Wunna Maung Lwin (Burmese: ဝဏ္ဏမောင်လွင်; born 30 May 1952,[3]) is a Burmese politician and a member of State Administration Council.[4] He was a Minister of Foreign Affairs under Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services Min Aung Hlaing after the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état.[5][6] He previously served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from March 2011 to March 2016. He is a retired colonel in the Myanmar Army.

Wunna Maung Lwin
ဝဏ္ဏမောင်လွင်
Member of the State Administration Council
Assumed office
1 February 2023
SAC ChairmanMin Aung Hlaing
19th and 21st Minister of Foreign Affairs
In office
1 February 2021 – 1 February 2023
PresidentMyint Swe (acting)
SAC chairman and prime ministerMin Aung Hlaing
Preceded byAung San Suu Kyi
Succeeded byThan Swe[1]
In office
30 March 2011 – 30 March 2016
PresidentThein Sein
Preceded byNyan Win
Succeeded byAung San Suu Kyi
Permanent Representative to the United Nations[2]
In office
2007 – 30 March 2011
LeaderThan Shwe
Succeeded byMaung Wai
Personal details
Born30 May 1952 (1952-05-30) (age 72)
Thaton, Mon State, Burma
NationalityBurmese
Political partyUSDP (2010–2016)
SpouseLin Lin Tin
ChildrenTin Thitsar Lwin
Lin Marlar Lwin
Lin Min Aung Lwin
ParentMaung Lwin (father)
Alma materDefence Services Academy
Methodist English High School
CabinetMin Aung Hlaing's military cabinet
Military service
Allegiance Myanmar
Branch/service Myanmar Army
Years of service1971–1998
Rank Colonel

Early life and education

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Wunna Maung Lwin was born in Thaton, Mon State on 30 May 1954.[citation needed] He graduated from the 16th intake of the Defence Services Academy in 1971.[3]

Career

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He joined the Myanmar Diplomatic service in 2000, after a long career in the Myanmar Armed Forces from 1971 to 1998. Before he holds the current position, he served as Director-General of the Ministry of Border Affairs (Myanmar) from July 1998 to September 2000, Myanmar Ambassador to Israel from 2000 to 2001, France from 2001 to 2004, Belgium and EU from 2004 to 2007 and Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland from 2007 to 2011.

Foreign minister

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He served as the 19th Foreign Minister of Myanmar from 2011 to 2016. Thein Sein appointed him in his cabinet. Later he became the CEC member of USDP. In the 2020 general election, he lost to his opponent from NLD, Kyaw Htwe.[7]

But after 2021 coup, Min Aung Hlaing appointed him as Foreign Minister. On 24 February, Wunna Maung Lwin met with Thailand Foreign Minister, Don Pramudwinai and Indonesia Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi in Thailand. He also met with Thailand Prime Minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha. This was the first foreign trip of the military cabinet member.[8][9]

Personal life

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Wunna Maung Lwin is married to Lin Lin Tin, the youngest daughter of Thakhin Ba Tin, a member of the Dobama Asiayone and a cousin of Kyu Kyu Hla.[10] He has three children, Tin Thitsa Lwin, Lin Marlar Lwin, and Lin Min Maung Lwin.

Personal Sanctions

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On December 11, 2023 the European Union imposed personal restrictions on Wunna Maung Lwin due to his role as a newly appointed member of the State Administration Council and former junta-appointed Foreign Minister. In these positions, he has tried to legitimize the junta's rule and contributed to ongoing repressions and commission of serious human rights violations by the junta since the February 2021 coup.[11]

References

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  • Wai Moe (13 July 2011). "Wunna Maung Lwin: Military Commander to Foreign Minister". The Irrawaddy. Retrieved 21 August 2011.
  1. ^ "ပြည်ထောင်စုသမ္မတမြန်မာနိုင်ငံတော် နိုင်ငံတော်စီမံအုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကောင်စီ အမိန့်အမှတ်၊ ၆ / ၂၀၂၃ ၁၃၈၄ ခုနှစ်၊ တပို့တွဲလဆန်း ၁၂ ရက် (၂၀၂၃ ခုနှစ်၊ ဖေဖော်ဝါရီလ ၁ ရက်) ပြည်ထောင်စုအစိုးရအဖွဲ့ ပြင်ဆင်ဖွဲ့စည်းခြင်း" (in Burmese). Archived from the original on 2023-02-01. Retrieved 2023-02-01.
  2. ^ "Burma Issues and Concerns: Locked In, Tied Up: Burma's Disciplined Democracy". 7. Alternative Asean Network on Burma. April 2011: 14. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. ^ a b "Cabinet Ministers". Alternative Asean Network on Burma. Archived from the original on 18 October 2013. Retrieved 12 February 2014.
  4. ^ "ပြည်ထောင်စုသမ္မတမြန်မာနိုင်ငံတော် နိုင်ငံတော်စီမံအုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကောင်စီ အမိန့်အမှတ်၊ ၅ / ၂၀၂၃ ၁၃၈၄ ခုနှစ်၊ တပို့တွဲလဆန်း ၁၂ ရက် (၂၀၂၃ ခုနှစ်၊ ဖေဖော်ဝါရီလ ၁ ရက်) နိုင်ငံတော်စီမံအုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကောင်စီ ပြင်ဆင်ဖွဲ့စည်းခြင်း". Archived from the original on 2023-02-01. Retrieved 2023-02-01.
  5. ^ Nitta, Yuichi; Takahashi, Toru (2 February 2021). "Myanmar military appoints ministers after ousting Suu Kyi in coup". Nikkei Asia. Yangon and Bangkok. Archived from the original on 13 May 2022. Retrieved 13 May 2022.
  6. ^ "Myanmar coup: who are the military figures running the country?". The Guardian. 2 February 2021. Archived from the original on 17 February 2021. Retrieved 23 February 2021.
  7. ^ "ပြည်သူ့လွှတ်တော်ကိုယ်စားလှယ်လောင်း တစ်ဦးချင်းစီ၏ ဆန္ဒမဲရရှိမှုအခြေအနေ" (PDF). Union Election Commission (in Burmese). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-06-18.
  8. ^ "အင်ဒိုနိုင်ငံခြားရေး၀န်ကြီး နဲ့ ဦး၀ဏ္ဏမောင်လွင် ဘန်ကောက်မှာတွေ့" (in Burmese). Archived from the original on 2021-02-26.
  9. ^ "ထိုင်းဝန်ကြီးချုပ် မြန်မာစစ်ကောင်စီ နိုင်ငံခြားရေးဝန်ကြီးကို လက်ခံတွေ့ဆုံ" (in Burmese). Archived from the original on 2021-02-27.
  10. ^ "Analysis | Junta Reshuffle Shows Nepotism Rules in Myanmar". The Irrawaddy. 2023-02-13. Archived from the original on 2023-02-19. Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  11. ^ "COUNCIL IMPLEMENTING REGULATION (EU) 2023/2789 of 11 December 2023 implementing Regulation (EU) No 401/2013 concerning restrictive measures in view of the situation in Myanmar/Burma". EUR-Lex.
Political offices
Preceded by Minister of Foreign Affairs
2011–2016
Succeeded by
Political offices
Preceded by Minister of Foreign Affairs
2021-present
Incumbent