Laura Bush meets with Burmese refugees

Plays key role in advancing their cause

Laura Bush and her daughter Barbara spoke yesterday with a refugee family during a visit to the Mae La refugee camp. (AFP/Getty Images)

MAE SOT, Thailand - With a steady downpour outside, Laura Bush sat down inside a small hut near the Thai border with Burma and invited a group of refugees from one of the world's most repressive regimes to tell her what they "would like the people of the world to know" about their situation.

"Our dream is to go home," said one of the refugees, Mahn Htun Htun. "But there is no peace and democracy in Burma - and it's impossible to go home."

For the past two years, Bush has made the cause of freedom in Burma a focus of her official duties as first lady. Yesterday, she ventured as close to the closed country as she ever has, visiting a muddy, rain-soaked refugee camp and medical clinic just miles from the border with Burma, part of a coordinated White House public relations offensive to raise public pressure on the country's ruling junta.

President Bush played a supporting role, lunching at the US ambassador's residence in Bangkok with a group of Burmese dissidents and telling them that the "American people care deeply about the people of Burma, and we pray for the day in which the people will be free." He also spoke about Burma in a radio interview with journalists heard inside that country.

But the White House effectively made the first lady the leading figure in its public campaign yesterday by releasing a presidential address on Asia more than 12 hours before he delivered it yesterday morning, and plugging his wife's interest in Burma in the process.

"Together, we seek an end to tyranny in Burma. The noble cause has many devoted champions, and I happen to be married to one of them," the president said.

With the major presidential news out of the way, a sizable contingent of reporters covering the Bushes' trip to Asia accompanied Laura Bush and daughter Barbara on their seven-hour swing to the rugged border region where some 140,000 Burmese refugees, many of them persecuted ethnic minorities, have fled.

After returning to Bangkok yesterday, Laura and Barbara Bush boarded Air Force One and joined the president in flying to Beijing to attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games.

During her visit to this scenic part of northwest Thailand, Laura Bush performed a number of the activities typically associated with first ladies. She sat in on English and math lessons for students in the Mae La refugee camp, a virtual city of some 35,000 Burmese, most of them members of the Karen ethnic minority, living along a mountain ridge in ramshackle wood huts and under thatched roofs. She visited a medical clinic run by Cynthia Maung, described by many as the Mother Teresa of Burma, and learned how doctors there treat thousands of poor Burmese for cataracts, missing legs and other injuries.

But Laura Bush also came out swinging in decidedly non-first-lady-like fashion against Burmese strongman Than Shwe, who remains entrenched in power despite tightened US sanctions, the turbulence flowing from the uprising last fall of Buddhist monks and the cyclone this year that left 138,000 dead or missing.

Meeting the media for a brief news conference at the Mae La camp, Bush noted that today is the 20th anniversary of the military crackdown that crushed Burma's nascent democracy and left the leader of the democratic forces, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest.

"Twenty years have gone by - everything is still the same or maybe worse in Burma," Bush said. "We know that Burma is a very rich country, rich in natural resources. And the junta uses those resources to prop themselves up for their own benefit, not for the benefit of the people of Burma."

The first lady was reminded by a reporter that China is perhaps Burma's biggest patron in the world and asked why she and the president were going to the Olympics.

"That's a really good question, and we have talked to the Chinese quite often about this," she replied. "As you know, the Chinese depend on a lot of energy imports into China. . . . We urge the Chinese to do what other countries have done - to sanction, to put a financial squeeze on the Burmese generals."

As Bush herself suggested in her brief comments, US efforts to isolate Burma through sanctions have had only a limited impact, with countries like India and China resistant to any steps that might threaten their financial interests there.

Congress recently imposed a new ban on the import of jade and other precious gems from Burma. Despite such moves, the Burmese government has proved highly resilient, as well as paranoid, resisting international offers of assistance after Cyclone Nargis.

"The military regime is pretty immune to outside influence or criticism or observation," said Arthur Carlson, Thailand director for the International Rescue Committee, one of the many nonprofit groups operating at the refugee camp Bush visited.

Nonetheless, he said, the first lady's advocacy was helpful in focusing attention on the little-noticed humanitarian crisis generated in eastern Burma.