Thein Sein
Thein Sein was president of Myanmar from March 2011 to March 2016, the general and junta prime minister whom Than Shwe put at the head of the civilian government the constitution of 2008 created. He surprised the world and his patron by opening the country. There was the meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi in August 2011 that turned an enemy into a partner. There were the political prisoners freed in amnesties that emptied the cells of two thousand, the press censorship abolished in 2012 and the private newspapers licensed, the exiles allowed home, and the by-elections of April 2012 that put Suu Kyi and forty-two of her party into parliament. There was the Chinese Myitsone dam suspended in September 2011 against Peking's fury, which was the signal the West read. There were the visits of Hillary Clinton in 2011 and Obama in 2012 and 2014, the sanctions lifted, the currency floated, the mobile phones that went from a thousand dollars a SIM to a dollar. There were the ceasefires with eight ethnic armies in October 2015, and the election of November 2015 that his own party lost by a landslide and that he honoured, handing over to the National League's government the next March, which no general had done. He was born in a village in the Irrawaddy delta in 1944, a farmer's son, went through the military academy in 1968, and commanded the Triangle region on the Chinese border in the 1990s. He was the junta's first secretary from 2004 after the intelligence chief's purge, and its prime minister from 2007, the man who signed the constitution and who, during Nargis, told the foreign ministers that the country could cope. The other side of the five years was the violence in Rakhine from 2012, in which Buddhist mobs burned the Rohingya out of Sittwe and a hundred and forty thousand were penned in camps. There were the 969 movement's monks preaching against Muslims with the government's tolerance, and the war with the Kachin that resumed in 2011 after seventeen years. There was the Letpadaung copper mine's protesters burned with phosphorus in 2012, and the constitution he did not amend, which kept Suu Kyi from the presidency and the army in its quarter of the seats. He was ordained as a monk for a week after leaving office, a Burmese custom. He has kept out of politics since. The opening he made was closed by the coup of 2021, so that his five years are the interval.
- Lived: 1944 CE – ?
- Nationality: Burmese
- Roles: president, general, politician
