Don't Klingon to power, Trek star tells Burma junta

By Darren Schuettler

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Star Trek actor Walter Koenig urged fans of the iconic sci-fi series on Tuesday to turn their wrath on Myanmar's military junta, an earthly "outpost of tyranny".

Koenig, who battled alien Klingons and Romulans as an original member of the Starship Enterprise crew, said he hoped to mobilise Trekkies to join a campaign against the ruling generals blamed for human rights abuses in the former Burma.

"I can tell people what I experienced, meeting people without limbs, the ex-political prisoners, the squalor, all that I have seen in these brief days," Koenig, 70, told Reuters after visiting a refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border last week.

Thailand is home to around 140,000 long-term Burmese refugees, the U.N. refugee agency says, but a half million more have been internally displaced by attacks on villages in eastern Myanmar, home to one of the world's longest-running civil wars.

The United States has labelled Myanmar an outpost of tyranny and imposed economic sanctions, but the junta has avoided total isolation by using its vast natural gas reserves to befriend energy-hungry China and India.

Koenig, the son of persecuted Russian Jews who fled to the United States at the turn of the century, said the campaign against injustice in Myanmar would resonate with Star Trek fans.

The original television series was cancelled in the late 1960s after only three seasons, but it developed a strong cult following due partly to themes dealing with social justice, race relations and even Cold War tensions.

"Star Trek fans are very receptive to humanitarian causes. The stereotype is somebody who is into computers or sits at home and does nothing else," Koenig said.