Wookieepedia:Featured article queue/June 4, 2011

Malinza Thanas was a Human female born on Bakura to Gaeriel Captison and Pter Thanas, who were respectively the planet's Prime Minister and Defense Fleet Commander. Her father passed away from Knowt's Disease when she was three years old, and her mother was killed during the First Corellian Insurrection two years later. Thanas was adopted by a well-placed Bakuran family and was sponsored and frequently visited by Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, who had drawn her mother into the Corellian insurrection and felt responsible for the young Thanas. She became very fond of Skywalker, but harbored a deep hatred for the New Republic, the galactic government that he had acted on behalf of. As she grew up, she developed a strong belief in the Cosmic Balance religion, and at the age of fifteen, she formed a resistance movement known as Freedom and began peacefully protesting Bakura's role in the Galactic Alliance, the New Republic's successor state. Thanas lobbied for Bakuran independence but took a firm stand against Freedom's members use of violence to get their voices heard due to her fear of backlash from the Cosmic Balance. She was nevertheless arrested on charges of disturbing the peace and conspiracy, and was brought to a prison in Salis D'aar, Bakura's capital city.

Several members of Skywalker's family came to Bakura at the time of Thanas's arrest, and when his niece Jaina Solo visited her in prison, Bakuran authorities engineered her escape in order to follow the two of them to Freedom's headquarters. As security officials closed in on them, Thanas and her closest friends fled and appealed to Bakura's Deputy Prime Minister Blaine Harris, who had been covertly funding their organization, for help. However, he planned to kill Thanas and to use her status as a martyr to unite Bakura behind him as he seized power within the government. Harris brought Thanas, Solo, and Vyram, another member of Freedom, to a stadium where Bakura's new allies, the P'w'eck Emancipation Movement, were performing a Consecration Ceremony to signal the beginning of the partnership. The ceremony was in fact a ruse organized to allow the expansionist Ssi-ruuvi Imperium, who had enslaved the P'w'eck, to attempt to invade Bakura, and Thanas and her friends fled from the invaders into tunnels beneath the stadium after they escaped from Harris's clutches. Several Ssi-ruuk warriors followed them, but were subdued by P'w'eck who began to actually revolt. The mutiny curtailed the invasion, and Thanas and Vyram were subsequently hired by the the Bakuran government to trace a trail of credits that had been laundered offworld. The investigation was an effort to both expose senatorial corruption and to demonstrate the good intentions of Freedom to a skeptical public.