John kerry and Aung san suu kyi

John kerry and Aung San Suu Kyi : A Milestone meeting in Myanmar,tempered by question.NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — Less than two months after a civilian government took many of the levers of power in Myanmar for the first time in a half century, Secretary of State John Kerry conducted a seemingly routine diplomatic meeting on Sunday with the most improbable Burmese counterpart: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident who now sits atop a government that had long kept her under house arrest.

Their discussion focused on Myanmar’s brutal treatment of a Muslim minority group — at a moment when outsiders are questioning whether Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a hero of the human rights movement, has a double standard — and on the delicate question of whether Myanmar’s military leaders once had a program in place to build a nuclear weapon.

Yet Mr. Kerry seemed struck by the very idea that he was having the conversation at all.

He recalled visiting Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi at her lakeside home in Yangon, when it was still the capital of what was then called Burma, and sparring with members of the junta. They “assured me that there were no political prisoners” in the country, he said, and “tried to tell me that the people of Myanmar prized order more than they prized democratic rights.”

President Obama has already been to Myanmar twice, and Mr. Kerry several times. But it was only in April that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 69, became state counselor and foreign minister and moved into her offices in Naypyidaw, a strange capital carved into a valley a dozen years ago by military leaders obsessed with the fear that the United States, among others, was preparing to invade.

The meeting between Mr. Kerry and Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was a milestone in one of the Obama administration’s biggest foreign policy experiments: to coax isolated, longtime adversaries into engaging with the United States and gradually moving toward more democratic governance. Iran and Cuba have taken steps but strongly resist fundamental change; efforts with North Korea never got off the ground.

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Why that policy succeeded in Myanmar will be studied for decades, and had as much to do with personalities as institutions — chiefly inside the military.

“They accepted defeat, and have generally supported the political transition,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said in Washington last week, when the United States lifted sanctions on Myanmar. “This work is incomplete, and the military’s role in politics continues to go beyond what would constitute a full transition to democracy.”
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In fact, as soon as Mr. Kerry left Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s office, his motorcade sped along this capital’s empty, eight-lane roads up into the hills to see the nation’s other center of power: the commander in chief of the armed forces, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, a slight man in a green uniform with none of the Nobel laureate’s international profile. His sparkling headquarters, with 40-foot ceilings and gold trim, and huge parade fields outside, left little question who was in charge of the scarce resources of one of Southeast Asia’s poorest nations.

At a news conference with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, Mr. Kerry acknowledged that he had expressed longstanding concerns that Myanmar’s close relationship with North Korea could include the transfer of nuclear weapons technology. In 2011, a State Department report concluded that Myanmar might be violating its pledges under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, though United States officials, citing the classified nature of the data, have never publicly discussed the intelligence behind their suspicions.

“I did raise the issue with her,” Mr. Kerry said when pressed. “And I am satisfied that with respect” to North Korea, he continued, “clearly Myanmar has taken the steps to address that issue, and we’re satisfied that we’re on the same page.”