Burmese State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday called for the lifting of economic sanctions against her country, and US President Barack Obama, in their first White House meeting since she took office on April 6, said the US was ready to do so.
“It is the right thing to do in order to ensure that the people of Burma [Myanmar] see rewards from a new way of doing business and a new government,” Obama said with Aung San Suu Kyi beside him in the Oval Office.
The trip by Aung San Suu Kyi, 71, who like Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, capped a decades-long journey from political prisoner to national leader after her party won a sweeping electoral victory last year.
Photo: Reuters
With Suu Kyi no longer an opposition figure, Washington has been weighing a further easing of sanctions against Myanmar as Obama looks to normalize relations with a country shunned when it was ruled by a military junta.
“We think that the time has now come to remove all the sanctions that hurt us economically,” Aung San Suu Kyi said, adding that the US Congress had supported her country by backing sanctions in the past to apply pressure for democratic reforms.
As Aung San Suu Kyi arrived for the meeting, the White House issued a statement saying it would reinstate Myanmar to the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which provides duty-free treatment for goods from poor and developing countries.
Myanmar was removed from GSP benefits in 1989 following pro-democracy uprisings a year earlier that were brutally suppressed by the ruling military junta. Myanmar will be back in the program on Nov. 13, US officials said.
Reinstating those benefits, combined with lifting sanctions, “will give the United States, our businesses, our non-profit institutions greater incentive to invest and participate in what we hope will be an increasingly democratic and prosperous partner for us in the region,” Obama said.
After visiting the White House, Aung San Suu Kyi met with some members of the House of Representatives at the US Capitol.
She was scheduled to return there yesterday for meetings with House and Senate leaders from both parties, although not US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan’s aides said he had a scheduling conflict.
Some members of Congress have expressed concerns about change in Myanmar and its human rights record. They have introduced at least two pieces of legislation seeking to give lawmakers some influence on the process of easing sanctions.
Republican US Representative Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, commented after meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi that while the new administration brought hope to Myanmar, he remained committed to efforts to protect its oppressed Rohingya Muslim minority.
For Obama to lift sanctions, he would need to issue an executive order ending the national emergency declaration on Myanmar, first issued in 1997, which underpins sanctions, and revoke previous country-related sanction orders.
A senior administration official said the removal of sanctions would not apply to military-to-military assistance.
In a statement on Myanmar, the US Department of State said that several restrictions would remain in place, including barring visas for military leaders.
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