Head of the ruling military clique, “The State Peace and Development Council” (SPDC) and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
Took over the reins of government on 23rd April, 1992.
Born 1933 in Kyaukse township, central Burma. Believed to have been a high school drop-out. He was a postman before attending Officer Training School at age 20.
He became a psychological warfare expert early in his career. He then gained a reputation for extreme ruthlessness in Burma Army operations against the Karen, which led to his promotion to the rank of captain in 1960. During this period he underwent several years of psychiatric hospital treatment for mental disorders.
He gradually rose in rank to colonel and then to major-general in 1985, when he became Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army.
In 1988, he was promoted to lieutenant-general and appointed Commander-in-Chief of Burma Army.
When the new regime, then calling itself the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), took power in 1988, Than Shwe was Vice-Chairman and Deputy Minister of Defence. In 1990, he was promoted to full general.
On 20th March 1992 Than Shwe became Defence Minister, a position he took over from General Saw Maung. On 23rd April, he replaced Saw Maung as head of the junta. The next day Than Shwe became "Prime Minister", while maintaining the Defense Ministry portfolio. On 25th April he was congratulated by the Government of Japan. In 1993, he promoted himself to senior general, a rank that previously did not exist.
Publicly he pretends to be a devout Buddhist, but secretly he practises “the black arts” .
In May 1998, on a specific order from Than Shwe in person, 59 men, women and children (including a new-born baby and a three-year old girl) found gathering firewood on Christie Island, were liquidated. They had earlier been arrested by Col. Zaw Min, now Minister for Electric Power, a known torturer of Karen villagers, and a former commander of one of Total's battalions in the Yadana Pipeline area.
During this same month, a Thai fishing vessel, registered to fish in Burmese waters, was stopped when sailing past Christie Island. The 22-man crew were subsequently killed and the boat sunk, on orders from above.
What these unfortunate people did not know was that the area had been declared out-of bounds in Section 144 of a decree issued by the Regional Military Commander.In May 2003, Than Shwe ordered Gen. Soe Win to carry out the Depayin Massacre at which the troublesome Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was to have been disposed of once and for all, under cover of a pre-arranged “riotous” attack on her cavalcade. Scores of her supporters perished. But the plan miscarried because of the non-execution by army marksmen of their allotted task, the self-sacrifice of her young, unarmed bodyguards and the initiative of her driver.
General Soe Win was kicked upstairs, to become a figurehead prime minister. In this capacity he managed to charm some ASEAN leaders, before dying of cancer on 2nd October 2007.
In September 2007, Than Shwe ordered Gen. Shwe Mann to crush in blood the peaceful monks' demonstrations against regime-decreed price increases which place an already malnourished population on the threshold of starvation.
Than Shwe, whose hand many Asian leaders feel privileged to shake, is responsible, directly and indirectly, for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, throughout Burma, but especially in the closed-off areas of the Karen, Karenni, Shan and Mon States and the Tenasserim Division.
He is trying hard to legalise the regime in the eyes of the world through a sham National Convention and Referendum (both completed), now to be followed by rigged Elections to bring into play a Constitution. The Constitution was tailor-made for the Generals, by the Generals, and has been rubber-stamped by the bogus National Convention and approved by the bogus Referendum.
He has given a new meaning to the word Democracy:
Government of the People,
By the Generals,
For the Generals.
He calls this “Disciplined Democracy”.
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