Title: NCC official calls for sanctions against Burma in wake of border
violence against refugees
Date: March 31, 1997
Disciples News Service
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Contact: news@cm.disciples.org
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NEW YORK (NCC) -- A Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) leader with the National Council of Churches recently returned from Southeast Asia with reports of violence against refugees on the border between Burma and Thailand and reissued a call for the United States to impose sanctions on Myanmar (Burma).
"Burma is a pariah government and no one should do business with them," said the Rev. Larry Tankersley, director of the Southern Asia office of the NCC Church World Service Unit. "While I was there, the military Burmese government---the State Law and Order Restoration Council---had begun attacking refugee camps, burning them down and committing atrocities against the people, causing them to flee into Thailand," he said.
"People were fleeing in panic, their houses, food and everything destroyed," Tankersley said. Since returning to the U.S., Tankersley said he receives regular reports about continued incidents of violence on the border. Eyewitnesses initially reported the Thai army had refused entry to all male refugees, sending them back into a war zone. An international outcry led to better treatment from the Thai government, but the refugees burned out of their camps remain unprotected and without adequate shelter.
The Disciples minister said he opposes the Thai government's proposal to put the displaced people into large camps contained by barbed wire. "Not only would this be akin to putting the refugees in concentration camps, but it would lead to greater public health hazards," he explained. Currently, refugees are spread out in a number of small camps up and down the border.
"It is ironic that this is happening during the Ecumenical Year in Solidarity with the Uprooted,'" Tankersley said.
Also at issue, according to Tankersley, is the treatment of the democratic opposition in Myanmar (Burma). In February, Nobel Peace Prize winner and democratic advocate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi appealed for international sanctions, saying there was a "large scale repression of the democracy movement" underway. On March 4, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi complained of the new arrests and intimidation tactics.
Tankersley and other church leaders were turned away from a meeting with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi on Nov. 16, leading them to conclude that she was still essentially under house arrest.
Several U.S. officials agree with this assessment. A bipartisan group of seven senators has circulated a letter calling on President Clinton to impose sanctions on new investments in Myanmar in keeping with a law signed over five months ago that calls for the administration to ban all new American investment in Myanmar if its military steps up repression of the democratic opposition. However, the Clinton administration is still divided over whether the conditions of the law have been met.
"It seems to me that all of the conditions (for sanctions) have been met," Tankersley said. "Nothing else seems to be helping."
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