For the first time in more than a decade, senior U.S. officials will travel to Burma to meet with that country's leaders and political dissidents as part of a policy shift by the Obama administration.
Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and Scot Marciel, a deputy assistant secretary, are scheduled to visit Burma on Nov. 3 and 4, the State Department announced Friday. A State Department official said Campbell and Marciel would meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has spent 14 of the last 20 years under some form of imprisonment and is currently under house arrest.
The last senior U.S. official to travel to Burma, also known as Myanmar, was Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in 1995.
| According to the AP, Aung San Suu Kyi supports the trip. |
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