mystic burma

ဖီလစ္ပိုင္ျပည္သူျပည္သား မ်ားႏွင့္အတူ အာဏာရွင္စံနစ္ ခ်ဳပ္ၿငိမ္း ၿပီး ဒီမိုကေရစီစံနစ္ ရေအာာင္ ဦးေဆာင္ ခဲ့သူ အာဇာနည္တဦး ကြယ္လြန္သြား ပါေၾကာင္း

CORAZON AQUINO DEIS 

Philippines lost a National Treasure

 

MANILA (Reuters) - 

Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, whose conquest of one of the 20th century's most corrupt dictators made her a global icon of democracy, died on Saturday after a 16-month battle against colon cancer. She was 76.

Her family announced she died in the early hours of Saturday at the hospital where she had been admitted over one month ago. A private mass was held in her room shortly before her death, and all five children were at her bedside when the end came.

"Our mother peacefully passed away at 3:18 a.m. (1918 GMT Friday) of cardio-respiratory arrest," her son, Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., told reporters.

Born on January 25, 1933 into one of the country's richest families, the Cojuangcos, Aquino grew up in a world of wealth and politics, being the daughter of a three-time congressman. She married Benigno, one of the country's most promising politicians, and they had four daughters and a son before he was thrown into prison by Marcos and then forced into exile.

Aquino seemed frail in later years, but was still game for a fight when she thought it necessary. She brought half a million people onto the street in the 1990s when her successor Ramos flirted with the idea of trying to extend his term in office. 

She was involved in protests that brought an end to the presidency of Joseph Estrada in 2001, and has supported the campaign to remove current President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo after her one-time ally was accused of corruption and election fraud.

Arroyo, who is in the United States on a visit, announced a 10-day period of national mourning and said in a message: "Today the Philippines lost a national treasure. She helped lead our nation to a brighter day."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: "Like millions of people worldwide, Bill (former U.S. President Bill Clinton) and I were inspired by her quiet strength and her unshakable commitment to justice and freedom. We join the American and Filipino people in honoring her life and memory."

Her arch-foe Imelda Marcos, who returned to the Philippines after her husband died in exile, said: "Now that Cory is with the Lord, let us all unite and pray for the Filipino people."

(Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Dean Yates)

႐ုိက္တာသတင္း႒ာနမွ သတင္း အား ကူးယူေဖၚျပပါသည္။