Myanmar rebel leader dies after long illness
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A veteran leader of Myanmar's ethnic Karen rebel movement, which is fighting one of the world's longest-running insurgencies, has died aged 79, rebel officials said on Sunday.
General Bo Mya, whose Karen National Union (KNU) has waged guerrilla war against the central government since 1949, died late on Saturday in a Thai hospital near the border of eastern Myanmar, a senior KNU official told Reuters.
"He passed away after suffering from several diseases so severe that he could not walk for three years," said the official, who declined to be named.
KNU general secretary Mhan Sa La Pah said the funeral would probably take place on December 26 in a Karen stronghold near the Thai border. "General Bo Mya died last night. His condition got worse in the last two days. He couldn't eat and had a sore throat. We had planned to move him to a hospital in Bangkok," Man Sa La Pah said.
Bo Mya suffered from diabetes and heart disease, and had been wheelchair-bound for several years.
The KNU official said the leader's death would have no impact on the group's fight for autonomy for the Karen, a predominantly Christian ethnic minority in eastern Myanmar, the official said.
"KNU objectives are the same. Nothing changes," he said.
The KNU and its armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), have been fighting the central government in Yangon since the year after what was then called Burma won independence from Britain.
After seizing power in 1988 from another set of generals, Myanmar's current military rulers signed ceasefires or peace pacts with around two dozen ethnic guerrilla groups in the country's jungle hinterlands.
The KNU reached an informal cease-fire with the junta in December 2003 after talks brokered by then military intelligence chief Khin Nyunt, with whom Bo Mya once said he had a good rapport.
But a formal peace deal was never signed. Khin Nyunt was ousted in October 2004 and fighting resumed.
LIFELONG GUERRILLA
Born in the Papun hills of Karen State in eastern Myanmar around 1927, Bo Mya served with the British and then became an active member of the anti-Japanese resistance in the Second World War.
It is from these roots that the Karen independence movement was born.
As an able field commander, Bo Mya rose quickly through the ranks in the 1950s and 1960s as ideological differences between the top political leaders threatened to tear the movement apart.
A committed Christian and staunch anti-communist, he was responsible for remodelling the KNU in his own image at the height of the Cold War in southeast Asia with the help of right-wing military governments in neighbouring Thailand.
from Reuters
