PRESIDENT BARACK Obama has given the clearest signal yet that the US is taking reforms in Burma seriously. He is sending Hillary Clinton there next month for the first visit by a US secretary of state in more than half a century.
“After years of darkness we’ve seen flickers of progress in these last several weeks,” Mr Obama said at a summit of Asian leaders in Bali, Indonesia.
He said he had spoken to Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and she had backed increased engagement with Burma.
While he insists “more needs to be done” on human rights, sending Mrs Clinton to Burma for a two-day trip is the clearest sign yet that reforms introduced by Burma’s authoritarian government are being taken seriously by the international community.
After 50 years of military rule, the junta handed over power in March after elections in which the generals featured strongly were boycotted by Ms Suu Kyi’s party.
However, since then there have been signs of greater openness, with hundreds of political prisoners being released, trade unions legalised and promises of more political and economic reforms in the largely closed country.
Rights activists around the region are reserving judgment, but certainly there is a greater atmosphere of openness than at any time in the last half-century.
This was underlined when Ms Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, said yesterday it would contest forthcoming byelections.
The Burmese government is led by former general Thein Sein and is keen for an end to international sanctions which have held the economy back from enjoying the advances enjoyed by its neighbouring southeast Asian tiger economies.
The breakthrough in Burma comes at the end of a busy few days in Asian geopolitics, which have seen the world’s global superpower, America, issue a warning to rising giant China that it intends to keep the world order the way it stands.
China has long been Burma’s chief backer, but recent months have seen Rangoon cancel a major Chinese-backed dam project and start engaging with other regional rivals.
During his visit to southeast Asia and Australia, Mr Obama has announced that the US will post marines in Australia and set up a free-trade area that omits China.
The Chinese reaction to the news of the marines being deployed in the region has been swift.
The Global Times, a tabloid owned by the Communist Party’s People’s Daily, quoted a People’s Liberation Army major general saying the expanded US training and deployment base in Darwin was part of a broader group of installations that would “encircle China from the north to the south of the Asia-Pacific region”.
Meanwhile, premier Wen Jiabao says “outside forces” should not get involved in a dispute over the South China Sea, a veiled warning to the US and others not to stick their noses into the sensitive issue.