YANGON – (UPDATE) The most senior US official to visit Myanmar for a decade and a half held talks with Aung San Suu Kyi Wednesday after the ruling junta allowed the detained Nobel laureate to make a rare public appearance.
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell, accompanied by his deputy Scot Marciel, also met Myanmar's prime minister as Washington seeks a new era of engagement with the military regime.
Suu Kyi met Campbell at a luxury hotel in the former capital Yangon, the first time she had appeared in front of the media other than at her house or in prison since the current period of her house arrest began in 2003.
Dressed in a pink and maroon traditional outfit, the 64-year-old opposition leader smiled but neither she nor the US diplomat spoke to waiting reporters as she headed into the meeting in a hotel room.
Earlier this year journalists saw her in prison at her trial for harboring an American man who swam to her house, but they were not allowed to take pictures and the only images were released on state television.
The junta extended her house arrest by another 18 months in August after she was found guilty, effectively ruling her out of elections due in 2010 that critics already say are a sham.
Suu Kyi has spent most of the last two decades in detention. The most recent period of her house arrest began in 2003 after pro-junta forces launched a deadly attack on her convoy during a political campaign.
Campbell and Marciel earlier Wednesday held talks with Prime Minister Thein Sein in the remote administrative capital Naypyidaw, Myanmar officials said on condition of anonymity.
Myanmar officials said the US delegation was not expected to meet reclusive junta leader Than Shwe. State media said that when the US envoys arrived he was in southern Myanmar inspecting aid efforts after last year's Cyclone Nargis.
Campbell is the highest ranking US official to travel to Myanmar -- formerly known as Burma -- since Madeleine Albright went as US ambassador to the United Nations in 1995 during Bill Clinton's presidency.
The two-day trip is a follow-up to discussions in New York in September between US and Myanmar officials, the highest-level US contact with the regime in nearly a decade.
The Obama administration in September announced a dramatic change in US policy because isolating Myanmar had failed, but said it would not ease sanctions without progress on democracy and human rights.
US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said overnight that the current visit was the "first step, or I guess I should say the second step in the beginning of a dialogue with Burma."
Asked what Campbell discussed on Tuesday in talks with the information minister and local organizations, Kelly said: "They laid out the way we see this relationship going forward, how we should structure this dialogue, but they were mainly in a listening mode."
September's talks had called for free and fair elections and the release of Suu Kyi, but also dealt with US concerns about Myanmar's possible military links with nuclear-armed North Korea.
Nyan Win, a spokesman for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, has said the visit is the "start of direct engagement between the US and Myanmar government" but added that the party was not expecting any "big change".
The junta refused to acknowledge the NLD's landslide win in Myanmar's last elections, in 1990. The United States toughened sanctions after the regime cracked down on protests led by Buddhist monks in 2007.
But in the first major sign of a thaw, leader Than Shwe in August held an unprecedented meeting with visiting US senator Jim Webb, which yielded the release of John Yettaw, the American detained for swimming to Suu Kyi's lakeside house.
