Rice says Myanmar closing people off from world

Jakarta, Mar 15: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blasted Myanmar's leaders today (Mar 15, 2006) for trying to cut their country's people off from the world in her second attack in as many days on Myanmar's military junta.

Myanmar's military ignored a landslide election victory in 1990 by the National League for Democracy led by Aung San Suu Kyi, and has continued to rule the country with an iron fist.

Most recently it began moving the country's capital from Yangon, the country's most cosmopolitan city, to Pyinmana, 200 miles (320 km) north of Yangon in Myanmar's interior.

''The Burmese (Myanmar) regime is now literally retreating into the depths of the country, closing its people off from the world and robbing them of their future,'' Rice said in a speech to an international affairs group in Indonesia.

''For 15 years the military dictatorship in Burma has held captive the democratic aspirations of the Burmese people,'' she said.'' ''A country that was once the jewel of Southeast Asia, is now out of step with the entire modern experience of the region.'' Rice praised Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for his efforts for freedom in Myanmar.

Yudhoyono visited Myanmar earlier this month, urging the fellow member of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to deliver on promises of moving towards democracy.

Rice's speech was the last public event of a two-day visit to Indonesia, which has been making its own transition to democracy since an authoritarian government stepped down in 1998. Yudhoyono became its first directly elected president in 2004.

''Great democracies like Indonesia and the United States cannot turn a blind eye to those who still live under oppression,'' Rice had told reporters on the first day of the visit to Indonesia, in comments attacking the junta.

Indonesia has been more vocal in its own criticism of the Myanmar government than some other ASEAN countries, several of whom are themselves one-party states or relatively authoritarian.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said yesterday that while his government was trying to help Myanmar learn from Indonesia's democratising experiences, ''...the process is not easy. I conveyed an expression to the United States and other countries to not have exceedingly high hopes because it is not easy to deal with Myanmar.''

REUTERS