YANGON (Myanmar): T-shirts bearing images of President Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, hang side by side in the shops just off busy Kabar Aye Pagoda Road in Yangon. It’s a reminder of the history made in November when Obama became the first sitting US president to set foot in Myanmar.
A return trip to this former pariah state doesn’t appear to be on Obama’s immediate itinerary. But corporate America is on its way.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt visited in March, and Ford announced its entry into the chaotic local auto scene at an April event with the US ambassador. Hilton is building a hotel across from the golden Sule Pagoda, and Colonel Sanders isn’t far behind, as Yum Brands’ KFC posts job ads in local newspapers.
It’s just one element of the surprisingly rapid expansion of economic, political and even military ties between the United States and Myanmar in recent months after more than two decades of estrangement.
The thaw will be on display again when Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, visits the White House on Monday — the kind of event that would have been unimaginable even a year ago. The former general, who took power in a transition to civilian government in 2011 and has ushered in a wave of political and economic reforms, is also scheduled to be the featured guest at a US Chamber of Commerce event.
Taking their cues from the administration, many US-based companies are looking to make up for lost time in Southeast Asia’slast untapped market, where regional and European rivals have already moved in.
Local businesses see the change. Aye Hnin Swe, co-founder of Mango Marketing, a Yangon-based advertising agency, noted that “American companies take a little bit longer time than the other companies.” But “after President Obama’s visit, things changed more quickly. We got more inquiries.”
Mango signed an affiliation with JWT just weeks ago, giving the American ad company valuable knowledge about a still- opaque economy.
Yet the US-Myanmar relationship remains fraught with awkward complications — including the fate of remaining political prisoners and US concerns about the Myanmar government’s handling of recent anti-Muslim violence, which has re-emerged after being suppressed during decades of rule by the former military regime. The Myanmar government remains under fire from human rights groups for its attitude toward the displaced Muslim Rohingya.
In a May 6 speech, Thein Sein acknowledged that “we are still at a sensitive stage in the reform process where there is little room for error.”
Derek Mitchell, who last year became the first US ambassador to Myanmar in 22 years, said the ability to expand ties, “even as we frankly raise issues of concern,” reflects a maturing of the relationship.
Obama recently extended targeted sanctions against certain Myanmar’s officials and government-connected business leaders for another year, calling it an effort to “ensure that the democratic transition becomes irreversible.”
The United States — which still officially refers to the country as Burma instead of Myanmar, the name the former ruling junta gave it — is helping the government prepare to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations next year, a sign of the strategic importance the United States places on this country of 60 million wedged between India and China.
The US armed forces helped train many Myanmar’s military officials before relations between the two countries soured in the late 1980s, and despite concerns from some human rights groups, members of the Myanmar’s military, or Tatmadaw,participated as observers in a US-led military exercise in Thailand in February.
By arrangement with the Washington Post/Bloomberg News Service