US President Barack Obama called for the release of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi when he met the country's prime minister at a meeting with other Southeast Asian leaders in Singapore on Sunday.
Obama shook hands with Myanmar Prime Minister Thein Sein at the meeting in Singapore's Shangri-la hotel with the 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the first ever with a US president. The United States has begun to re-engage with Southeast Asia after years of relative neglect that left China to increase its diplomatic and economic heft in the region.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Obama said he reiterated his offer to Myanmar of better ties with Washington if it pursued democratic reform and freed political prisoners, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. "I reaffirmed the policy that I put forth (Saturday) in Tokyo with regard to Burma," Obama said.
Thein Sein expressed his appreciation that Washington had decided to re-engage with Myanmar, saying: "It will be a new chapter in the relationship to all the countries in the region," ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan quoted him as saying. The meeting marked the first time a US leader had met his counterparts in the 42-year-old grouping, founded at the height of the Vietnam War. It took place after an Asia-Pacific summit.
Washington has recently taken a two-prong approach to the former Burma, engaging the junta while keeping sanctions on the resource-rich nation that shares borders with India and China. Suu Kyi has been detained for 14 of the past 20 years, but recently has been allowed to meet US diplomats. She has expressed hopes those contacts would lead to democratic reforms. Obama was the first president since Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to even be in the same room as a top Myanmar leader.
Obama, who lived in Jakarta as a boy and who has pronounced himself America's "first Pacific President", has led his administration to take a renewed interest in ASEAN.