U.S. ready to improve Myanmar ties: envoy

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell and his deputy Scot Marciel held rare meetings with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and premier Thein Sein on a two-day visit ending Wednesday.

“This is early days, the first time we met most of these people. It's going to take some time to see how they respond,” said Marciel, who is also the U.S. ambassador to ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) affairs.

“We are willing to move ahead in terms of bilateral relations but we are only going to do that if there is real progress,” he told a public forum on Thursday in Bangkok, capital of neighboring Thailand.

The trip came two months after the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama changed its policy on Myanmar, saying it would push for engagement with the military regime because sanctions on their own had failed to bear fruit.

Marciel said the United States wanted to see the release of Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, improvements in human rights and the pursuit of democratic reform ahead of elections promised by the junta in 2010.

The ruling generals have kept the 64-year-old in detention for most of the last two decades and extended her house arrest by 18 months in August after a bizarre incident in which an American man swam uninvited to her lakeside house.

Asked about the elections, he said that it would be “very hard to say that is credible” if Nobel peace prize winner Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party were not allowed to participate.

He also said it was “essential” that the opposition leader be allowed regular opportunities to interact with colleagues in her party.

The NLD won Myanmar's last elections in 1990 but the junta refused to recognize the result.

“If there is to be a credible election that fundamentally changes the dynamic in the country, there needs to be dialogue and there needs to be participation,” said Marciel.

He stressed that this dialogue within Myanmar — which has been under military rule since 1962 — needed to include the country's ethnic groups as well as the government and opposition.

The U.S. diplomat said sanctions were “still a useful tool” and they would only consider lifting them if there was sustained progress.

“We are not going to do tit-for-tat, we're talking about a whole range of things we can do. We're not saying, 'If you do X, we'll do Y' — more, 'If you make progress these are the sorts of areas we can move in',” he added.

“We go into this knowing full well how difficult this is going to be. We are under no illusions,” he said, reiterating that it was an “exploratory” mission.

The trip was a follow-up to discussions in New York in September between U.S. and Myanmar officials, themselves the highest level U.S. contact with the regime in nearly a decade.

Campbell and Marciel were the highest ranking U.S. officials to travel to Myanmar — formerly known as Burma — since Madeleine Albright went as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1995 during Bill Clinton's presidency.

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