WASHINGTON: A former aide to Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is stirring up anger among exiled groups for calling on the US Congress and human rights groups to end their economic sanctions against the military regime in Yangon. “To target innocent people makes me very very bitter,” Ma Thanegi, a Myanmar writer who spent three years in prison after working as the personal assistant to Suu Kyi in the early 1990s, said of the US sanctions against Myanmar. “This is economic terrorism. It won’t bring economic change and won’t even bring any positive change. It is so unfair and so cruel.”

Thanegi is a contributing editor to the “Myanmar Times”, one of a handful of publications tolerated by the Myanmar government. In a speech here to a forum this week sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, she said that economic sanctions against Myanmar do not hurt the government but instead threaten the livelihood of “totally innocent workers”, including more than 200,000 women employed in the garment industry.

A sanctions bill under consideration in the US Senate, she said, would force 300 to 400 factories to close, putting thousands of young women out of work and forcing many of them to become prostitutes to survive. “Why can’t there be other means than to target people without skills, and women?” she asked. Thanegi’s comments did not draw much sympathy from the audience, which appeared to be composed primarily of student and human rights activists, with a few business people and state department officials also in attendance.

Thanegi was barraged with hostile questions from the activists. They demanded to know where she got her statistics, who she was representing and why she refrained from asking tough questions of Myanmar’s military leaders in her capacity as a journalist. “In 1998, we asked for democracy and a lot of people were killed in the streets,” said one activist, referring to the violent crackdown on the opposition by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), as the ruling junta was then called.

Some in the crowd passed out leaflets calling her “the dictator’s spokesperson”. Thanegi replied that she spoke “as an ordinary person who knows all levels of society”. The people of Myanmar, she asserted, “want peace and more freedom, but they also want economic prosperity.” —Dawn/InterPress Service.