Talk:Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services

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Role of Military Appointments General

@နေနီဝန်း: I saw you added that the Military Appointments General is one of the appointers of the office. The constitution is quite clear on the process, it is nomination by the NDSC followed by formal appointment by the State President. The MAG is not even mentioned in the constitution; little is known about the role, but we should follow the actual law in the constitution, and my assumption is that the MAG is just a coordinating figure not a decision maker in the appointment or even the formal appointer, just assisting the president with that part. TEMPO156 (talk) 07:47, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Your first source just says the MAG read out the letter and Min Aung Hlaing did the handover (supporting my understanding), while your second link is not active and I cannot find an archived version. TEMPO156 (talk) 07:51, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

@TEMPO156: My second link is still active as of today, I just checked it. (Myanmar government websites sometimes load slowly or have connection errors, probably browser issue or something?) It is a presidential order signed by Thein Sein: နိုင်ငံတော်သမ္မတရုံး တပ်မတော်ကာကွယ်ရေးဦးစီးချုပ်အဖြစ် ပြန်လည်အတည်ပြုခန့်အပ်ခြင်း (အမိန့်အမှတ် ၄/ ၂၀၁၂) ၁၃၇၃ ခုနှစ်၊ ပြာသိုလပြည့်ကျော် ၂ ရက်

(၂၀၁၂ ခုနှစ်၊ ဇန်နဝါရီလ ၁၀ ရက်) [President Office, Reconfirmation and Reappointment of Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services (Order Number 4/2012), 2nd Waning Day of Pyatho, 1373 M.E (10th January, 2012)], digitalized on the Myanmar Law Information System. It states that "Army 14232 General Min Aung Hlaing who was appointed by the document number, 4, Appointment (1) 2011, dated 2011 March 30, of the Office of the Military Appointments General, Ministry of Defence, has been reconfirmed and reappointed in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, Article 342, Article 448, and Union Government Law, Section 16, Subsection (a). (Sd) Thein Sein, President, The Republic of the Union of Myanmar." နေနီဝန်း (talk) 21:59, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

@နေနီဝန်း: Thank you for supplying the quote. I think you are correct, but we really need to be able to get a stable source. I just tried again today, and the server is again not responding. I don't have any issues with other Myanmar government websites. The Wayback Machine hasn't been able to capture this website's homepage since 2024: . Is there an archived version of this page or is the order published elsewhere? Myanmar Law Library is external but only has presidential orders going back to 2016. TEMPO156 (talk) 00:58, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

I've just checked the link and it's still easily accessible on my phone, as of today (24 July 2026). If you cannot view the website, here is an instagram post with its screenshot  ; that post's caption states that "တပ်ချုပ်ကို နိုင်ငံတော်သမ္မတက အတည်ပြုဖို့လိုအပ်။" [the military chief needs to be confirmed by the state president.] I found that a BBC Burmese article from 3 April 2026 briefly states about the 2012 reconfirmation; "သမ္မတဦးသိန်းစိန်လက်ထက် ၂၀၁၂ ခုနှစ်မှာ တပ်ချုပ်ကို သမ္မတအမိန့်နဲ့ ပြန်လည်အတည်ပြုခန့်အပ်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ သမ္မတဟာ အမျိုးသားကာကွယ်ရေးနဲ့လုံခြုံရေးကောင်စီရဲ့ အဆိုပြုထောက်ခံချက်နဲ့ တပ်မတော်ကာကွယ်ရေးဦးစီးချုပ်ကို ခန့်အပ်တာဝန်ပေးရမယ်ဆိုတဲ့ ဖွဲ့စည်းပုံအခြေခံဥပဒေ ပုဒ်မ ၃၄၂ ကိုအသုံးပြုပြီး ပြန်ခန့်ခဲ့တာပါ။" [During the term of President U Thein Sein, in 2012, the military chief was reconfirmed and reappointed with the presidential order. That appointment used the Constitution Section 342 which states that the president has to appoint the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Services with the proposal and approval of the National Defence and Security Council.] နေနီဝန်း (talk) 05:31, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Is this the full document, matching the same text as what you're seeing on the government website? TEMPO156 (talk) 01:52, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes, it is. Beware of using Google Translate on Chrome browser. The phrase "စစ်ရာထူးခန့်ချုပ်ရုံး" means "Office of the Military Appointments General", but Google Translate on Chrome browser tends to falsely translate it as "Office of the Chief of Staff" which is a totally different office (စစ်ဦးစီးအရာရှိချုပ်ရုံး). နေနီဝန်း (talk) 05:38, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Thank you. I would always defer to someone who speaks Burmese for the final word on translation, and it's consistent with the English statements from the Tatmadaw naming the Military Appointments General as the uniformed officer involved in the appointment. We can use {{Cite wikisource}} for now; if the Wayback Machine was crawling the site regularly and lost the ability to do so two years ago, I'm wondering if it is no longer accessible from outside Myanmar. Are you accessing that site from within Myanmar or outside? TEMPO156 (talk) 17:49, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

I think so. နေနီဝန်း (talk) 03:20, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

Okay, then we definitely want to be able to rely on webpages Myanmar editors are able to access, though we also want to provide as much accessibility to readers in other countries for the source info as we are able to. Ideally a third party like Myanmar Law Library would be able to take care of republishing the presidential order by Thein Sein, but we can do our best with Wikisource. I'm going to change the source here to a Wikisource citation, but I think it would also be helpful for you to add your link as a citation to the Myanmar wikisource page for the presidential order (maybe with a note in Burmese saying there are possible issues accessing from outside Myanmar), so that Myanmar editors are able to help maintain that sourcing. Wikisource pages are supposed to have a source for the document but that one on Myanmar Wikisource does not yet have one. TEMPO156 (talk) 05:15, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

According to the The Copyright Law (The Pyidaungsu Hluttaw Law No. 15, 2019),

16. Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 13, 14 and 15, if a literary or artistic work or an object of related rights is involved in any of the following, copyright or related rights protection shall not extend to: (a) idea, procedure, method of operation, mathematical concept, principle, discovery or data; (b) news of the day or miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press information; (c) constitution and legislation; (d) rules, regulations and bye-laws, and notifications, orders, directives and procedures issued by the Governmental departments, Governmental organizations and Departments; (e) judicial decisions and orders; (f) official translation and collection of those in subsections (c) to (e) by the Government.

Should we add Myanmar Law Information System links, which are not accessible outside of Myanmar but accessible in Myanmar, as references for those Wikisource pages? နေနီဝန်း (talk) 14:24, 29 July 2026 (UTC)

This copyright statute means it would be okay for anyone to republish an official, publicly available, directive, which is in line with most governments. I think you can add the link as a reference to that Myanmar Wikisource page, which is a site intended for use by Burmese speakers, and we could cite that Wikisource page here on the English Wikipedia as an external reference. But if you think there is a separate law that presidential directives cannot be posted to the internet or that it would be unwise to edit Myanmar Wikisource at all, I urge you to trust your judgement. I can make the edit myself if you like, or not at all. TEMPO156 (talk) 17:22, 29 July 2026 (UTC)

I am also reachable by email through my user page. TEMPO156 (talk) 23:09, 29 July 2026 (UTC)