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NEWSMAKER - Myanmar's Thein Sein, junta

henchman to radical reformer!

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:00 GMTSource: reuters // Reuters

By Andrew R.C. Marshall and Martin Petty

BANGKOK, Nov 16 (Reuters) - There is a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality to

President Thein Sein, the bookish-looking former general Barack Obama

will meet on Monday during the first visit by a U.S. president to

Myanmar.

Thein Sein has been both a dictator's henchman and a man widely seen as

a Nobel Peace Prize contender. He rose to power in a rabidly anti-

American military junta, yet spearheaded its efforts to build better

relations with the United States. His past remains opaque, even as he

leads Myanmar into a new era of transparency after nearly five decades

of dictatorship.

When his quasi-civilian government took power four months after a rigged

election in November 2010, Thein Sein was easy to dismiss as a puppet

for a still-powerful military lurking behind a new democratic facade.

Few predicted what happened next. Thein Sein launched an ambitious

programme of political and economic reform that could transform the

impoverished nation of 60 million people also known as Burma.

He released political prisoners, scrapped censorship, legalised trades

unions and protests, sought peace with ethnic minority insurgents and

pushed through legislation on everything from land reform to foreign

investment. Thein Sein's reputation as a corruption-free moderate among

hawkish hardliners has earned him widespread praise from world leaders,

top economists and Nobel Peace Prize winner and opposition leader Aung

San Suu Kyi.

For years the junta's greatest foe, Suu Kyi was released from house

arrest a week after the November 2010 election. She met Thein Sein nine

months later and, in a critical endorsement, declared him "sincere"

about reforming Myanmar. With his reformist zeal and growing domestic

popularity, Thein Sein was widely tipped to win the Nobel Peace Prize in

October. A Western diplomat who has met the bespectacled, soft-spoken

president many times described him as "modest, courageous and

committed".


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"Those who knew him before he became president felt that he was aware of

the poverty of his people, had seen the progress made by others in the

region and recognised the need for change," he said.

"HIS OWN VISION"

Those comments were echoed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who

got to know Thein Sein when he was the military regime's prime minister

from 2007-2011. He felt Thein Sein had been inspired by the world around

him. "He must have seen and heard the real situation ... the

international perception and Myanmar's image," Ban told a group of

journalists during his last trip to Myanmar in May. "As soon as he

became president, he has his own visions to make his country better and

more prosperous, where human dignity would be respected."

But Thein Sein's reputation still suffers from his role as a loyal

servant to former dictator Than Shwe, who during 19 years in power

jailed political opponents, gunned down pro-democracy protesters and

commanded a military accused of killing, raping and torturing members of

ethnic minority groups. Thein Sein was described last year as "Than

Shwe's most malleable puppet" by Irrawaddy, a prominent Myanmar news

service long based in neighbouring Thailand.

A man of humble rural beginnings and son of a landless farmer and monk,

Thein Sein joined the military in his early 20s. But he was always moreof a bureaucrat than a soldier, serving as Than Shwe's personal

assistant in the 1990s. He kept his reputation as "Mr Clean" despite

four years as a commander in the lucrative drug-producing Golden

Triangle region, where several successors were tarred with allegations

of smuggling and abuse of power. In a 2001 speech to officials in the

Golden Triangle, Thein Sein referred to two suspected drug-lords as

"real friends", according to Bertil Lintner, the author of seven books

on Myanmar.

The two suspects were leaders of the United Wa State Army, described by

the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as "Southeast Asia's leading

heroin and methamphetamine trafficking organisation".

"CONSUMMATE INSIDER"

Under the dictatorship, regional commands often served as springboards

to higher office. In 2003, Thein Sein was given a senior position in the

State Peace and Development Council, as the military junta was then

known, becoming part of Than Shwe's secretive and paranoid inner circle.


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A 2007 U.S. Embassy cable described him as a "consummate insider".

He was prime minister when the regime sparked international outrage by

crushing pro-democracy protests led by Buddhist monks. He also presided

over a national convention to draft the 2008 constitution, which

enshrines the military's powers and privileges, and was dismissed by the

White House at the time as a sham. The convention, which was boycotted

by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party as undemocratic, lasted

15 years. "Actually, we could have wrapped all of it up in a day, but

there's a need to make it look good, isn't there?" Thein Sein said in

2007, according to the Shan Herald Agency for News, a website run by

exiles in Thailand.

The following year he led the widely criticised response to CycloneNargis, which killed at least 130,000 people and flattened villages

across the Irrawaddy River delta. The junta initially denied entry to

international aid agencies and was so tardy in providing its own

humanitarian relief that the international community considered

delivering aid by force. But Thein Sein is also said to have "appealed

directly" to the much-feared Than Shwe to belatedly allow foreign aid

workers into the disaster zone, according to a 2008 U.S. diplomatic

cable.

The devastated areas included Konkyu village, Thein Sein's birthplace.

As Than Shwe's prime minister, Thein Sein led the junta's attempts to

improve ties with the United States during an August 2009 visit to

Myanmar by Senator Jim Webb. "The generals left no doubt they are

reaching out," said a 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable.

As president, Thein Sein seems to have distanced himself from his junta

days. In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September

he referred to the past government as "authoritarian" and in an address

to parliament in March spoke of the need to "root out the evil legacies

deeply entrenched in our society".

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Nov 16 Wu Deng Zane.pdf