People’s Parliament Chairman Saw Mra Aung Dies

By WAI MOE

Burma’s pro-democracy movement has lost an influential ethnic leader, Saw Mra Aung, 91, the chairman of the People’s Parliament, who died in his home in Rangoon on Monday.

The funeral was held in Yayway Cemetery in Rangoon on Tuesday.

Burma’s detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi sent a flower basket and five monk robes to the family, according to Aye Thar Aung, a close colleague of Saw Mra Aung.

“He was an important figure in Burma’s national reconciliation and the People’s Parliament,” Aye Thar Aung said. “The place he occupied in our country cannot be filled.”

Saw Mra Aung, a physician, was born in April 1918 in Mrauk Oo Township in Arakan State in western Burma. He received his basic education in Arakan State and Rangoon before going to Mumbai, India, to read in medicine in 1943. He received his bachelor degree there in 1947.

After studying in India, he went to Britain for further studies at the Royal College of Physicians.

From 1955 to 1963, Saw Mra Aung worked in Mandalay hospitals and taught at the medical college. In a medical exchange program in 1958, he studied in the United States and the United Kingdom, and he led a Burmese medical team to China in 1972.

After his retirement in 1978 as a government in-service physician, he worked at two hospitals in Hong Kong from 1979 to 1982. Later, he worked in a hospital for monks and nuns in Rangoon.

In 1988, he was named chairman of the Arakan League for Democracy. In the 1990 elections, he was elected a member of Parliament, winning 62.09 percent of the vote in his native Mrauk Oo Township.

In August 1998, the Burmese military junta arrested many dissidents including Saw Mra Aung, who was held in detention until June 13, 2001.

On September 17, 1998, the main opposition National League for Democracy and its alliance parties, including the Arakan League for Democracy, formed the Committee Representing the People’s Parliament.

Saw Mra Aung was elected chairman of the People’s Parliament, which has served as a symbolic emblem of unity among all ethnic groups in Burma.