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Monday, January 24 3:13 PM SGT
God's Army -- bitter opponents of Yangon regimeRATCHABURI, Thailand, Jan 24 (AFP) -God's Army, which seized a Thai hospital Monday is a 200-strong ethnic Karen militia led by teenage brothers bitterly opposed to Myanmar's military junta. Members of the group, which has been holed up in thick jungles along the Thai-Myanmar border, deny they are terrorists, preferring to style themselves as freedom fighters for democracy. The group is a religious offshoot of the ethnically-based Karen National Union (KNU) which has been locked in a bloody independence struggle with the Yangon junta for decades. The shady band of fighters is believed to be led by two twin brothers said by their followers to possess mystical powers. Some reports say the boys are as young as 12 years old, others say they are 15, but their identity or ages have never been confirmed. Since October, God's Army has been sheltering five gunmen from another dissident Myanmar group, the Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors (VBSW) which stormed Yangon's embassy here last year, severely damaging Myanmar-Thai relations. In a statement issued in December, God's Army said it was sheltering the men because their actions were designed to trigger revolt against the junta, and were not acts of terrorism. "The embassy siege may look like terrorism against another country but it was merely intended to break the domestic political stalemate in our country," said the statement, written in Burmese. It accused the Myanmar army of killing and raping villagers in border areas and destroying their homes in March 1997 during an attack on the KNU. "We could not sit around to let this happen any longer so we acquired weapons and decided to fight against the Rangoon military dictatorship," the statement said. Myanmar was outraged when the embassy siege ended when Thailand provided the five VBSW gunmen with a helicopter to escape to the border. It shut the frontier with its neighbour in protest and only agreed to reopen it in late November. Thailand has promised to try the five embassy gunmen if they are found in the country. The border has been tenser than usual in recent days after four Thai troops were killed in a hunt for unidentified intruders last week. The VBSW said they had come under attack from both the Myanmar and Thai armies. |