Senior U.S. officials visit Myanmar, will meet PM

The two-day trip is part of a new U.S. policy that reverses the Bush administration's isolation of Myanmar in favor of direct, high-level talks with a country that has been ruled by the military since 1962.

“Mr. Campbell's visit is the beginning of new U.S engagement policy toward Myanmar. This is the first step of the engagement but we have to see what comes out of the new engagement policy,” said Nyan Win, spokesman for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy.

Campbell will be the highest ranking U.S. official to visit Myanmar since a September 1995 trip by then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright. The American diplomats flew Tuesday from Bangkok, in neighboring Thailand, to Myanmar's administrative capital of Naypyitaw in a U.S. Air Force plane, Mei said. The embassy spokesman said Campbell will be continuing talks he began in September in New York with senior Myanmar officials, the first such high-level contact in nearly a decade.

Myanmar government sources said Campbell was due to meet Prime Minister Gen. Thein Sein early Wednesday. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has been detained for 14 of the past 20 years. Suu Kyi was recently convicted and sentenced to an additional 18 months of house arrest for briefly sheltering an uninvited American, in a trial that drew global condemnation.

Washington has said it will maintain its tough political and economic sanctions against the regime until talks with Myanmar's general's result in change.

Campbell said last month if Myanmar doesn't address U.S. worries, “we will reserve the option of tightening sanctions on the regime and its supporters as appropriate.”

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