Ousted leader of Myanmar, turned 80 on June 19th 2025. She was detained in February 2021 when the army staged a coup. She is believed to be held in solitary confinement in a purpose-built cell in a detention centre in Naypyidaw, the capital. Since her arrest only one letter from her has been received: to her younger son, Kim Aris, in January 2024.
Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won 82% of seats in parliament in the November 2020 election. She served as Myanmar's "state counsellor". In December 2022 she was sentenced to 33 years in prison—later reduced to 27—for offences including incitement to resist the coup, electoral fraud and corruption. She denies all charges. Between 1989 and 2010, in three separate periods, she spent some 15 years mainly under house arrest in a villa in Yangon.
Her international standing collapsed after she failed to defend the mainly Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority when they came under attack from Buddhist neighbours in Rakhine state in 2015 and were massacred by the Myanmar army in 2017. She went to The Hague to defend her country against charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice. She admitted that war crimes were committed but stopped short of calling it a genocide; a verdict is still pending. Supporters say her priority in power was to introduce a fully democratic constitution, which required keeping the generals onside. Others believe she shares their views.
Within Myanmar she remains "the most trusted political figure" in the country, according to a survey by Blue Shirt Initiative. The resistance against the coup is partly led by the National Unity Government, a parallel authority of mainly ousted NLD members of parliament, whose website still shows her as state counsellor. Min Zin of the Institute of Strategy and Policy has called her "narcissistic as a politician" who thought she could charm the generals—and whose failure "brought the whole country down". The junta appears to have chosen to keep her alive, perhaps fearful of the rage that would follow should she die in custody.
Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.