Soe Win Biography

Prime Minister and fourth ranking member of the military junta. He was blamed for overseeing the 2003 attack on opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her followers. Due to his role as the mastermind in the bloody attack he was nicknamed “the butcher of Dipeyin.” He first gained notoriety in 1988 as one of the officers who brutally suppressed a pro-democracy uprising at Rangoon University. He gave orders to fire on a crowd of protesters in front of Rangoon General Hospital. Win was a former air force chief who joined the junta’s inner circle in 2003, and became Prime Minister in 2004.