Speaking at the same forum, Aung San Suu Kyi said her government was “not afraid of sanctions”, and supported the minimal changes that had been made the previous week. Suu Kyi’s party swept historic elections last November, and the visit by the 71-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate, deeply respected in Washington, is a crowning occasion in the Obama administration’s support for Myanmar’s shift to democracy, which the administration views as a major foreign policy achievement.
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The U.S. has eased economic sanctions on the country also known as Burma since political reforms began five years ago but it still restricts dealings with military-owned companies and dozens of officials and associates of the former ruling junta.
Mr Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said: “The Burmese government doesn’t deserve a wide-scale lifting of sanctions”.
Several megaprojects that have come under fire for human rights abuses, including the Myitsone Dam in Kachin State and the Letpadaung copper mine in Sagaing Region, are backed in part by firms featured on the current SDN list.
More than 100 ethnic Rohingya Muslims were killed there during sectarian rioting in 2012; thousands more tried to escape by boat to Malaysia or Thailand. There still is a – an undo role that the military plays in the government, there.
Encouraged by Myanmar’s progress towards democracy and installation of a civilian government, US President Barack Obama today chose to terminate national emergency imposed on the country and said he will “soon” lift the sanctions against it. She invited a team led by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary-general, to begin investigating the plight of the Rohingya, a group of about 1 million Muslims living in dire conditions in western Myanmar.
Welcoming Aung San Suu Kyi to Washington DC, President Barack Obama affirmed the commitment to deepen US-Myanmar partnership.
Suu Kyi’s stance on sanctions is unclear.
She said that USA sanctions helped drive the country’s military junta to surrender power, but that the time had come to lift them.
CNBC reveals that although lower tariffs with Myanmar will be re-instated, there still remains a blacklist of sorts that prevents some 100 companies from becoming involved with US trade. This partnership, anchored by annual dialogues led by the U.S. Department of State and Myanmar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will allow the two countries to broaden and deepen their cooperation across a range of sectors. Political activist Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won 392 of the 492 parliamentary seats.
“It’s a good news story in an era when so often we see countries going the opposite direction”, he said, acknowledging that much work remains to be done. “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.
In 2011, the junta gave way to a quasi-civilian government that was dominated by former military officials but still ushered in some democratic reforms, leading the U.S.to restore full diplomatic relations and ease sanctions.
Delphine Schrank, journalist and author of the Rebel of Rangoon, said that the U.S. has been “phasing” out sanctions, and while the business community in Myanmar and the USA would like them removed entirely, there is an understanding within Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and the United States government that the “game is not over” yet in the transition process. The biggest obstacle to USA investment is the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals blacklist of individuals, he said.
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“I certainly believe it would be premature to get rid of all the sanctions at this point”, said Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley of NY, a prominent voice on the issue in Congress.
