Envoy says US ready to improve Myanmar ties
Posted: 05 November 2009 1712 hrs

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BANGKOK - Washington is ready to boost ties with Myanmar but will not lift sanctions until there is progress on democracy, a US diplomat said Thursday after the highest-level talks with the ruling junta in years.

US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and his deputy Scot Marciel held a rare meeting with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Prime Minister Thein Sein during their two-day visit which ended 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," Marciel told a public forum on Thursday in Bangkok, capital of neighbouring Thailand.

"We are willing to move ahead in terms of bilateral relations but we are only going to do that if there is real progress."

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

Marciel stressed that the United States wanted to see the release of Nobel laureate 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.

Asked about the elections, he said that it would be "very hard to say that is credible" if Suu Kyi was not released from house arrest and allowed to participate.

He also said it was "essential" that the opposition leader be allowed regular opportunities to interact with her National League for Democracy (NLD) party.

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.

The NLD won Myanmar's last elections in 1990 but the junta refused to recognise 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 the need for this dialogue within Myanmar to include the country's ethnic groups as well as the government and opposition.

The US 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.

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

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

- AFP/ir