In rare talk, US envoy meets with Suu Kyi
Urges harmony in Myanmar
BANGKOK - A senior American diplomat who completed a rare visit to Myanmar yesterday said that Washington would improve relations with the nation on the condition that 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.
Campbell is the highest-ranking US 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 yesterday with the leader of the country’s beleaguered democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, 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.
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. Campbell is the most senior US representative she has met since 1995.
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. US officials say they have no immediate plans to lift the sanctions, which bar most trade and investment in the country by US 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.
Campbell said the United States was committed to seeing “national reconciliation and a fully inclusive political process.’’
