When the Japanese occupied most of Burma in 1942, Stanley Edwards had just been born. He was the child of a successful English businessman and his Thai wife, who lived in comfortable security in Victoria Point, in the south of the country.
By the time the war ended in 1945, little Stanley was a child of the forest, living a life on the run in the depths of Karen State.
Today, he is joint general secretary of the exiled Burmese opposition party, the National Democratic Front, which has joined a vigorous new campaign to bring down the Burmese junta after their recent order extending the house arrest of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.
Stanley was six months old when the Japanese occupied Victoria Point. The invaders were the infamous Manchurian army, which took few prisoners on its advance through |
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edward loxton on an Anglo-Burmese
whose rebellion was
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Burma. They rounded up Victoria Point's English community and executed many of the men as spies. Stanley's father was among them. The Japanese carried off his mother and she was never seen again.
"Before my father was killed I'm told that his executioners asked him what he wanted done with his children, my elder brother and me," Stanley said at his home near Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. "He was a churchgoer, a member of the Church of England, and he asked his captors to give us to the missionaries of the town."
The Japanese had spared the missionaries, members of a French Catholic order. The priests took in the two little boys - and so began Stanley's remarkable life story, from those insecure beginnings to the leadership of Burma's exiled National Democratic Front.
The priests were in no position
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