US diplomat to meet Aung San Suu Kyi on 2nd visit before Myanmar elections

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US envoy to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi

YANGON, Myanmar — A top U.S. official was due to meet Myanmar’s detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday, after expressing concerns about the legitimacy of the military-run country’s upcoming elections.

Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asia, started off his two-day visit by saying Washington was deeply concerned about the political environment the ruling junta has created in the run-up to Myanmar’s first election in 20 years.

Campbell arrived Sunday and met with senior junta officials in the remote administrative capital of Naypyitaw before flying Monday to Yangon, the biggest city. He was due to meet Suu Kyi in the afternoon at a government guesthouse near her lakeside villa, diplomats and officials said.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner has been detained, mostly under house arrest, for 14 of the past 20 years.

Suu Kyi’s longtime opposition party, the National League for Democracy, was disbanded Friday after effectively boycotting the election by declining to register for it, as required by a new election law. The NLD and other democracy advocates have called the election a sham. The NLD won Myanmar’s last election in 1990, but the army never allowed it to take power.

“We are troubled by much of what we have seen. We have very real concerns about the election and the environment that has been created,” Campbell told a news conference Sunday during a stopover in the Thai capital, Bangkok. The visit is Campbell’s second in six months to Myanmar.

Among the officials he met Sunday were Foreign Minister Nyan Win, Information Minister Kyaw San and Science and Technology Minister U Thaung — Myanmar’s former envoy in Washington — who is the point person for the U.S.-Myanmar engagement.

Details of the talks and the focus of Campbell’s meeting with Suu Kyi were not immediately made public.

Senior officials of the NLD, who were also scheduled to meet Campbell, said they were not optimistic that his visit would accomplish much.

Relations between Myanmar, also known as Burma, and the U.S. have been strained since its military crushed pro-democracy protests in 1988, killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of demonstrators. Since then, Washington has been Myanmar’s strongest critic, applying political and economic sanctions against the junta for its poor human rights record and failure to hand over power to a democratically elected government.

Campbell, however, said he would continue a dialogue with all sides in Myanmar as part of a new Washington policy of engagement rather than isolation of the ruling generals.

Last year President Barack Obama reversed the Bush administration’s isolation of Myanmar in favor of dialogue with the junta, which brooks no dissent and has detained Suu Kyi for 14 of the last 20 years.

Campbell cited recently issued election laws, lack of talks between the military and pro-democracy advocates, political prisoners, status of ethnic minorities and nonproliferation as issues he would bring up during discussions.

The United States has also raised concerns that Myanmar may be trying to acquire nuclear technology, possibly with the help of North Korea.

Washington has said it will maintain political and economic sanctions toward the junta until talks with Myanmar’s generals result in genuine political progress.