When she met Kerry in Myanmar in May, Suu Kyi said that the USA was keeping sanctions not to hurt but to “help us”, and that if the country was on the right path, sanctions should be lifted “in good time”.
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The Treasury Department said that Obama’s decision will be legally effective when he issues a new executive order to terminate the emergency.
The sanctions announcement was condemned by rights groups who said it would forfeit leverage on Myanmar’s military. Thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been either targeted by sectarian violence or have attempted to flee on boats to Thailand and Malaysia.
On Wednesday, US Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticised what he described as Suu Kyi’s “dismissive” reaction to concerns he had raised about her country’s record on human trafficking.
Suu Kyi told reporters she wants to develop her country’s internal resources and thanked Obama for his support during the transition.
Myanmar will be able to export about 5,000 products to the United States duty-free under a new designation under the Generalized System of Preferences trade preferences programem, a USA official said on Wednesday.
Rights groups have also urged the U.S.to maintain the remaining sanctions, saying they are still needed to make sure more reforms are carried out and those in place become entrenched. The military, she says, “still controls much of the economy and retains great political power”.
“Lifting restrictions on doing business with Burma’s military and its corporate enterprises, as well as the friends and cronies who been enriched by their decades of rule, is not the right thing to do”, Human Rights Watch director John Sifton said. It estimates the industry is worth almost half of the nation’s economic output.
The White House is keen to help Myanmar’s economy and Suu Kyi’s administration – which is managing a hard transition to a full-fledged democracy.
Privately, US officials acknowledge Suu Kyi is working with some very tough political constraints and dare not push the military, or the public, too far or too fast.
Myanmar’s access to trade benefits for poorer nations had been suspended in 1989 over human rights abuses.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s latest visit to Washington signals her transformation from long-imprisoned heroine of Myanmar’s democracy struggle to a national leader focused on economic growth.
Aung San Suu Kyi spent more than 20 years under house arrest in the country formerly known as Burma.
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White House spokesman Josh Earnest pushed back on the notion the US was undercutting its leverage over Myanmar on human rights and constitutional reforms by lifting sanctions. “Now they (U.S. officials) are meeting someone in charge of the government”, said Murray Hiebert, a Southeast Asia expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.
