US President Barack Obama will endow Myanmar’s startling reform drive with his newly replenished political prestige tomorrow, as he makes history in a short, but hugely symbolic, visit to the country.
Thirteen days after he was re-elected, Obama will become the first sitting US president to visit the formerly isolated state, hoping to spur greater reform and to highlight a rare success for his policy of engaging pariah regimes.
However, his mission is not without peril: Should Myanmar’s new political dawn darken and conservative forces move to regain control, Obama’s trip could appear in hindsight as premature and invite a domestic political backlash.
Photo: EPA
Obama hopes to solidify the political reforms of Burmese President Thein Sein by granting the Myanmar leader his highest profile moment on the world stage since his government replaced junta rule.
“I want to be very clear that we see this visit as building on the progress that the Burmese government has made,” US deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said.
“We are going in part to encourage them to continue down that road, because much more needs to be done within Burma to realize the full potential of its people,” he said.
After meeting Thein Sein, Obama will visit the rickety home of Aung San Suu Kyi, where his fellow Nobel peace laureate was confined for years.
Obama was deeply impressed by Aung San Suu Kyi during their private meeting in the Oval Office in September and told aides the National League for Democracy leader lived up to her billing.
However, there will be an air of incongruity when Air Force One touches down and Obama’s armored motorcade rattles through Yangon’s decrepit streets, in the shadow of the gleaming, golden spire of the Shwedagon Pagoda.
That Obama will be there at all is testament to the pace and depth of a reform drive that took US officials by surprise after they spent years isolating the country’s ruling generals through sanctions.
For some US-based human rights groups, the visit is coming too soon in a reform process that has left the cards overwhelmingly stacked in favor of the military in the country’s new parliament.
Myanmar watchers also say the future of reforms faces a serious threat from the country’s intractable ethnic insurgencies and deadly communal unrest in the West.
Euphoria over Myanmar’s emergence from decades of junta rule has been tempered by concern over the persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group in Rakhine State who are widely seen as illegal immigrants to the country.
Rights groups have criticized Thein Sein for a military crackdown in the region and accused Aung San Suu Kyi of staying mute on the contentious issue.
Washington is concerned that unrest in Rakhine and other festering ethnic conflicts in Shan and Kachin states risk undermining hopes of stability.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
RSS