The simple answer is they missed their chance. Suu Kyi (pronounced soo chee), 55, was first confined to house arrest in 1989, months before her National League of Democracy won Burma's last election in a landslide. The dictators ignored the election results and proceeded to arrest all the NLD leaders they hadn't already jailed previously, and continued the kind of repression that had been the junta's modus operandi since 1962. But in 1991 something happened that the dictators couldn't have anticipated. Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize. The eyes of the world suddenly became focused on this slight, Buddhist woman locked in her home, forbidden from picking up her award. But her captors came under international gaze as well, and killing Suu Kyi now would be too reckless a move even for a junta that makes murder and slavery cornerstones of its policy.

The Burmese dictatorship is known within and outside the country as SLORC, for State Law and Order Restoration Council, the banner under which the autocrats ran in the 1990 elections they conveniently dismissed. Three years ago they changed their name to the even more Orwellian State Peace and Development Council, but SLORC seems to fit them better. In the manner of many dictatorships, SLORC is fond of renaming. In 1988 SLORC decided to call Burma "Myanmar," but most of the world, recognizing the illegitimacy of the government, ignores the name change, much in the way "Kampuchea" is now nothing more than a synonym for the evil visited on Cambodia by Pol Pot and his minions.

Under SLORC's reign, Burma has vied with a few other countries, such as North Korea, Afghanistan and Algeria, for the honor of serving as poster child for a nation destroyed by tyrants. By any objective measure Burma -- as physically beautiful and as rich in natural resources as any Southeast Asian country -- is in dire straits. It was ranked second to last, after Sierra Leone, on healthcare spending per capita, according to the World Health Organization. The result is that diseases (including AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and anthrax) are rampant. AIDS is considered more epidemic in Burma than in Thailand, on a par with the scourge in southern Africa. Contributing to the problem is a robust drug trade: Burma alternates with Afghanistan as the largest heroin producer in the world, and burgeoning drug addiction within Burma is helping to spread AIDS.

The Burmese armed forces are thought to be about 500,000 strong and are ruthless in enforcing SLORC's will. Forced relocation is common, with entire communities uprooted and moved to slums or barren lands where they are barely able to survive. SLORC uses slave labor for construction projects, including children, and Amnesty International reports that thousands of Burmese are kidnapped each year and made to carry supplies for the army through dense, mountainous jungle, where ethnic resistance groups reside.

The Burmese economy is in shambles. People earn less than a dollar a day, and many are illiterate because SLORC has closed down hundreds of schools. The United Nations reports that Burma spends 28 cents a year per student on public schools. Four out of 10 children are reported to be malnourished, and the average life expectancy for Burmese is less than 50 years. SLORC is paranoid about people congregating, and gatherings of more than four people are forbidden. Unions, needless to say, are prohibited, and SLORC owns all the media. It's illegal to possess a home computer. Anyone who violates SLORC's capricious laws is subject to lengthy prison sentences and torture, which, according to Amnesty International, is a specialty of the junta.

In 1995, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., visited Burma while on a fact-finding mission in Southeast Asia. Newsweek reported that Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt of SLORC welcomed McCain by screening for him a video of machete-wielding thugs beheading Burmese villagers. McCain later said of the junta members, "These are very bad people."

Yet despite the horror, hope lives on in Burma, and much of it rides on Aung San Suu Kyi. It's a lot for one person to bear, but Suu Kyi seems born to the task -- literally and constitutionally. Not only is she the daughter of Aung San -- considered the father of Burmese democracy and an assassinated martyr to the cause of freedom -- and as such revered almost automatically, but her deep Buddhist training has made her uniquely fit to weather a life of confinement and isolation. She meditates daily, a discipline that provides insight into life beyond the external reality most of us perceive, and she hews strictly to Buddhist proscriptions against harming, hate, fear and ego.

In a 1995 interview with Alan Clements, an American author who lived as a Buddhist monk in Burma for several years and who wrote the 1992 book "Burma: The Next Killing Fields?" Suu Kyi alluded to another interviewer who kept asking if she really was not frightened. "Why should I have been frightened?" she said. "I'm not sure a Buddhist would have asked this question. Buddhists in general would have understood that isolation is not something to be frightened of." Then she added, "You cannot really be frightened of people you do not hate. Hate and fear go hand in hand."

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