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US President Obama Calls For Further Burma Reforms
BBC NEWS, ASIA
November 18, 2012: US President Obama has urged Burma's rulers to continue political reforms, ahead of a historic visit. On Monday, Mr Obama will be the first serving American president to visit Burma, which has been praised in the West for reforms over the past year. Answering critics who have highlighted continued human rights abuses in Burma, Mr Obama said the country was moving in "a better direction". But he said "much greater progress" was needed in future. "I don't think anybody is under any illusion that Burma's arrived, that they're where they need to be," Mr Obama told reporters at a press conference in Thailand. "On the other hand, if we waited to engage until they had achieved a perfect democracy, my suspicion is we'd be waiting an awful long time," he added.
Mr. Obama is on a tour of South East Asia, which began in the Thai capital Bangkok on Sunday - his first foreign trip after his re-election as president. There he met Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and King Bhumibol, the world's longest-serving monarch.
Unresolved conflicts
In Burma, he is due to hold talks with President Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He will also give a speech at Rangoon University, one of the hotbeds of pro-democracy protests in 1988 that were violently suppressed by the regime.
In the past year, the Burmese authorities have freed hundreds of political prisoners and held the country's first contested election. Over the past year the US and other Western nations have relaxed the sanctions they had imposed on Burma, which was ruled by a brutal military regime for five decades. However, around 300 political prisoners remain in detention, according to rights groups.
Ethnic conflicts also remain unresolved, including an increasingly bitter confrontation between Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Rakhine people in Rakhine state.
US officials say they have been seeking assurances that Burma had distanced itself from North Korea, after accusations emerged in 2010 that the two states were sharing nuclear technology.
After visiting Burma, Mr Obama will head to Cambodia to join a meeting of the regional bloc Asean. Analysts say the US is trying to counter the dominating influence of China in the region. But US officials have repeatedly insisted that they want to work with China.
