Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi welcomed a new US engagement with Myanmar’s junta, but warned against “rose-colored glasses,” saying greater human rights and economic progress was still needed.
“There are a lot of people who say that now that the US has decided to engage with the military regime, they have turned their back on us,” Aung San Suu Kyi told CNN after being freed from years of house arrest.
“I don’t think of it like that. I think engagement is a good thing,” she said in comments broadcast by the US television network on Friday.
However, she cautioned: “I don’t want them to go into engagement wearing rose-colored glasses. I would want them to be practical about it.”
The administration of US President Barack Obama last year initiated a dialogue with Myanmar after concluding that the longstanding US policy of isolating the military regime had failed to bear fruit.
The Nobel peace laureate, who has been locked away for 15 of the last 21 years, said US officials should not be any under illusions about the real situation in her country.
She stressed that Washington must be “keeping your eyes open and alert and seeing what is really going on, and where engagement is leading to and what changes really need to be brought about.”
“I think we would like to have more respect for human rights in Burma than at present. We would like economic progress, but I think that has to be balanced by what I would think of as accountability,” she added.
US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Kurt Campbell, has been leading the dialogue, but said in September that he had been disappointed with the results so far.
US Department of State officials said on Friday that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had sent a letter in recent days to Aung San Suu Kyi and would likely telephone her at some point.
“We believe there needs to be a strong, unified, firm message that there needs to be change in Burma,” US Department of State spokesman Phillip Crowley.
He stressed that Washington places “a special responsibility on the government of Burma to guarantee” Aung San Suu Kyi’s safety as she reconstitutes her party and meets with her advisers.
“Ultimately, Burma has to change,” Crowley said. “It has to have greater political space. It has to have a meaningful dialogue with other ethnic groups. That’s the only way that Burma’s going to be able to move away from its current isolation.”
The US has also renewed calls for the Myanmar authorities to release all of the country’s estimated 2,100 political prisoners.
Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest less than a week after a controversial election that cemented the junta’s decades-long grip on power but was widely criticized by democracy activists and Western leaders as a sham.
Asked by CNN whether she feared being arrested again, she said: “So many people ask me this question and the only thing I can say is, I don’t know. It’s always a possibility. After all they have arrested me several times in the past.
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