Htin Kyaw, confirmed Friday as presidential nominee for Myanmar’s National League for Democracy (NLD), is a close aide to party leader Aung San Suu Kyi who’s believed likely to win the country’s top office and govern on her behalf.
Htin Kyaw, 70, was at the democracy activist’s side when she was freed from house arrest in 2010. He has had a senior role with the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation, a charity founded in tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother.
He previously had served in national government, rising to deputy director of its foreign economic relations department. He retired in 1992.
Described as honest, soft spoken and loyal, Htin Kyaw has deep roots with the NLD. His late father, Min Thu Wun, was a noted scholar, writer and poet who’d won a seat for the party in 1990. Htin is married to Daw Su Su Lwin, whose father was an NLD party founder and official and who herself represents the party as a member of parliament.
In a June 2015 interview, Daw Su Su Lwin said that before the country’s end of military rule in 2012, her family frequently had been subjected to surveillance and her husband once held in prison for roughly three months without any charges.
The interview was published in The PIE News, website of Professionals in International Education.
Htin Kyaw, born in 1946, earned a master’s degree from the Yangon Institute of Economics in 1968, then was graduated from the University of London’s Institute of Computer Science. He also studied in the United States in 1987, at the Arthur D. Little School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
