Obama to Visit Myanmar as Part of First Postelection Overseas Trip to Asia

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama will make Asia his first overseas destination since his re-election, with a trip this month that is to include a historic visit to Myanmar and underscore his desire to reorient American foreign policy more toward the Pacific during his second term.

The White House announced on Thursday that the newly re-elected Mr. Obama would head to an annual international economic summit meeting in Cambodia and stop in Thailand and Myanmar. No sitting American president has visited either Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, or Cambodia, allowing Mr. Obama to reinforce his commitment to the region.

The trip fits into a larger geopolitical chess game by the Obama administration, which has sought to counter rising Chinese assertiveness by engaging its neighbors. China was Myanmar’s main international patron during the final years of military rule there, and the long-isolated country’s opening to the West comes amid a popular backlash against Beijing’s perceived influence and its role in extracting natural resources.

But the planned trip drew criticism from human rights advocates who worried that a presidential visit to Myanmar as it moves toward democracy was premature given its continuing insurgency, ethnic violence and detention of political prisoners. Likewise, some in Congress expressed concern that Mr. Obama’s stop in Cambodia not be seen as validating a harsh authoritarian government that has cracked down on dissidents.

The trip from Nov. 17 to 20 will be a quick one, squeezed in just before Thanksgiving, as Mr. Obama focuses most of his energy on confronting tax and spending issues that must be addressed by the end of the year and rebuilding his team for the next four years. The White House said that while in the region, the president would discuss “a broad range of issues,” including economics, security and human rights.

The most symbolically potent part of the trip will be the stop in Yangon, where Mr. Obama will meet with the two driving forces behind Myanmar’s dramatic emergence from decades of military dictatorship, President Thein Sein, who came to power last year, and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition leader freed from house arrest and allowed to run for and win a seat in Parliament.

Mr. Obama met with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi when she visited Washington in September, and he has eased sanctions to encourage the evolution in Myanmar. But critics said he was going too far by rewarding Yangon with a visit of his own without extracting additional concrete progress like freedom for hundreds of political prisoners still held there.

“This is an incredibly delicate process that’s still at a very early stage,” said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. “It would have been better, I think, to reserve some leverage before the incredibly difficult decisions that the government has yet to make.” He added, “It would not be a good thing if the president leaves Burma and there are still political prisoners there.”

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), an advocacy group, lists 283 political prisoners whose whereabouts it has verified, and said that even as the government has released many others, it has detained more activists arbitrarily. During a visit last winter, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed to say that additional relationship building seemed to depend on the release of the prisoners. “That would have to be resolved before we could take some of the steps that we would be willing to take,” she said then.

The U.S. Campaign for Burma, an exile group that has been critical of the government, urged Mr. Obama to cancel the trip. “This government has continuously failed its own responsibilities in serving the people of Burma,” said Aung Din, the group’s director and a former student activist who fled a bloody crackdown by the military in 1988.

Others disagreed. “It’s a good time to show American support for what has taken place,” said Gordon Hein, vice president of the Asia Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that is returning to Myanmar 50 years after being forced out. “It’s true there’s still unfinished business to be done in the reform process, but if one waited until every major issue was successfully resolved, that would be a long wait for any country.”

In a similar vein, the Cambodia stop has generated concern. Mr. Obama is visiting Phnom Penh to attend a meeting of the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. A bipartisan group of 12 members of Congress sent Mr. Obama a letter on Oct. 31 saying they saw the value of attending but urging him to condemn human rights violations by the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has held power for 27 years.

The prime minister’s party “uses various forms of coercion, including violence and manipulation of national institutions, to limit the freedoms of ordinary citizens,” said the letter, whose authors included Senator John McCain of Arizona, a conservative Republican, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a liberal Democrat.