BANGKOK--When Myanmar's voters last went to the polls in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy to a landslide victory, despite being held under house arrest by the military.

Fast forward 18 years: the Nobel peace laureate remains locked away in her lakeside Yangon home, but her supporters are hoping to repeat history by dealing the junta another electoral defeat.

Myanmar will vote Saturday on a constitution drafted under the close watch of the generals -- a constitution the National League for Democracy (NLD) says will enshrine the military's role long after elections promised for 2010.

Despite efforts by the ruling military to silence Aung San Suu Kyi, the 62-year-old's steely resolve in the long and painful struggle to bring democracy to Myanmar has made her her the junta's most enduring opponent.

A slender woman who often wears flowers in her hair and prefers traditional clothing, Aung San Suu Kyi has spent 12 of the past 18 years either in jail or under house arrest.

Her confinement and isolation from the outside world have only heightened her stature as a symbol of the nation's struggle against tyranny.

Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Myanmar's founding father General Aung San, but came relatively late to the political scene after spending much of her life abroad.

She studied at Oxford, married a British academic, had two sons and seemed settled 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 pro-democracy movement, petitioning the government to prepare for elections and delivering impassioned speeches to hundreds of thousands of people at Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda, the country's most sacred Buddhist site.

In September 1988 she helped found the NLD, an alliance of 105 opposition parties, and campaigned across Myanmar for peaceful change.

Aung San Suu Kyi mesmerized huge crowds with her intelligence, poise and rhetoric, helped by her family's legacy. Her father had been assassinated just months before independence from Britain in 1948.

Alarmed by her fearlessness and the support she commanded, the generals in 1989 placed her under house arrest, where she has spent most of the intervening years.

Nevertheless, in 1990, her leadership helped the NLD win 82 percent of parliamentary seats in a result the junta refused to accept.

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.

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.

When her husband Michael Aris was in the final stages of 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 in Britain, believing she would have been barred from returning to Myanmar.

Critics see her resolve as intransigence that has contributed to the stalemate, but the woman known in Myanmar simply as "The Lady" remains the most powerful symbol of freedom in a country where the army rules with an iron fist.

A clause in the new charter would bar Aung San Suu Kyi from running for election because she was married to a foreigner -- one of the many reasons opposition forces are urging a "No" vote at Saturday's referendum.