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| Southeast Asia | |
| US govt to send delegation to Burma | |
| 2009-10-23 | |
| The United States is preparing to send a rare mission to Burma but warns that its bid to engage the military junta after decades of hostility will be "slow and painful." Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said a team would head to Burma to follow up on talks last month in New York, which marked the highest-level US contact with the regime in nearly a decade. But in testimony Wednesday before a House of Representatives committee, Campbell cautioned: "We expect engagement with Burma to be a long, slow, painful and step-by-step process."
The National League for Democracy, the party of detained opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi, welcomed the planned visit as a "good thing." "They will also meet the NLD when they come," party spokesman Nyan Win told AFP. "We welcome their visit. We are also hoping that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will be allowed to meet Mr Campbell." President Barack Obama's administration last month concluded that the longstanding US approach of isolating Burma had failed to bear fruit but said it would not ease sanctions without progress on democracy and human rights. In August, Burma's military leader Than Shwe held an unprecedented meeting with a visiting US senator, Jim Webb, a leading advocate of engaging the junta. Webb also met with Suu Kyi. A State Department official, Stephen Blake, quietly visited Burma in March to hold talks with both the junta and the opposition. It was the first trip by a US envoy to the country in more than seven years. Campbell told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the dialogue would "supplement rather than replace" the sanctions regime. "We will not judge the success of our effort at pragmatic engagement by the results of a handful of meetings. Engagement for its own sake is obviously not a goal for US policy," he said. Campbell said that one goal was simply to gain a better understanding of the junta, which he described as "a group of men that have self-isolated themselves." "In my particular area, the country that we know the least about at a fundamental level, even less than North Korea, is Burma," said the top US diplomat for Asia. Democratic Representative Joseph Crowley, one of Suu Kyi's top champions in Congress, said he backed the new strategy in part because the Nobel laureate has indicated her support. But Crowley warned: "It is a real possibility that the military regime will try and use ongoing talks to buy time, in order to proceed with a sham election they have scheduled for next year." The NLD plans to shun the elections, the first since a 1990 vote that the party won in a landslide. The junta ignored that result, and has kept Suu Kyi under house arrest for much of the past 20 years. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican, was one of the few to reject the US outreach altogether, questioning whether the Obama administration needs to learn more about the junta. "With all due respect, we know all about Burma. It's not an unknown quantity. It has a vicious gangster regime, one of the most despicable regimes in this planet," he said. "We are saying that they are a legitimate government to sit down with. They are not." | |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 "...self-isolated themselves." Kurt Campbell, Super Genius. |
| Posted by: Parabellum 2009-10-23 06:58 |