Myanmar’s junta is ready to “endure” being on the United Nations Security Council’s agenda but warned the UN that it would “also have to handle the situations of the nations similar to or worse than Myanmar’s,” state-run media reports said Wednesday.

That is what Myanmar Information Minister Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan told visiting UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari in a recent dressing-down, according to The New Light of Myanmar.

“If the Myanmar affairs are to be put on the UNSC agenda and the UNSC is going to handle them, the body will also have to handle the situations of the nations similar to or worse than Myanmar’s,” Kyaw Hsan told Gambari, who has been in the military’s new capital of Naypyidaw since Saturday.

A transcript of Kyaw Hsan’s interview with Gambari was made public on state-run Myanmar television Tuesday night and repeated in the state-owned print media Wednesday.

The UN has stepped up international pressure on Myanmar’s ruling junta since its brutal crackdown on monk-led protests in September, that left at least 10 people dead according to official figures. Others claim the death toll was closer to 200.

“Even in the South Asia and South-East Asia, there are some nations in which the armed forces have to take over the state duties due to certain reasons, martial law is still in force, hundreds of people died when protests were crushed and hundreds of people including children were kicked when mosques were raided,” said Kyaw Hsan, in an apparent reference to Thailand and Pakistan, two close allies of the US.

Thailand experienced a military coup d’etat on September 19, 2006, while Pakistan’s military-led government attacked a radical mosque in Islamabad in July.

Kyaw Hsan warned Gambari that “if a big power bullies her with its influence by putting Myanmar’s affairs on UNSC, we will have no other way but to face and endure.”

Gambari, who is in Myanmar on a mission to hasten the national reconciliation process, is coming under increasing pressure from his boss UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to show some progress.

Gambari arrived in Yangon Saturday with Ban’s instructions to seek democratic reform, engage in dialogue with detained political opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and military supremo Senior General Than Shwe, and to seek the release of political prisoners and detained pro-democracy marchers.

At UN headquarters in New York, Ban told reporters Tuesday: “I am concerned at this time about the lack of progress. He has not been able to meet with Senior General Than Shwe.”