Than Shwe
Than Shwe ruled Myanmar from April 1992, when he replaced Saw Maung as chairman of the junta that had taken power in the massacre of 1988 and annulled the election of 1990, to March 2011, when he handed the state to a civilian government of retired generals under a constitution he had written. In nineteen years the senior general, as he was titled, said almost nothing in public and was almost never seen. The country was kept under the army's boot and outside the world. Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest for fifteen of the years. There were the monks' protests of September 2007, the saffron revolution, shot down in the streets of Rangoon, and Cyclone Nargis of May 2008, which killed a hundred and forty thousand in the delta while the junta refused foreign rescuers for three weeks and held its constitutional referendum on schedule. The capital was moved in 2005 without warning to a city built in secret in the scrub at Naypyidaw, on an astrologer's advice. There were the ceasefires bought from the ethnic armies with logging and mining concessions, the gas sold to Thailand and China, the American and European sanctions, and the roadmap to disciplined democracy of 2003 that produced the constitution of 2008 reserving a quarter of the seats and the security ministries to the army for ever. He was born in Kyaukse in 1933, worked as a postal clerk, joined the army in 1953, served in the psychological warfare department and against the Karen. He rose without distinction through the Ne Win years to command the south-west region in 1988, when he was one of the officers who took power. He was deputy chairman from 1988 and pushed Saw Maung, who had begun talking of himself as a reincarnated king, into retirement. The regime's manner was his, suspicious, provincial, superstitious and patient, with the intelligence chief, the one general foreigners could talk to, purged and jailed in 2004 and the prime ministership given to nobodies. The election of November 2010, which the army's party won with the opposition boycotting, and the release of Suu Kyi six days later were the handover's terms. Thein Sein, his chosen man, then went further than he had intended. He retired to Naypyidaw, is said to have advised on the coup of 2021 and to have picked Min Aung Hlaing a decade earlier. At ninety-three he is the country's oldest general and the author of its constitution.
- Lived: 1933 CE – ?
- Nationality: Burmese
- Roles: head of state, general, dictator
