Suu Kyi was addressing the US business community, a day after President Barack Obama announced that the USA would lift sanctions and restore long-lost trade benefits as the Southeast Asian nation emerges from half a century of oppressive military rule.
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Wednesday’s meeting in Washington was the first by Aung San Suu Kyi as Myanmar’s leader since her pro-democracy party won a stunning victory over the country’s military rulers in elections previous year.
President Barack Obama said on Wednesday the United States was prepared to lift sanctions on Myanmar “soon” and that democratic progress in the country was incomplete but on the right track.
An immediate question for Obama administration officials during her visit is whether the time has come to lift the remaining sanctions on Myanmar and to encourage military-to-military cooperation and development aid.
Business advisory BMI Research wrote in May that USA businesses remained reluctant to enter the local market after the incremental easing of sanctions, given the difficulty of “steering clear of the military and related tycoons” on the SDN list still in control of an outsized share of the national economy.
The move on Wednesday to let Myanmar back in to the Generalized System of Preferences is likely to have a significant, but limited economic impact.
Obama hailed a “remarkable” transformation in the country also known as Burma, which spent five decades under oppressive military rule. Her qualification of lifting measures that “hurt us economically” leaves scope for retaining elements of USA legislation targeted at the military, on the grounds they have a minimal effect on the general economy.
“If the issue was growing Burma’s economy, there are plenty of other ways to do that without pulling off all of these important restrictions, which have given Suu Kyi much-needed leverage over the military, with whom she still has battles ahead”, said John Sifton, the deputy Washington director of Human Rights Watch.
The U.S. has also taken steps to make it easier for American companies to conduct business in Myanmar as Washington tries to reward efforts at democratic overhauls.
Her government is believed to support extension of U.S. duty-free benefits to help spur still meager trade with the U.S. Two-way goods trade with Myanmar totaled just $227 million in 2015, and U.S. companies account for less than 1 percent of total foreign investment. But “any sanctions brand the country as being a risky place”, Mr Sean Turnell, an economic adviser to the Myanmar government, said.
“Unity also needs prosperity”, she said. About 125,000 remain confined to squalid camps on the country’s western coast following violence between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012.
“We are very hopeful about the future”, Obama said at the meeting.
The military still retains power in the government, in part through a constitution that effectively bars Suu Kyi from the presidency.
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The Obama administration moved Wednesday to lift longstanding USA trade sanctions on Burma in another step toward the normalizing of relations between the two nations. Her official title is “state counselor”, but an audience in the Oval Office with Obama leaves little doubt of her stature.
