US President Barack Obama moved to restore trade benefits to Myanmar, saying broader sanctions would soon be scrapped as he hosted the country’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi at the White House Wednesday, September 14.
Advertisement
Myanmar, which is also known as Burma, was removed from GSP benefits in 1989 after the country’s ruling military junta brutally crushed pro-democracy protests.
“It sends a bad message to say you’re not going to reward a government unless they do something, and then reward them anyway”, said John Sifton, the deputy Washington director of Human Rights Watch.
U.S. President Barack Obama says his government is set to lift U.S. economic sanctions on Myanmar (Burma), confirming an earlier announcement by a U.S. official and congressional aides on the matter.
The White House is keen to reinforce Suu Kyi’s primacy as the de facto head of the government of Myanmar. “If the issue is leverage, the decision today makes nearly no sense: Obama and Suu Kyi just took important tools out of their collective tool kit for dealing with the Burmese military, and threw them into the garbage”.
Removal of long-standing sanctions against Myanmar will help foreign investment and boost the country’s transition to democracy, the White House said prior to the meeting of the two leaders.
On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticized what he described as Suu Kyi’s “dismissive” reaction to concerns he had raised about her country’s record on human trafficking.
The veteran campaigner must tackle all those problems while keeping an eye on generals who may have second thoughts about reform. After the meeting, Suu Kyi said, “We have a constitution that is not very democratic, because it gives the military a special place in politics”.
Myanmar now has democratically-elected civilian leadership for the first time in over half a century, and is focused on bringing peace and national reconciliation, economic prosperity and social welfare, and respect for human rights to its people, it said.
Obama is expected to decide on the extent of the sanctions relief after consultations between Suu Kyi and his administration to gauge how far she wants Washington to go in loosening the screws on Myanmar’s military.
Scrapping that order would bring clarity to United States firms thinking about doing business there.
It is also an important legacy issue for Obama, who said during a visit there in 2012 that it was time to open the United States’ relationship with Myanmar, despite the fact that it was not yet a “perfect democracy”. Restrictions imposed by Congress, including sanctions related to North Korea and those governing arms sales and military cooperation, will remain unless lawmakers vote to lift them.
Human rights groups, meanwhile, had urged the Obama administration to block any drastic changes to the sanctions regime until more durable progress was made on democratic reform.
But the USA has retained more targeted restrictions on military-owned companies as well as officials and associates of the former ruling junta.
Mr Robertson acknowledged the release of political prisoners, but cited the continued arrests of civil society activists, as well as the government’s failure to repeal laws limiting free speech and the rights of religious minorities and its indifference to the plight of the Rohingya.
Advertisement
Tens of thousands of stateless Rohingya have spent the past four years trapped in bleak displacement camps with limited access to health care and other basic services.
