Tatmadaw Government (1988–2011)

This article is about the military government set up in Burma in 1988. For the military junta established after the 2021 coup d'etat, see State Administration Council.

State Law and Order Restoration Council

နိုင်ငံတော် ငြိမ်ဝပ်ပိပြားမှုတည်ဆောက်ရေး အဖွဲ့ နဝတ
State Seal of Myanmar (1988–2011)
Council overview
Formed	18 September 1988
Preceding agencies	Council of State (as the supreme council) Pyithu Hluttaw (as the legislature)
Dissolved	15 November 1997
Superseding Council	State Peace and Development Council

State Peace and Development Council

နိုင်ငံတော် အေးချမ်းသာယာရေးနှင့်ဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေး ကောင်စီ နအဖ
Council overview
Formed	15 November 1997
Preceding Council	State Law and Order Restoration Council
Dissolved	30 March 2011

The Tatmadaw Government (Burmese: တပ်မတော်အစိုးရ), officially the Government of the Union of Myanmar (Burmese: ပြည်ထောင်စုမြန်မာနိုင်ငံတော်အစိုးရအဖွဲ့), was a totalitarian provisional military government that had ruled Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) since the collapse of the constitutional socialist regime in 1988 until the new constitutional government took power in 2011. Direct military rule was established on 18 September 1988 when the military junta, namely the State Law and Order Restoration Council (Burmese: နိုင်ငံတော် ငြိမ်ဝပ်ပိပြားမှု တည်ဆောက်ရေးအဖွဲ့; abbreviated SLORC or နဝတ), came into power. The SLORC was dissolved and the junta was reconstituted as the State Peace and Development Council (Burmese: နိုင်ငံတော် အေးချမ်းသာယာရေး နှင့် ဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေး ကောင်စီ; abbreviated SPDC or နအဖ) on 15 November 1997. On 30 March 2011, Senior General Than Shwe, the SPDC Chairman, signed a decree that officially dissolved the SPDC, ending the direct military rule that had lasted for more than two decades.

SLORC succeeded the Pyithu Hluttaw as a legislature and the Council of State as a ruling council, after dissolving the state organs of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma. When SLORC was dissolved and reconstituted as SPDC in 1997, the powerful regional military commanders, who were members of SLORC, were promoted to new positions and transferred to the capital of Yangon. The new regional military commanders were not included in the membership of the SPDC which then consisted of eleven senior military officers of the Tatmadaw, the combined military forces of the country. The members of the junta wielded a great deal more power than the cabinet ministers, who were either more-junior military officers or civilians. The exception was the Defence Ministry portfolio, which was in the hands of junta leader Senior General Than Shwe himself. On 15 September 1993, it established the Union Solidarity and Development Association, which was replaced by Union Solidarity and Development Party on 29 March 2010 in time for the elections.

Although the regime retreated from the totalitarian Burmese Way to Socialism of the Burma Socialist Programme Party when it took power in 1988, the regime was widely accused of human rights abuses. It rejected the 1990 election results and kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest until her release on 13 November 2010. The way the junta handled Cyclone Nargis was also internationally criticised. The council was officially dissolved on 30 March 2011, with the inauguration of the newly elected government, led by its former member and Prime Minister, President Thein Sein.