Obama’s gains in Myanmar

By JONATHAN HEAD
THE prestige of a United States presidential visit is a scarce resource that American administrations use carefully to ensure they achieve the best results.
So, what did the US get out of President Barack Obama’s trip to Myanmar – and what did Myanmar get out of it?
There were human rights groups who argued that it was too soon to play this trump card; that the Obama administration failed to secure concrete concessions on human rights from the Myanmar government before committing itself to a presidential visit.
In the end, the government did announce a series of initiatives: investigating remaining political detainees, ensuring the International Committee of the Red Cross’ (ICRC) access to prisons, reducing conflict in border areas and several other actions it said would help protect human dignity and advance democratisation.
US officials would use this public list to try to hold their Myanmar counterparts to their promises. It also released 66 more prisoners, including a substantial number of political detainees.
But that isn’t what this visit was about.
The long decades of isolation – some of it self-imposed, in the 1960s and 1970s, under the disastrous military-led “socialist” experiment, some of it imposed by outsiders in the form of sanctions – have left Myanmar without the diplomatic connections that sustain a healthy exchange of views and ideas among nations.
Myanmar’s rulers have little experience of engaging with other countries, and how Myanmar’s leaders think, what motivates them, remains a mystery to most other governments.
To jump-start a new relationship with Myanmar, where personal connections with officials are so sparse, symbols can help.
And few are as potent as a visit by a charismatic president like Obama. He understood that, and calibrated the symbols to balance the competing expectations of him.
For the first time, he used the country’s official name, Myanmar, which greatly pleased government officials.
The US still has a policy of using the old name, Burma, because it views the name-change as something done by a military government without consulting the local people.
But he also asked to meet President Thein Sein in Yangou, not the new capital Nay Pyi Taw, a project closely associated with the old regime.
And he met Aung San Suu Kyi in the lakeside home where she spent her 15 years of house arrest.
Just being there, with her, an inconceivable meeting two or three years ago, was a powerful symbol of Obama’s support for the democratic forces in Myanmar. And that meeting was notably warmer and less formal than with the president.
He chose the crumbling campus of Rangoon University to deliver a speech, where protest movements started against British colonial rule and later against the military leadership.
In the 1990s, student life was largely shut down when the military forced undergraduate students to move to the outskirts of Yangou. – BBC