Bangkok - American actor Walter Koenig, who played Pavel Chekov on the original Star Trek TV series, said Tuesday he spent the last week visiting Karen refugees along the Thai-Myanmar border in an effort to publicize their little-known plight. "I have benefitted from my role in Star Trek on a personal level, but I can't really think about what I have given back. This was an opportunity," Koenig told a press conference upon his return from the Thai-Myanmar border area where an estimated 1.5 million Karen refugees are living in temporary camps after being chased from their homes in the Karen State in eastern Myanmar.
Koenig was brought to the area by the US Campaign for Burma, a human rights group dedicated to publicizing the plight of the Karens and other victims of Myanmar's military regime.
"We feel the world has not woken up to how serious things are in eastern Burma," said Jeremy Woodrum, of the US Camapign for Burma. "Over the past ten years there have been twice as many villages destroyed in eastern Burma as destroyed in Darfur, Sudan."
Besides driving an estimated 1.5 million Karens from 3,000 villages in the Karen State over the past decade, the Myanmar military has also been accused of committing massive human rights violations in the area, including forced labour, rape and torture.
More recently, human rights groups have accused the military of deliberately burning crops in the Karen State to starve the population.
An yet the United Nations Security Council has failed to issue a special resolution on the Karen crisis, primarily because efforts to do so have been blocked by China and Russia.
"We need to press the UN Security Council to do their job," said Woodrum. "They have passed resolutions in other countries around the world but they haven't done a single thing in Burma," he added.
The Karen National Union (KNU) has been fighting for the autonomy of the Karen State against Myanmar's central government since 1948, making it one of the world's oldest conflicts.
The conflict, however, took a nastier turn ten years ago when the Myanmar army vowed to wipe out the Karen insurgency and changed their their tactics from conventional warfare to attacks on the Karen civilian population, to undermine the Karen army's support base.
The offensive has intensified over the past two years after Myanmar's military junta moved the country's capital to Naypyitaw, formerly Prinmana, neighbouring the Karen and Kayah states.
Like many US citizens, Koenig admitted that he knew little about the Karens' plight until he was approached by the US Campaign for Burma to help.
"I was shocked that I knew so little," said Koenig. He said the was inspired to highlight the Karen crisis by his own family's history.
"My own family were refugees from Eastern Europe who arrived in America at the turn of the century," said Koenig. "They were Russian Jews living in Lithuania, where they were hated both for being Russians and for being Jews."
The Karen plight is due for another celebrity boost next year with the release of the latest movie in Sylvester Stallone's Rambo series, which highlights the oppression of the Christian-led ethnic minority by the Myanmar junta.
