A Buddhist ceremony to mark the seventh day of the passing of Sein Win, the co-founder of DVB and a cousin of jailed State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, was held by his family in the U.S. state of Maryland on Thursday after his death on Feb. 6.
“We’re still looking for a location to hold the funeral. We’re waiting for friends, who will travel from afar, to come,” Si Si Thwe, Sein Win’s wife, told DVB.
Sein Win, 83, 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 over the last five years since the military coup on Feb. 1, 2021.
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 was elected Prime Minister of the NCGUB, an administration claiming to represent lawmakers elected in 1990 but not allowed to take their seats in Burma’s parliament. The NCGUB was set up in Karen State’s Manerplaw, the former headquarters of the Karen National Union (KNU), in 1990.
Bo Hla Tint, the NCGUB foreign minister, told DVB that Sein Win won the support of ethnic armed groups, like the KNU, and pro-democracy forces because of his honesty.
Yin Aye, a Burmese pro-democracy activist in the U.S., told DVB that he first met Sein Win during the NCGUB delegation’s 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 15 years under house arrest in 2010 and her subsequent 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 as State Counsellor in August 2019 after her NLD won another landslide election victory in 2015, which was respected by the military with a peaceful transition of power from the military-proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) to the NLD taking place in 2016.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD repeated its previous two election victories in 1990 and 2015 with an even bigger landslide in the 2020 elections. But this was reversed by the 2021 military coup led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.
Aung Saw Oo, an NCGUB executive member, told DVB that Sein Win was an exceptional leader who, years before the 2021 coup and subsequent uprising against military rule, attempted to unite Burma’s diverse ethnic nationalities to end military dictatorship.
Sein Win is survived by his wife and two children. The date, time and place of his funeral has not been decided, according to his family.
