Asian politicians plead for UN action on Myanmar

The Security Council held its first official session on Myanmar last week, at which the United States and its allies advocated a resolution to pressure the former Burma to stop jailing political opponents, persecuting minorities and flooding the region with refugees.

"We can no longer tolerate the situation. Please do something more concrete rather than just paying lip-service diplomatically, which is no real solution in the situation," Indonesian parliamentarian Djoko Susilo told a news conference.

Susilo, Filipino Member of Parliament Loretta Ann Rosales and Thai Senator John Ungphakorn are members of the Asian Inter-Parliamentarian Myanmar Caucus who traveled to New York seeking support for UN Security Council Action on Myanmar.

The military has run the southeast Asian nation under various guises since 1962 and the current group of generals have been in power since 1988. They officially changed the English version of the country's name from Burma in 1989.

They put charismatic opposition leader Aung San Suu Ki, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, under house arrest and many of her followers in prison after her National League for Democracy won a landslide election victory in 1990.

"We feel that Burma at the very least is a security threat within the region and can therefore easily be a security threat within the international community," Rosales said.

"We are here to express our collective position as members of parliament within the region to try to at least reach out to the other countries, who are members of the UN Security Council, to give a measure of priority to Burma."

Western nations had fought to get the issue on the council's agenda over the objections of China, Russia, Qatar and Congo Republic, who maintained that the junta government was not a threat to international peace and security.

US Ambassador John Bolton has said Myanmar is destabilising the region, preventing agencies from helping to stop the spread of AIDS, compelling some 200,000 people to flee and becoming the second largest opium producer in the world.