A top State Department official says the United States supports non-political representation by Myanmar, also known as Burma, at this week’s Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ foreign ministers’ meetings in Vientiane, Laos.
This Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will head to Asia to hold talks with ASEAN officials, including discussions on the ongoing crisis in Burma. Officials say Washington also continues to engage with the Burmese democratic opposition groups.
In a phone briefing on Monday, Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told VOA that it is his understanding that there will be a representative from Burma at the meetings.
“It will be at the permanent secretary, non-political level,” Kritenbrink said. “We believe that any Burmese representation in the ASEAN meeting should be at a downgraded, non-political level, and that is what you will see in this coming week.”
In January, Myanmar’s military junta sent a senior official to attend an ASEAN foreign ministers’ retreat in Laos. Since it launched a coup in 2021 that ousted Myanmar’s democratically elected government, the junta has been barred from sending political appointees to high-level meetings of the Southeast Asian bloc.
Marlar Than Htaik, the permanent secretary of the foreign ministry under the control of Myanmar’s junta, attended meetings earlier this year on January 29.
Last week, more than 300 Burmese civil society organizations and revolutionary forces endorsed a letter sent to ASEAN’s secretary-general, Kao Kim Hourn, and other bloc officials.
The letter urged ASEAN to exclude Myanmar’s military junta members from all meetings and events and to ensure Myanmar is represented by its democratically elected leaders.
“We’ve spent probably even more time and effort in engaging the democratic opposition, various Burmese related groups inside and outside of Burma, and our commitment to those groups will continue going forward,” Kritenbrink told VOA.
He added the U.S. will continue to implement “unprecedented sanctions and other measures” to cut off the junta leaders’ ability to “acquire the funds necessary to continue to prosecute the atrocities.”
The U.S. also “strongly supports” the ASEAN five-point consensus on ending the Myanmar crisis.
Shortly after the military coup began, the leaders of nine ASEAN member states and the Myanmar junta chief, General Min Aung Hlaing, agreed to an immediate end to violence in the country. They also agreed to the appointment of a special envoy to visit Myanmar and to meet with all parties and promote dialogue and humanitarian assistance from ASEAN.
Despite those promises, the Southeast Asian bloc, has largely been divided over the conflict in Myanmar, analysts say.
“The most authoritarian members of ASEAN, which would be Laos and Cambodia, to an extent, are still sticking with the junta,” Priscilla Clapp, a senior adviser at the United States Institute of Peace, told VOA.
Other members, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, have had some level of interaction with the Myanmar resistance.
“I would say that none of the ASEAN countries really understands fully what’s happening on the ground in Burma,” Clapp said in a recent interview.
She added that since ASEAN operates by consensus, achieving unanimity when dealing with the junta is difficult, given the differences among individual governments.
