U.S. Diplomat Allowed Rare Visit With Burmese Dissident - NYTimes.com

Image by divinehammer42 via Flickr

By THOMAS FULLER

BANGKOK — A senior American diplomat who completed a rare visit to Myanmar on Wednesday said that Washington would improve relations with the nation if its military government embraced reconciliation with Myanmar’s democratic opposition.

“We stated clearly that the United States is prepared to take steps to improve the relationship, but that the process must be based on reciprocal and concrete efforts by the Burmese government,” the diplomat, Kurt M. Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said in a statement before boarding a plane for Thailand.

Mr. Campbell is the highest-ranking American official to hold substantive talks in Myanmar, formerly Burma, in more than a decade, and he described his trip as an “exploratory mission.”

After a two-hour meeting on Wednesday with the leader of the country’s beleaguered democracy movement, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Mr. Campbell urged the government to allow her “more frequent interactions” with members of her own party, the National League for Democracy, which won elections in 1990 that were ignored by the ruling generals.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has been held under house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years and is allowed only infrequent meetings with anyone outside her home. Mr. Campbell is the most senior American representative she has met since 1995.

Mr. Campbell’s trip is part of a broader policy review announced by the Obama administration to engage Myanmar after years of diplomatic isolation and sanctions. American officials say they have no immediate plans to lift the sanctions, which bar most trade and investment in the country by American companies.

The European Union also imposes wide-ranging sanctions on the military government, but Myanmar’s neighbors, including Thailand, China and India, trade and deal freely with the country, weakening the effectiveness of the Western sanctions.

During his two-day visit, Mr. Campbell held talks with Myanmar’s prime minister, Gen. Thein Sein, but in what seemed to be a snub that has become commonplace for visiting dignitaries, Mr. Campbell did not meet Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the leader of the junta.

Mr. Campbell also held talks with the minister of science and technology and said he expected Myanmar to live up to its United Nations obligations on “proliferation,” probably a reference to the country’s nuclear ambitions, which most analysts say they believe are in a nascent stage.

Mr. Campbell said the United States was committed to seeing “national reconciliation and a fully inclusive political process,” a variation on the oft-repeated pleas of United Nations officials and Western diplomats.

Skeptics of the American attempts at reconciliation, including many members of the Burmese exile community in Thailand and the United States, point to the numerous failed attempts at engagement since the generals ignored the 1990 elections.

The military has announced elections for next year and is introducing a new constitution that devolves power away from the military but retains a prominent role for the military leadership. Many analysts are skeptical that the military will actually give up significant control.