On 4 December, the leader of Myanmar’s opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in the previous month’s general election, had a two-and-a-half hour meeting with Senior General Than Shwe, the leader of the military junta that had kept her under house arrest for 15 of the 21 years after 1989. The meeting provided grounds for optimism that there could be a peaceful transfer of power early in 2016 from Myanmar’s present military-supported government to one led by the massively popular Suu Kyi.
Though Than Shwe nominally retired in 2011, he is widely believed to exert considerable influence over the Tatmadaw (the country’s armed forces, which were founded by Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, during the independence struggle against the British in the 1940s) and, by extension, the current government. Details of the meeting are unknown, but in a Facebook post Than Shwe’s grandson, Nay Shwe Thway Aung, quoted the general as saying of Suu Kyi: ‘It is the truth that she will become the future leader of the country’ and ‘I will support her with all my efforts’. (Courtesy of iiss.org)
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