YANGON: President Barack Obama has urged Myanmar to hasten its “remarkable” reforms on a historic visit during which he was feted by huge crowds and met Aung San Suu Kyi at the home where she was long locked up.
The trip, the first to Myanmar by a serving US president, came as the regime freed dozens more political prisoners to burnish its reform credentials and after the United States joined other Western powers in relaxing its sanctions.
On his first trip abroad since his re-election earlier this month, Obama got a warm welcome in Myanmar, hugging long-time opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and lauding her as a personal inspiration.
After a red-carpet welcome for Air Force One, Obama met Myanmar’s reformist President Thein Sein and called on the former general to speed up the country’s march out of decades of iron-fisted military rule.
“Over the last year and a half, a dramatic transition has begun, as a dictatorship of five decades has loosened its grip,” Obama said afterwards in a major address at Yangon University during his whirlwind visit.
“This remarkable journey has just begun, and has much further to go,” he said. “The flickers of progress that we have seen must not be extinguished. They must be strengthened.”
Over the past few decades, “our two countries became strangers”, added Obama, who is on his foreign trip since winning re-election this month.
“But today, I can tell you that we always remained hopeful about the people of this country. About you. You gave us hope. And we bore witness to your courage.”
Speaking to a national audience from the University of Yangon, Obama offered a “hand of friendship” and a lasting US commitment, yet a warning as well. He said the new civilian government must nurture democracy or watch it, and US support, disappear.
The visit to Myanmar was the centerpiece of a four-day trip to Southeast Asia. Obama seemed to revel in the history of what he was witnessing in Myanmar a nation shedding years of military rule, and a relationship between two nations changing fast.
“This remarkable journey has just begun,” he said.
In a notable detour from US government policy, the president referred to the nation as Myanmar, the preferred name of the former military regime and the new government, rather than Burma, the old name and the one favored by democracy advocates and the United States government.
Crowds swelled at every intersection, yelling affectionately for Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton. In once unthinkable scenes, Obama’s motorcade passed tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters – some chanting “America” – lining the streets of Yangon, the backdrop for several bloody crackdowns on pro-democracy uprisings.
“You are the legend hero of our world,” one banner read.
Obama acknowledged Myanmar’s many democratic shortcomings but said: “The United States of America is with you.”
-AP
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