BURMA: A black-tongued child soldier who commanded a small Burmese guerrilla group called God's Army has surrendered to the military government, according to state media.
Militia leader Johnny Htoo, who was 12 when God's Army guerrillas held hundreds of people hostage at a Thai hospital in 2000, had left a refugee camp in Thailand and "returned to the legal fold", the Myanma Ahlin paper said yesterday.
He brought with him nine other fighters and a small assortment of weapons, including assault rifles, it added.
The paper, an official mouthpiece of Rangoon's military junta, did not say anything about the whereabouts of Johnny's twin brother, Luther, co-commander of the ragtag Christian militia.
God's Army, a 200-strong band of ethnic Karen fighters, broke away in 1997 from the Karen National Union, a guerrilla group which has been fighting for independence from Burma for more than five decades.
According to Karen tradition, black tongues are a sign of divinity. Many followers believed the cheroot-smoking twins were immune to bullets and landmines and had been sent to save the movement after it was all but wiped out by major government offensives.
The army was well known as a haven of fringe anti-junta elements, including five dissidents who took over the Burmese embassy in Bangkok for a day in 1999.
After the 2000 hospital siege, in which Thai commandos killed 10 guerrillas, some commentators suggested the twins could have stepped straight from the pages of William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
Four Thai soldiers died in a God's Army booby trap, but the twins were not prosecuted after they surrendered to Thai police in early 2001. They have spent the interim 5½ years in a refugee camp along the border.
The camps are home to more than 120,000 permanent refugees who have fled fighting between the Burmese army and the host of ethnic militias which have been in existence since the southeast Asian nation's independence from Britain in 1948.
Myanma Ahlin said Htoo and the other fighters had surrendered as they did not want to be "bullied by other insurgent groups" and were keen to "take part in regional development tasks and live peacefully with their families and relatives".
Burma has been under military rule of one form or another since 1962.