Yangon, November 04: The top U.S. diplomat for East Asia met with detained Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday, becoming the highest-ranking American official to visit the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 14 years.
Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell greeted Suu Kyi with a handshake after she was driven to his lakeside hotel in Yangon for the private two-hour meeting, U.S. Embassy spokesman Richard Mei said. The content of the talks was not immediately known.
Campbell and his deputy, Scot Marciel, are the highest-level Americans to visit Myanmar since 1995. Their two-day trip, which included meetings with senior junta officials, stems from a new U.S. policy that reverses the Bush administration’s isolation of Myanmar, also known as Burma, in favor of dialogue with a country that has been ruled by the military since 1962.
Myanmar’s junta has praised the U.S. initiative, but shown no sign it intends to release Suu Kyi or initiate democratic reforms demanded by Suu Kyi’s party ahead of an election planned for next year, goals also sought by Washington. But the military government has made some gestures, such as loosening the terms of Suu Kyi’s house arrest and allowing her more meetings with visitors, in hopes that the U.S. will ease its political and economic sanctions on the country.
Suu Kyi, 64, has been detained for 14 of the past 20 years. Dressed in a pink traditional Burmese jacket, she was upbeat as she emerged from the hotel and joked with photographers who asked her to smile.
“Do I look pretty when I smile,” she said as she smiled for the cameras.
“Hello to you all,” she said before getting into the car that whisked her back to her tightly guarded home.
The U.S. visit is the second step in “the beginning of a dialogue with Burma,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters in Washington on Tuesday after the officials met with senior junta officials in the administrative capital of Naypyitaw.
“They laid out the way we see this relationship going forward, how we should structure this dialogue,” Kelly said. “But they were mainly in a listening mode.”
Campbell is continuing talks he began in September in New York with senior Myanmar officials which were the first such high-level contact in nearly a decade.
Campbell met Wednesday morning with Prime Minister Gen. Thein Sein before flying to Yangon, the commercial capital, Mei said.
State television, which on Tuesday ignored the Americans’ visit, broadcast footage of both meetings.
Campbell later met for about an hour with six senior members of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party at its headquarters. He also was to visit leaders of other parties before departing Wednesday night.
Suu Kyi was recently sentenced to an additional 18 months of house arrest for briefly sheltering an uninvited American, in a trial that drew global condemnation. The sentence means she will not be able to participate in next year’s elections, which will be the first in two decades.
U.S. sanctions, first imposed more than a decade ago, failed to force the generals to respect human rights, release jailed political activists and make democratic reforms. The Obama administration decided recently to step up engagement as a way of promoting reforms.
Washington has said it will maintain the sanctions until talks with Myanmar’s generals result in change.
Campbell is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Myanmar since a September 1995 trip by then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright.
—Agencies