THE BURMESE authorities have released John Yettaw, the American citizen whose uninvited visit to the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader, led to her being sentenced to a further 18 months of house arrest, allowing him to leave the country with a visiting US senator.
“He’s not a well man. He had a medical incident this morning when they read him his orders of deportation. He’s now undergoing a thorough medical review in a hospital and soon he will be able to return to his family,” James Webb, the senator, said in Bangkok yesterday after returning from a two-day visit to Burma.
Mr Yettaw, a 54-year-old Vietnam war veteran who suffers from epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder, was sentenced last week to seven years in jail for swimming across the lake behind Ms Suu Kyi’s house to warn her that he had had a vision in which she was killed by terrorists.
Mr Webb is the chairman of the Senate foreign relations sub-committee on southeast Asia and Pacific affairs and at the weekend he became the most senior US official to visit Burma in more than two decades.
He used his rare meeting with the regime’s leadership to ask for Mr Yettaw’s release on humanitarian grounds, for a visit to Ms Suu Kyi, and for her release.
“They granted two of those three requests in the meetings. They have not yet communicated on the third,” Mr Webb said yesterday.
Although he expressed his gratitude to the Burmese authorities for freeing Mr Yettaw and allowing him to see Ms Suu Kyi, he was careful not to say he was optimistic about her release. “I am hopeful that as the months go forward they will take a look at it.”
Analysts believe the Burmese authorities used Mr Yettaw’s visit as an excuse to keep Ms Suu Kyi out of circulation in the run-up to elections due to be held next year.
Mr Webb said: “I hope that over time the government of Myanmar [Burma] will understand that with the scrutiny of the outside world judging their government very largely on how they are treating Aung San Suu Kyi, that it is to their advantage to allow her to participate in the political process.”
He gave little indication of how his suggestions were received by Gen Than Shwe, who leads the regime, and the other generals he met. Mr Webb’s visit has been controversial.
Many observers believe it sent the wrong signals to a regime that had only days earlier defied international pressure to keep Ms Suu Kyi in jail.
But Mr Webb is part of a growing movement that believes past attempts to isolate the regime have failed and that engagement is the only alternative. It is a position that resonates with the administration of President Barack Obama.
Thant Myint-U, an analyst who is a leading proponent of engagement, said: “Jim Webb’s trip, hopefully, represents a watershed, towards a more pragmatic approach that will actually yield results, that will help the Burmese people and be in the US national interest.” – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)