Daily Times

BANGKOK: Aung San Suu Kyi vowed on Friday to work towards bringing home hundreds of thousands of Myanmar people who fled her impoverished and war-torn country under its former military leaders.

The democracy champion was speaking during her first visit as a state leader to neighbouring Thailand, where legions of low-paid Myanmar migrants prop up the economy with back-breaking labour. Over 100,000 refugees who fled ethnic conflicts with the Myanmar army are also kept in Thai camps along the border.

“What we want is that all people displaced from our country should come back to us and should come back to the kind of conditions which they will never want to move again,” Suu Kyi told a press conference in Bangkok. “For this, we will need to do a lot of work,” she cautioned, stressing that it would take time to revive an economy battered by mismanagement under the former junta, whose five-decade reign plunged the country into brutal poverty.

“Job creation is of the greatest importance for our country. Everywhere I’ve been in Myanmar people have talked about their need for jobs,” she said. Suu Kyi has arrived in Thailand to a frenzied welcome from some of the hundreds of thousands of her compatriots who have sought work and sanctuary from war across the border.

Thai police struggled to hold back a boisterous crowd of migrant workers, many holding aloft framed photos of the nation’s star politician while chanting “Mother Suu, Mother Suu.” Although cocooned by security guards, crowds craned to grab a fleeting glimpse of a politician who strides over Myanmar’s democracy movement and exerts a powerful moral force among her countrymen wherever they are.

“I am so happy, I love Aung San Suu Kyi … today is the first time I have seen her,” said 32-year-old Banyar Taik, who works at a tuna processing plant. It is Suu Kyi’s highest-­profile overseas visit since her pro-democracy party took power in April, ending almost half a century of military domination.

Her government has seeded hopes for a new era of prosperity that could eventually convince the army of low-paid Myanmar labourers in Thailand to return home. The southeast Asian neighbours have travelled in starkly different directions in recent years. While Myanmar’s junta has rolled back its chokehold on politics, Thailand remains in the grip of a military that seized power in 2014.

Suu Kyi is not scheduled to visit any of the Thai centres holding hundreds of Rohingya boat migrants, Muslims who have fled persecution in western Myanmar. Campaigners say her failure to support the stateless minority is a boon to Buddhist hardliners who loathe the Rohingya.

Agencies