SANDAR WIN

File Photo

Dad: Late Burmese prime minister and president Ne Win

Age: 57

Bad behavior: Before the current military junta took power in 1988, Burma was ruled by prime minister and later president Ne Win, who ruled the country as a one-party Marxist dictatorship from 1962 to 1988. As Win (already 52 when he began his rule) grew older, he began to rely more and more on Sandar, his favorite daughter, to help run things. Throughout the 1980s, Sandar’s power grew as she assumed more and more responsibilities for the rapidly failing state. She controlled party officials’ access to her father, and then oversaw the appointment of Col. Khin Nyhut (a future prime minister under the junta) as chief of intelligence, providing her with even more control over the regime.

When her father stepped down in 1988, Sandar Win played a key role in suppressing the following pro-democracy movement that was led by Aung Sun Suu Kyi. After the military junta took over the country, Win preserved her father’s power behind the scenes during the 1990s, while she used her connections to continue enriching her family’s business ventures. Some saw Sandar as Aung Sun Suu Kyi’s greatest rival if the junta fell. Then, at the beginning of this decade, her husband and their three sons were arrested for plotting to overthrow the junta. Win was not implicated directly, despite many considering her the brains behind the plot, but her family’s influence was finally dead. Like her opponent Aung Sun Suu Kyi, she was placed under house arrest. Reports indicate she was finally released in December.

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