Min Aung Hlaing
Min Aung Hlaing has ruled Myanmar since 1 February 2021, when the army he had commanded for ten years arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and the president at dawn on the morning the new parliament was to sit, claiming fraud in the election of November 2020 that her party had won with eighty-two per cent of the contested seats and his party had lost badly. He declared a year's emergency that he has extended eight times. The coup was answered by a general strike, the civil disobedience movement that emptied the hospitals, the banks and the ministries, and the protests of February and March in which the army shot more than a thousand people. Then came the armed resistance, the People's Defence Forces of the National Unity Government formed by the deposed parliamentarians, fighting alongside the ethnic armies of the Karen, Kachin, Karenni, Chin and Arakan. By the end of 2024 the army had lost most of the border, the town of Lashio and the whole of Rakhine but the capital Sittwe. It was answering with air strikes on schools, monasteries and weddings, a conscription law, and the burning of villages, with six thousand civilians dead by the monitors' count and three and a half million displaced. He was born in Tavoy in 1956, the son of a civil servant, studied law at Rangoon University for a year and joined the military academy at eighteen on his third attempt. He commanded the Triangle region and then the Bureau of Special Operations against the Kokang in 2009, which recommended him to Than Shwe as commander-in-chief in March 2011, over more senior men. The Rohingya clearance of August 2017, in which the army drove seven hundred and forty thousand people into Bangladesh in a month with the villages burned and the women raped, was his operation. For it the UN's fact-finding mission named him for genocide and Facebook removed his page, and the International Criminal Court's prosecutor sought his arrest in November 2024. The junta's economy has halved the kyat, lost the garment factories and the tourists, and lives on gas, jade, timber and the scam compounds on the Thai and Chinese borders. China, which had backed Suu Kyi, has backed him since 2023 for the sake of the pipelines. It pushed the northern alliance into ceasefires that returned Lashio in April 2025. The earthquake of March 2025 killed thirty-seven hundred and he bombed the rebels during the ceasefire. The election he has promised since the coup was held in phases from December 2025 in the territory the army holds, with the opposition banned, and gave his party the parliament that will make him president.
- Lived: 1956 CE – ?
- Nationality: Burmese
- Roles: head of state, general, dictator
