''When Karen National Union (KNU) representatives held an emergency meeting earlier this month at their jungle headquarters along the Thai-Myanmar border, the ethnic group’s leaders weighed their continued participation in the government’s peace process. The KNU, along with its armed wing the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), have battled against the central government since 1949 – a year after the country achieved independence from British colonial rule – marking one of the world’s longest-running civil wars. So when the KNU agreed to accede to a previous military-backed government’s so-called Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) in 2015, the pause in hostilities lent the peace initiative a degree of credibility while wars still raged with other ethnic armed groups across the country...''