nov 16 wu deng zane.pdf
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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".