The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) extended its deepest condolences to the family of Sein Win, 83, a DVB co-founder and a cousin of jailed State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, following a Buddhist ceremony after his death in the U.S. state of Maryland on Friday.
“He worked his whole life for his country,” Moe Zaw Oo, an advisor to the National Unity Government (NUG) Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told DVB.
Sein Win served as chairperson of the board at DVB since its founding in Oslo, Norway on July 19, 1992 up until 2012. He was the son of Ba Win, one of the nine martyrs assassinated alongside Burma’s independence leader Aung San on July 19, 1947 – just months before independence in Burma was achieved in 1948.
Sein Win was a first cousin to National League for Democracy (NLD) party co-founder Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been held in detention since the military coup on Feb. 1, 2021. He is survived by his wife and two children.
In the 1990 general elections, Sein Win won a seat representing Bago Region’s Paukkhaung Township for the National Democratic Party, which ran alongside the NLD against pro-military parties.
After the military refused to recognize the NLD’s landslide victory or transfer power to Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest at the time, many elected members fled to the Thai-Burma border to set up the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB).
Sein Win became the NCGUB prime minister, an administration claiming to be the elected government of Burma based in Karen State’s Manerplaw, the former headquarters of the Karen National Union (KNU) in 1990.
Bo Hla Tint, an NCGUB foreign minister, told DVB that Sein Win was instrumental in lobbying the U.N. and the U.S. on behalf of Burma’s historic struggle for democracy.
Yin Aye, a Burmese pro-democracy activist in the U.S., told DVB that he first met Sein Win during a visit to the U.N. headquarters in New York City in 1993.
The NCGUB was dissolved in September 2012, following Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest in 2010 and her election to the Pyitthu Hluttaw, or lower house of parliament, in the April 2012 by-elections.
Sein Win returned to Burma to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi in August 2019 after her NLD won another landslide election victory in 2015, which was repeated in the 2020 elections, but reversed by the 2021 coup led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.
Aung Saw Oo, an executive member of the NCGUB, told DVB that Sein Win’s legacy will endure with the success of DVB – providing critical news and information to the people of Burma – and the NUG, which resumed the work of the NCGUB following the 2021 coup.
