"AMID THE turbulent and sometimes bloody politics of Myanmar, members of one of the country’s most famous families have devoted most or all of their lives to the struggle for freedom, either from colonialism or dictatorship. One of them, Dr Sein Win, 74, has finally come home. Sein Win is a nephew of independence hero Bogyoke Aung San and a cousin of State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Sein Win’s father, U Ba Win, was among the nine men killed in a hail of gunfire when Aung San was assassinated during a meeting of the pre-independence cabinet at the Secretariat in Yangon on July 19, 1947. Ba Win was minister of trade. Two years after the brutal crushing of the national uprising against military rule in 1988, Sein Win became prime minister of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB). He headed the government-in-exile from its formation near the Thai border in December 1990, until its dissolution on September 14, 2012. After nearly 30 years in exile, Sein Win returned to his motherland in the second week of August and since then has been receiving a steady stream of journalists and well-wishers at a bungalow in Yangon’s outer northeastern South Okkalapa Township. He greets visitors in a longyi and the ochre-coloured pinni (handspun jacket) favoured by members of the National League for Democracy, with which the NCGUB was closely aligned during the years of repression after the NLD’s landslide victory in the 1990 election that the ruling military junta refused to honour..."