In this April 2, 2014, photo, a Myanmar Muslim family, who identify themselves as long-persecuted “Rohingya” Muslims, look out from their tents at Da Paing camp for Muslim refugees in north of Sittwe, Rakhine State, western Myanmar. Two years after the United States announced the normalization of diplomatic relations with Myanmar, optimism in Washington over the nation’s embrace of democracy is waning and concern over the plight of minority Muslims is growing. (AP Photo)
WASHINGTON, April 4 (AP): Two years after the United States announced the normalization of diplomatic relations with Myanmar, optimism in Washington over the nation’s embrace of democracy is waning and concern over the plight of minority Muslims is growing.
What has been viewed as a foreign policy success story for the Obama administration, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, faces a rocky road ahead as the pace of political reform slows and U.S. congressional criticism intensifies.
Lawmakers are frustrating the administration’s efforts to engage the nation’s powerful military, and antipathy will likely increase if opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long revered in Washington, is unable to run for the presidency next year and complete a Mandela-like transformation from former political prisoner to head of state.
Suu Kyi is ineligible to be president because she was married to foreigner. While the United States says it remains hopeful the constitution can be amended so Suu Kyi can run, congressional aides say U.S. officials are pessimistic about that happening before the national elections at the end of 2015. Constitutional reforms would also be required to dilute the political power of the military and meet ethnic minority demands for autonomy.
U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that constitutional reform is an evolving process and the boldest changes may not happen before the election, a key staging post in Myanmar’s transition from five decades of repressive army rule.
But the most pressing concern for the U.S., and the one on which the Obama administration and lawmakers have been most outspoken, is communal violence between majority Buddhists and Muslims, and the rising tide of Buddhist nationalism that many expect will intensify in the run-up to the election. The House Foreign Affairs Committee called last week for an end to persecution of stateless Rohingya Muslims in one of the strongest congressional criticisms yet of Myanmar’s reformist government. The committee’s Republican chairman, Ed Royce, questioned whether the U.S. should embrace diplomatic reconciliation with Myanmar while human rights deteriorate.
The country also known as Burma regards Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, although many have lived in Myanmar for generations. Some 140,000 Rohingya displaced by the violence since mid-2012 live in overcrowded, dirty camps that segregate them from Buddhists. Tens of thousands of Rohingya have fled the country by boat.
A month ago Myanmar suspended the operations of Doctors Without Borders, the main health care provider in the strife-hit state of Rakhine. Other relief agencies fled this week because of attacks by Buddhist mobs that the U.N. said threatened the entire humanitarian response in the state.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Wednesday voiced deep concern about the “humanitarian crisis” there.
“Currently, large segments of the population do not have access to adequate medical services, water, sanitation, and food. The government has so far failed to provide adequate security and the travel authorizations necessary for the humanitarian aid workers to resume their life-saving services,” she said.
That strong statement came almost two years to the day that then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the U.S. was appointing its first full ambassador to Myanmar in two decades, ending a policy of diplomatic isolation. That rewarded the fair conduct of special elections in which Suu Kyi won a parliamentary seat.
By November 2012, the U.S. had suspended most of its restrictions on aid, trade and investment, and Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to visit Myanmar — hugging Suu Kyi outside the lakeside villa where she was once imprisoned.
