immediately travelled the country to meet supporters, drawing huge crowds -- and increasing hostility from backers of the military government.
Then, on May 30, 2003, Suu Kyi and her convoy were, according to rights groups, ambushed and attacked by government-affiliated thugs. Dissidents in exile suspect more than 70 NLD followers were killed.
The military blamed the clashes on Suu Kyi and placed her under "protective custody" at a secret location, sparking international outrage and sanctions from the West and an unprecedented rebuke from Yangon's neighbours.
Since major surgery in September 2003, she has been confined to her home on Yangon's University Avenue, a prisoner in all but name, without the use of a telephone and with her visitors restricted.
"SECOND STRUGGLE"
Suu Kyi spent much of her life abroad before returning to her family's home on Yangon's Inya Lake in April 1988 to care for her ailing mother just as resentment of military rule boiled over into pro-democracy protests across the country.
She first spoke to crowds of protesters from the steps of the capital's historic Shwedagon Pagoda on August 26 that year.
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