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Michael Vaillancourt Aris (b. March 27, 1946, Havana, Cuba – d. March 27, 1999, Oxford, England, UK) was a leading Western authority on Bhutanese, Tibetan, and Himalayan culture, and wrote numerous books on Buddhism in those regions.
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After being educated at Worth School in West Sussex and upon completing his degree in modern history at Durham University in 1967, Aris spent six years as the private tutor of the children of the royal family of the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan.
Aris was an academic and lecturer in Asian history at St John's College and later at St Antony's College, Oxford. In the last years before his death, he helped to establish a specialist Tibetan and Himalayan Studies center at Oxford.
In 1972, Aris married Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he had met while in college. After spending a year in Bhutan, they settled in North Oxford, where they would raise their two sons, Alexander and Kim. During this time, he did postgraduate studies at the University of London and obtained a Ph.D. in Tibetan literature in 1978. In 1988 Suu Kyi returned to Burma at first to tend for her mother but later to lead the pro-democracy movement. St John's College provided Aris with an extended leave of absence as a fellow on full stipend so that he could lobby for his wife's cause.
In 1997, Aris was diagnosed with prostate cancer which would later be found to be terminal. Appeals by several countries, prominent individuals and organisations were made to the Burmese authorities to allow Dr Aris a visa, which included the United States, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Pope John Paul II.
The Burmese government would not grant him a visa to visit Burma, saying that they did not have the facilities to care for him, and instead urged Aung San Suu Kyi to leave the country to visit him. She was at that time temporarily free from house arrest but was unwilling to depart, fearing that she would be refused re-entry if she left, as she did not trust the junta's assurance that she could return.[1]
He died on his 53rd birthday in 1999. Since 1989, when his wife was first placed under house arrest, he had seen her only five times, the last of which was for Christmas in 1995.