MAE SOT, Thailand -- Theirs is the longest-running insurgency in Asia, against a regime widely recognized as one of the world's most repressive. And yet the Karen National Union, which launched a guerrilla war in 1949 to secure a homeland for the Karen ethnic minority in eastern Myanmar, is anything but a household name.
The KNU, which seeks an autonomous Karen state within a new Myanmarese federation, needs the world's help to resolve its conflict with the military junta in Yangon, said Mahn Sha Lah Phan, general secretary of the KNU, in an interview in the Thai border town of Mae Sot.
Mahn Sha said intense international pressure could force Myanmar's ruling military junta to enter into meaningful dialogue with the KNU. "If there is concerted pressure from the international community as well as domestic pressure, there is the probability that they [the junta] would accept dialogue," he said.