THA SONG YANG, THAILAND // The US first lady Laura Bush, meeting today with refugees who fled a brutal campaign by Myanmar's military junta, urged China and other countries to join the United States in imposing sanctions against the country. Mrs Bush, accompanying US President George W Bush on a three-country Asian trip, flew to the Thai-Myanmar border to spend the day at the Mae La refugee camp and a health clinic run by a woman known as the "Mother Teresa of Burma". Burma is Myanmar's previous name.
"We have talked to the Chinese quite often about this. We urge the Chinese to do what other countries have done. To sanction, to put a financial squeeze on the Burmese generals," the first lady said during her trip to the border and prepared to fly with her husband to Beijing to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic games. She acknowledged that US economic sanctions weren't perfect but said "we do think some of those are effective, that they are being squeezed".
An outspoken critic of the junta, Mrs Bush urged other nations to also apply sanctions to force the military into a dialogue with pro-democracy forces in Myanmar. China is the country's closest ally. At the border she met with some of the 38,000 refugees at Mae La, mostly from the Karen ethnic minority group that human rights organisations say is the target of an ongoing Myanmar military campaign marked by murders of civilians, rapes and rasing of villages. The Myanmar regime's decades-long conflict with a number of the country's ethnic minorities has sparked an ongoing exodus, and some 140,000 refugees now live in camps along the Thai-Myanmar frontier.
Emphasising human rights abuses in Myanmar, the first lady said: "The best solution would be if General Than Shwe's regime would start real dialogue" with ethnic minority and pro-democracy groups. She also saw off a group of Karen ready to depart for resettlement in the US, including a family of seven bound for South Carolina who were waiting to boarding a bus. "I want to wish them the very best," the first lady said in an open-air hall made of bamboo poles and thatched roof. "Our dream is that we want to go home," community leader Mahn Htun Htun told her. "But repatriation with dignity and safety is not possible right now."
"Most people do not want to move to a third country," Mrs. Bush responded. "If we could see a change in the Burmese government ... people could move home in safety." Mrs Bush and her daughter, Barbara, made their way through the muddy ground of the camp in pouring rain at about the same time her husband was delivering a speech in Bangkok, the Thai capital, calling for "an end to the tyranny in Burma". *AP
