ASIA PACIFIC | LISTENING POST
On Visit, Obama to Face a Backsliding Myanmar
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — When President Obama made his historic visit to Myanmar two years ago, he answered critics who charged that he was prematurely rewarding the country’s military-dominated rulers by saying, “If we waited to engage until they achieved a perfect democracy, my suspicion is we’d be waiting an awful long time.”
Prophetic words, it turns out, as the president returns to Myanmar again this month. The country, also known as Burma, has lost the reformist sheen it had in 2012, and its backsliding poses a challenge to Mr. Obama, for whom the opening to this exotic, tragic country will rank as one of the diplomatic achievements of his presidency.
Yet Mr. Obama is doggedly continuing to engage: On Thursday, he called PresidentThein Sein to press him on the pace of constitutional reforms and on the treatment of Muslims in remote western Myanmar, where thousands of people are languishing in internment camps after violent persecution by the Buddhist majority.
“We understand this is hard to address,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, summarizing the president’s message to Myanmar, “but if you do not take steps toward alleviating the humanitarian situation, that is going to have a profound effect on Burma’s standing and the perceptions of its progress.”
Mr. Obama is going to Myanmar now only because it is the host for two Asian regional summits, which the president — as part of his much-vaunted pivot to the region — has promised to attend. Under normal circumstances, he would not have been likely to visit the country again until after elections scheduled for 2015 that will be an obvious benchmark to judge Myanmar’s progress from reclusive military dictatorship to democracy.
Instead, Mr. Obama will visit during a messy period when the easy steps for the Myanmar government — like the release of political prisoners — are behind it, and the hardest parts of the transition loom ahead. They include reducing the military’s role in the political process, ending decades of civil war between the Buddhist majority and an array of ethnic minorities, and stopping the violence against the Muslims, known as Rohingya.
The recent death of a Burmese journalist, who was being held in custody by the military, has also aroused fears of a government crackdown on the press, which had become lively after Mr. Thein Sein lifted strict censorship rules and the blocking of Internet sites.
“There are so many elements that are going wrong,” said John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “Once the Burmese sanctions were lifted, the reforms started to stall.”
Myanmar’s government appears to recognize the need to show progress before Mr. Obama’s visit. On Friday, Mr. Thein Sein met with the opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is ineligible to seek the presidency because of a provision in the Constitution that bars people with spouses or children who hold foreign citizenship from the top job. (Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband was British, as are her two children.)
A spokesman for the president said after the meeting that the government might amend the Constitution before the elections, in which Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, is expected to sweep to victory. She and the democrats have focused on eliminating the military’s veto over constitutional amendments, calculating that it will be easier to push through other changes after that.
In a separate phone call to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, Mr. Obama talked about “the need to ensure an inclusive and credible process for conducting the 2015 elections,” according to the White House. He plans to meet her in Yangon, Myanmar’s historic capital, after attending the East Asia Security summit in the new purpose-built capital, Naypyidaw.
While in Yangon, formerly known as Rangoon, administration officials said, Mr. Obama will also hold a town-hall-style meeting with young people, similar to one he held in Kuala Lumpur in April, where he spoke about Malaysia’s legacy of conflict between Muslims and Chinese and Indian minorities.
That will give him a platform to speak publicly about the need to accelerate political reform and to curb the violence against the Rohingya. But he will have to choose his words carefully: Even courageous figures like Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate, have been loath to speak out too forcefully on the issue. The Rohingya are deeply resented in Myanmar, viewed by many as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh.
“To help the Myanmar people get beyond this will require some sophisticated, thoughtful nudging,” said Lex Rieffel, an expert on Myanmar who is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “This cannot be solved from the bully pulpit.”
Mr. Rhodes, a close aide to Mr. Obama, has taken a special interest in Myanmar and traveled there last summer. He defended the administration’s decision to keep engaging Myanmar’s leaders because he said it offered the best way to keep its transformation on track. The economic sanctions, he noted, were suspended rather than revoked.
On Friday, the Treasury Department placed a senior Burmese official and member of the pro-military party on a blacklist for undermining the political transition and “perpetuating violence, oppression and corruption.” The official, Aung Thaung, had close ties to Than Shwe, the general who ran the junta before Mr. Thein Sein, according to American officials.
But having lifted the broader sanctions, Mr. Sifton said, the United States no longer had much leverage over Myanmar. The streets of Rangoon and Mandalay are filled with business people from Japan and South Korea; if the administration were to restore a ban on investment, Myanmar’s Asian neighbors would happily fill the void.
That Myanmar’s political transition would hit bumps was inevitable, administration officials said, given that the reforms threaten the vested interests of the military. Nor is it a cause for despair, they said.
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