Originally published in The Times, 20 September 2000, after I had travelled to Rangoon in June of that year. Whether Aung San Suu Kyi likes it or not - and she does not - she is an icon. Under house arrest again, she is said to be safe and well, but her supporters are concerned. Last Saturday the Nobel Peace Laureate and 13 members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) were forcibly taken to Rangoon. Nothing has been heard from them since, and the authorities show no sign of granting access to the opposition leader who has fought for 12 years to bring democracy to Burma. “I’m no icon. That’s a phrase I don’t like,” she insisted when I met her in June. It was easy to understand the potency of her personality, why she frightens Burma’s ruling generals -and why they make it so hard for people to contact her. Interviewing her is even trickier. Once you have made an appointment, using contacts in two other countries, and fraudulently acquired a tourist visa, smuggled recording equipment past military intelligence at Rangoon Airport, and spent the next week evading their colleagues in your hotel bar, you are still only at the sweaty halfway point. Getting a recording or a photograph of Aung San Suu Kyi out of Burma is almost impossible. My interview was recorded in three ways: on a tiny “memory stick” taped to the inside of my thigh; a Dictaphone tape that went into my pocket as bait; and halfway through a bootleg Good Morning, Vietnam soundtrack I had picked up in Bangkok that went into my bag with some other tapes I had bought. A disk for my photographs from an Agfa digital camera was small enough to drop between the lining and the outer core of a pack of cigarettes, which went into my pocket with some Thai coins, so that when the disk set off the metal detector at Rangoon Airport, I could empty my pockets and walk through. The woman who is the primary target of this huge security offensive is small and thin with flowers woven into her hair. But with her Oxford-educated voice and pristine Burmese clothes, Suu Kyi is the kind of woman in whose company you instinctively sit up straight. She will suddenly deflate a political argument with a giggle but her determination remains intact. The West, she asserts, should boycott Burma. No tourism, no business, she says. “The question asking whether tourism is the best way for a poor country to try to get rich is a moot one. This regime is not interested in handling tourism in any way except to get as much money out of it as possible. “Also the military regime is not going about economic reform in the right way. The economic disaster that Burma is facing has come about not because of anything that the NLD has said but because this regime does not know how to go about instituting sound economic management. “The majority of the people get poorer and poorer. There was a lot of investment from Western countries, but it did not make the people richer. You see wealth concentrated in a few people, and a lot of [these] people are connected to the regime.” Born in 1945, Suu Kyi is the daughter of the late General Aung San, who is revered for uniting different warring ethnic groups in the country and signing the 1947 independence agreement with Britain. “I am my father’s daughter,” she explains. Despite being a legal party, NLD’s members face daily harassment or worse. With phonelines tapped, Internet use illegal, fax machines compulsorily licensed, and their travel disrupted, it is hard for an opposition to exist, much less be effective. The NLD’s headquarters are in a ramshackle two-storey building on the edge of Rangoon. There is scant electricity, and no equipment, bar a few old typewriters. Posters of Suu Kyi cover cracks in the walls. Party members mill about waiting for a meeting or the mothers and baby mornings - where smuggled-in vitamins are distributed. But the determination of the members is evident. The day I was there, the building’s owner was released from detention. Elderly, diabetic and suffering from arthritis, she had been jailed for a week without drugs as the military tried to force her to evict the party. She had refused, explaining that she and her husband have pledged the building rent-free until democracy is restored. Doesn’t this kind of pressure ever make Suu Kyi want to give up? “No. No. No,” she insists. “I have always said that as long as there was one person remaining who was prepared to work for democracy, I’ll stay. I believe we will achieve democracy, but I can’t promise that it will be in my lifetime. I’ll do my best.” Brave words - and ones that would be difficult to get out of Burma. When I got to Rangoon Airport, I knew I would be searched. I had been followed all afternoon - despite changing cars and clothes across the city - by two men on a moped. One had a mobile phone. These are rare in Burma and could only mean one thing: bad guys. The two Customs officials who searched my bags were being directed by a plainclothes man with short hair. Speaking English, they opened my bag and started to empty it. “Walkman,” said a female offcial to her note-taking colleague, “Camera. Trousers - unwrap these please - shirt, presents? One Buddha, tapes …” There it was. The memory stick recorder. She picked it up and unzipped the case. “Electric razor? OK.” She turned to him and said: “He’s clean.” (Note: she honestly said this. PoMo lives!). But he wasn’t happy. They went through my stuff again. “Walkman,” He took the tapes aside, “shirt, book, Buddha.” He got to the memory stick recorder and opened it. “Electric razor,” the Customs official piped in. The man grunted and confiscated my tapes and all of the - dummy - film I had half-heartedly hidden. Somewhere in Burma there’s a man who has recently heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time. Customs, satisfied with some music and film, let me go, but I still had to go through the metal detectors with a tape and a metal digital picture disk in my pocket. Here the Thai coins did the trick. With the disk next to my Camels, I emptied my pockets into a basket, walked through, grinned at the security guard, put everything back in my trousers and strolled to the plane.