Aung San Suu Kyi’s soft voice and demeanour belie a steely resolve in the long and painful struggle to bring democracy to Myanmar after decades of military dictatorship.

She has spent most of the past 18 years under house arrest in a rambling, lakeside home after leading her National League for Democracy to a landslide victory in elections in 1990.

On Saturday however, crying in the rain, she stepped out to greet Buddhist monks who stopped and prayed outside, after police had unexpectedly lifted the roadblock that normally bars access.

Monks have emerged in the past week at the forefront of an escalating wave of protests against the junta that broke out a month ago following a massive hike in fuel prices.

Aung San Suu Kyi, now 62, is the daughter of General Aung San, a liberation hero who led the country then known as Burma to freedom from British colonial rule, but she only took up her political cause in 1988.

A slender woman who often wears flowers in her hair and prefers traditional longyis to Western clothes, she charmed the nation with eloquent speeches that called for peaceful change.

Her dedication to non-violence won her the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, putting her beside Nelson Mandela among the world’s leading voices against tyranny.

She was first arrested in July 1989, and has spent most of the years since then under house arrest or in jail.

Aung San Suu Kyi had spent much of her life abroad. She studied at Oxford, married a Briton, had two sons and seemed settled into a life in Britain.

But when she returned to Yangon in 1988 to tend to her ailing mother, she found the city gripped by protests against the military.

Later that year she saw the aspirations for democracy evaporate as soldiers fired on crowds of demonstrators, leaving thousands dead.

Within days she took on a leading role in the movement, petitioning the government to prepare for elections and delivering speeches to hundreds of thousands of people at the city’s glittering Shwedagon Pagoda.

In September 1988 she helped found the National League for Democracy (NLD), an alliance of 105 opposition parties, and campaign across Myanmar.

Aung San Suu Kyi mesmerised huge crowds with her intelligence, beauty and rhetoric and because of her family’s legacy in the liberation movement — her father had been assassinated just months before independence.

Alarmed by her fearlessness and the support she commanded, the generals in 1989 ordered her house arrest.

Despite that, she led the NLD to a landslide in 1990, winning 82 percent of parliamentary seats in a result the junta refused to accept.

During a brief moment of freedom, she told AFP in a 1999 interview that the military struggled to accept the very concept of dialogue.

“They don’t understand the meaning of dialogue, they think it is some kind of competition where one side loses and the other wins, and perhaps they are not so confident they will be able to win,” she said.

Aung San Suu Kyi has paid a high price for her fame.

As her husband Michael Aris was in the final stages of a long battle with cancer, the junta refused him a visa to see his wife. He died in March 1999, not having seen her for four years.

She had refused to travel to see him, knowing she would have been barred from returning.

Critics see her resolve — demanding international sanctions and a tourism boycott, and insisting on having the 1990 vote recognized even 17 years later — as intransigence that has contributed to stalemate.

But when her sons Alexander and Kim accepted the Nobel for her, they said she saw her struggle as part of a greater spiritual battle against tyranny.

“The quest for democracy in Burma is the struggle of a people to live whole, meaningful lives as free and equal members of the world community,” she wrote in “Freedom from Fear and Other Writings”.

“It is part of the unceasing human endeavour to prove that the spirit of Man can transcend the flaws of his nature.”