Htin Kyaw

Htin Kyaw was president of Myanmar for two years and said openly that he was Aung San Suu Kyi's proxy. The 2008 constitution written by the military barred anyone with foreign children from the presidency, a clause drafted specifically to exclude her, and when the National League for Democracy won the 2015 election overwhelmingly the party needed somebody it could trust absolutely in the office instead. Htin Kyaw was the obvious choice: a writer and former civil servant, son of the poet Min Thu Wun, educated in economics and computer science, married to an NLD member of parliament, and a school friend of Suu Kyi's who had run her charitable foundation and been jailed briefly for driving her car through a checkpoint. He was sworn in in March 2016 as the first civilian president in over fifty years, while a new post of state counsellor was created to put Suu Kyi above him constitutionally. He signed the laws, made the ceremonial trips, freed some political prisoners, and did not pretend the arrangement was anything else. His presidency covered the army's clearance operations in Rakhine in 2017 that drove more than seven hundred thousand Rohingya into Bangladesh, over which neither he nor the civilian government had authority and about which they said very little. He resigned in March 2018 citing health, and was replaced by Win Myint. The coup of February 2021 ended the experiment in shared government entirely. He was seventy when he took office and had never held elected position. His father was one of Myanmar's most celebrated poets and a member of the committee that drafted the 1947 constitution. He kept a deliberately low public profile throughout, giving few interviews and making no attempt to build a following of his own. He has not held office since resigning.

• Lived: 1946 CE – ?
• Nationality: Burmese
• Roles: politician