Given what the military did to rob her party of its 1990 election victory, and to arrest, torture, and kill generations of democratic activists, it is hard to imagine that she does not have a fierce desire for legal accountability, if not vengeance. But Suu Kyi follows Gandhi on the path to forgiveness: "If we march the long road to freedom in hatred, what we find at the end is not freedom but another prison," she told the San Francisco Freedom Forum. She made clear repeatedly on her American tour that she is relentlessly focused on the future. And she urged her fellow Burmese, here and at home, and her international well-wishers to do the same. "You can't be driven by ideology or romanticism," she cautioned her Burmese American audience at the University of San Francisco. The judicial action she urgently seeks is the institutional rebuilding of a thoroughly decimated legal system. The battle for democracy will not be won, she stressed, until Burma achieves "an independent, free, and well-trained judiciary."

The same is true for the legislature, of course. Having been elected to parliament in April by-elections (which saw her party sweep 43 of the 44 seats it contested), she is wasting no time in making that new institutional opportunity work to develop democracy in Burma. One of the regime's most powerful figures, parliament speaker Thura Shwe Mann, reached out to her by appointing her to chair a new parliamentary "Committee on the Rule of Law and Tranquility." From that platform, and as leader of the opposition in parliament, she is seeking dialogue with the military to a degree they probably never imagined. While keenly aware that the 2008 Constitution must be extensively amended to remove the vast, undemocratic powers it gives the military, for now she sees it as an opportunity that military officers occupy (by constitutional provision) a quarter of the seats in parliament. "It gives us a chance to engage the military, and the military a chance to see how the civilian aspects of democracy work," she told the Asia Foundation audience.

Aung San Suu Kyi knows that the path ahead is difficult and uncertain -- far from the "irreversible" march toward democracy that many inside and outside Burma are now giddily expecting. Hard bargaining lies ahead over constitutional reform to ensure that the country can emerge from the next national elections, in 2015, with a genuinely democratic form of government. Both peace and democracy require broad negotiations with the country's ethnic minority groups to establish a federal system in which different groups will have real political autonomy while surrendering any right to secede.

If federalism and self-government for all people of Burma are to be viable, the country needs to construct effective structures of local government. This will require massive training and institution building, a task that Suu Kyi regards as a priority for international assistance. And, she stresses, if corruption is not to infect the emerging competitive party system as it has poisoned the country under military rule, strong rules of accountability and transparency will need to be constructed. This is particularly true with respect to investment in mining Burma's natural resource wealth, where she and her party insist that the government sign on to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in order to contain the "resource curse."