A "national emergency" should not be easily invoked, nor should the security and foreign policy of the United States be claimed to be under threat unless there are clear and present indications that something serious is amiss. Yet in 1997, the US invoked the national emergency claim against Myanmar, even though risks to US interests have been, and remain, minimal and security concerns non-existent.
Washington uses the same language towards Myanmar it uses in applying sanctions to North Korea, where the threats to US interests are real and imminent. Yet this ludicrous language is a ritual built into legislation that allows the president to make such a determination only if these terms are employed.
On May 17, President Barack Obama for another year continued the sanction policies of the US toward "Burma" - it still insists on calling by that name even though officially most of the world, including the United Nations, has accepted that state's designation as Myanmar. If the president had not continued this claim within 90 days of their expiration, sanctions would have ended on May 20. They must be renewed every year using this national emergency phraseology.
This action seems to have been in response to a concerted campaign among some in the human-rights community and among certain expatriate Burmese designed to slow the elimination of sanctions in spite of the widely recognized and extensive recently implemented internal reforms.
Sanctions under both the Bill Clinton and George W Bush administrations were a tactic designed explicitly to accomplish regime change, to force the military junta's recognition of the right of the opposition National League of Democracy to govern based on their sweeping victory in the May 1990 elections that the military annulled.
Sanctions obviously did not achieve their goal, although they did negatively affect the lives of many ordinary Burmese and their administration. In contrast, the Obama administration has not called for regime change, but has opted for what it calls "pragmatic engagement"- high-level dialogue with the prospect for modifying the sanctions regime toward the goal of reform. This policy has been far more successful in promoting positive results in Myanmar than its predecessors.
The European Union recently has suspended sanctions for a year. Although this is clearly a euphemism for their elimination, for sanctions can be re-invoked at any time, it leaves the US as the only major state that still imposes them. Does the US really believe they have had, or continue to have, a constructive purpose? Even opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who previously was a strong advocate of sanctions, has recently agreed to their suspension.
The timing of Obama's announcement was exquisite - it happened on the only day Myanmar Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin was visiting Washington and meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Hardly inadvertent, the message conveyed two messages: the first was that the US was still concerned about incomplete reforms initiated by President Thein Sein that it wished to see continued and strengthened, and; second, that the administration was not prepared to forfeit any support it might receive in an election year from the sanctions-prone congressional community or the public.
While inviting Wunna Maung Lwin to Washington in return for Clinton's visit to Myanmar in early December 2011, Washington, perhaps with inadvertent arrogance, indirectly insulted his country. One wonders what the US reaction might have been if Myanmar had done something similar during Clinton's trip, the first secretary of state to visit the country since 1955.
At the same time, foreign ministers and secretaries of state do not simply get together without an agenda having been established, and often a joint communique either drafted or written before the meetings take place. Wunna Maung Lwin would not have come to Washington without some clear indication that his visit would produce fruitful results as interpreted in Myanmar, just as Clinton would not have visited Myanmar without assurances that it would have positive repercussions.
So later in the day, Clinton announced the lifting of some sanctions on US financial services and investments that Myanmar officials had indicated informally to US visitors in early March 2012 were important to their anti-poverty program. Signaling an upgrade in bilateral relations, Clinton also indicated that ambassadorial coordinator Derek Mitchell was to be nominated as the US's new resident ambassador in Myanmar.
These were positive, important and welcome moves. No doubt there has been progress both internally in Myanmar and in US-Myanmar relations. Yet the gratuitous continuation of the sanctions policy with its misleading, formalistic, and inaccurate language, together with its timing, managed unnecessarily to reduce the effectiveness of what has otherwise been a positive policy shift. It need not have been thus.
Full article can be seen here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/NE23Ae01.html
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