U.S. offers Myanmar aid access for reform

YANGON, Myanmar – On a landmark visit to Myanmar, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday said the U.S. would ease aid restrictions and consider further steps to improving relations with the country’s autocratic rulers if they continued down a path of political and economic reform.

Clinton described her meeting with Thein Sein, Myanmar’s president, as “candid, productive,” but cautioned that while the “measures already taken may be unprecedented and welcomed, they are just the beginning.”

She said Thein Sein told her during a private 45-minute meeting that he “hopes to build on” a flurry of political reforms that began last year, and to work with the West on halting the illicit spread of nuclear and missile technology.

Clinton spent her first full day in the country, also known as Burma, whose government has been subject to ever-tightening U.S. sanctions since it violently suppressed political opposition in 1988. She dined with Myanmar’s celebrated pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon, a scene symbolic of the changes afoot in this poor but strategic Asian nation.

Both women have expressed a willingness to test the sincerity of the government’s moves toward allowing greater political freedom.

Suu Kyi gave Clinton full support for her diplomatic overture. Speaking by video conference to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Suu Kyi said she trusted Thein Sein, but warned that others in the government were not equally committed to reform.