Myanmar junta chief Min Aung Hlaing appointed president after ‘sham’ election | Myanmar

Min Aung Hlaing, the military general who plunged Myanmar in conflict and economic chaos when he took power in the 2021 coup, was installed as president, months after widely condemned sham elections.

Min Aung Hlaing, who is wanted by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity against the Rohingya Muslim minority, was elected president by lawmakers on Friday. Myanmar’s parliament is dominated by the pro-military party, which is in a landslide one-sided elections earlier this year.

Min Aung Hlaing has long sought the role, analysts say, but his ambitions have been thwarted for years by the electoral success of the hugely popular Aung San Suu Kyi.

However, the former de facto leader no longer poses a threat. The 80-year-old was detained since the coup in 2021when her government was driven from power. Her party was barred from contesting recent elections, which were held in three phases from December to January.

The election, what the army’s proxy Union Solidarity and Development party (USDP) which was won by a landslide, was widely condemned as a fraud that tried to give a veneer of legitimacy to military rule. The changes in leadership are not expected to ease the political crisis or the deadly conflict that continues to rage across the country.

Min Aung Hlaing was already Myanmar’s acting president, and he is likely to install loyalists in key positions, International Crisis Group said in recent analysis.

“He will not trust anyone (enough) to take orders from (them) – he will want to deliver the orders,” said Yanghee Lee, a former special rapporteur for Myanmar, who added that Min Aung Hlaing was seen as a paranoid, suspicious person.

The general, 69, was born into a family from Dawei, in southeast Myanmar. He studied law at university in Yangon but yearned to join the army and on his third attempt was admitted to the Defense Services Academy, the country’s elite institution for training officers.

Myanmar’s military has been compared to a state within a state, suffocated from the rest of society with its own banks, companies, news outlets and hospitals. It considers itself the protector of Myanmar as a Buddhist Bamar nation – Bamar refers to the majority ethnic group.

He was appointed commander-in-chief in 2011, but assumed the role at a time when Myanmar was beginning a fragile transition to democracy.

The military remained extremely powerful during this period, even after Aung San Suu Kyi won a big win in 2015. Under the army’s model of “disciplined democracy”, he was awarded a quarter of the parliamentary seats, and the power to appoint key cabinet posts.

The uneasy power-sharing arrangement broke down after the 2020 elections, which again saw Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won with a great victory. Min Aung Hlaing accused his party of widespread voter fraud, without evidence, and seized on 1 February 2021. The coup was unleashed mass protests which turned into a civil war.

Min Aung Hlaing has been accused of presiding over repeated atrocities and human rights abuses. In 2009, while overseeing operations in border areas of the northeast, his troops were accused of driving tens of thousands of ethnic minority people from their homes. Such brutality would be repeated on an even greater scale in violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine State in 2017, which now the center of a genocide case in The Hague.

Since the coup, UN investigators have Min accused Aung Haling’s regime of indiscriminate airstrikes killing civilians, “mass murders of detainees, mutilation and desecration of bodies, rape and the deliberate burning of entire villages”, describing such crimes as “a manifestation of an organizational policy”.

Myanmar has denied the accusations of genocide, and the military says its post-coup operations are targeting terrorists it accuses of destabilizing the country.

Min Aung Hlaing has stepped up his international travels in recent months, trying to climb back from his status as an international pariah.

His diplomatic style has been derided by his critics – notably a visit to Moscow last year, when, while heaping praise on Vladimir Putin, he said the friendship between Myanmar and Russia was prophesied by the Buddha thousands of years ago when the Russian president was a “rat king” in a previous life. It is not clear whether Putin understood the obscure reference.

Richard Horsey, a senior Myanmar adviser to Crisis Group, said the junta leader presented himself as a politician rather than a “soldier’s soldier”, and even in the midst of post-coup fighting he was often photographed inspecting infrastructure and factories, rather than visiting the front lines. “It is well known that he has desired the presidency for a long time,” Horsey added.

Min Aung Hlaing is also a deeply superstitious figure and keen to present himself as a devout, devout Horsey. He frequently commissioned and renovated pagodas and religious sites, including a large Buddha statue in the capital Nay Pyi Taw.

“I don’t think he sees it as (in) conflict with his role as a brutal leader,” Horsey said.

At home, Min Aung Hlaing is unable to travel to large areas of Myanmar that have been seized by opposition groups or are in the middle of fighting.

With the support of his ally China, however, the junta chief is likely to hope that the recent election will allow him to reverse his isolated status abroad and reassure pro-military voices who have criticized his failure to crack down on opposition since the coup.