A global symbol of nonviolent resistance is currently being tried by one of the vilest regimes on Earth.

Imprisoned Burmese Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is revered worldwide. Politicians and artists from around the globe have rallied to her cause since her fight for democracy in her homeland began in earnest two decades ago. To give two very recent examples, artist Shepard Fairey (profiled in the June issue of The Progressive) has just released a poster of hers to raise money for her movement, while U2 is dedicating its latest concert tour to her struggle.

The Burmese junta doesn’t hold her in the same high esteem. It is putting her in the dock for “subversion” and for allegedly violating the terms of her house arrest by hosting a visitor.

Her alleged co-conspirator, John William Yettaw, is an American ex-serviceman, who, frankly, seems a little weird. Yettaw swam to her villa a few months ago, and was allowed to stay for two days when he pleaded exhaustion. The Burmese authorities nabbed him while he was swimming back. A staffer of Suu Kyi describes him as a “nutty fellow.”

“Everyone is very angry with this wretched American,” said Suu Kyi’s main lawyer, Kyi Win. “He is the cause of all these problems. He's a fool."

Yettaw has been a godsend for the Burmese junta, however. Suu Kyi’s current stint of detention was about to expire, and the rulers seized on Yettaw’s intrusion to ignore that deadline. More importantly from their perspective, Burma (illegitimately renamed Myanmar by the generals) is scheduled to have elections next year, and a long sentence for Suu Kyi will keep her out of the fray.

Suu Kyi has been held in prison (named Insean, pun unintended) since May, and faces the prospect of up to five years in jail. With the kangaroo court she’s up against, no prizes for guessing the verdict when the judgment is handed down in a few days.

Suu Kyi has been persecuted by the junta for so long—being under house arrest for thirteen of the past nineteen years—that even her compatriots have started to forget her.

“I only know her name,” says a young Burmese woman. “I’ve never seen a picture of her. I think she’s an old lady.”

This brings into question Suu Kyi’s strategy for regime change. She has repeatedly called for international isolation of Burma.

Companies that invest in Burma “do create jobs for some people but what they’re mainly going to do is make an already wealthy elite wealthier, and increase its greed and strong desire to hang on to power,” she told The Progressive in 1997. “So immediately and in the long run, these companies harm the democratic process a great deal.”

But the junta doesn’t mind, since isolationism has been its raison d’être since it seized power in 1962. My father recently got to make a foray into Burma during a visit to Northeastern India. After a meal at a Burmese restaurant, he looked around for a booth to phone my mother and boast that he was calling her from inside Burma. His search was in vain, since the junta has made sure that communication with the outside world is very difficult for its citizens.

Suu Kyi’s viewpoint has been challenged (politely) by the grandson of another Burmese icon, Thant Myint-U, whose grandfather was U Thant, the U.N. Secretary-General from 1961 to 1971.

Thant Myint-U, who was raised in the U.S., says in a book on his native country, “The River of Lost Footsteps,” that Suu Kyi’s approach is wrongheaded.

“The paradigm is one of regime change, and the assumption is that sanctions, boycotts, more isolation will somehow pressure those in charge to mend their ways,” he writes. “The assumption is that Burma’s military government couldn’t survive further isolation when precisely the opposite is true: Much more than any other part of Burmese society, the army will weather another forty years of isolation just fine.”

Besides, even in purely economic terms, the isolation approach isn’t working. China and, to a lesser extent, India have taken up the slack caused by Western sanctions, since they are the least interested in censuring Burma.

“Foreign investment in Myanmar swelled sixfold to almost $1 billion in the last fiscal year, most of it coming from China,” reports AP.

The Chinese dictatorship’s eagerness to court the junta is not surprising, but democratic India’s troubling about-face since the early 1990s has been caused by a weird geopolitical rivalry with China and a covetousness for Burma’s natural gas and oil.

The United States and the EU, on the other hand, have been maintaining economic sanctions for the past many years, not too difficult a choice for them to make, since Burma has limited global geopolitical or economic significance. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has ordered a policy review on Burma, and is committed to discussing the situation there at a summit meeting this week with foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

But the larger question here is: What will it take to get a country and its citizens rid of a regime that has few rivals in cruelty and mismanagement?

“There will be change because all the military have are guns," Suu Kyi is quoted on a poster presented to The Progressive by Burmese activist Zar Ni.

She will certainly be proven right eventually, but in the meanwhile, the wait is awfully long for the Burmese people—and for Suu Kyi herself.