American who visited Suu Kyi to be freed from Burma

The authorities in Burma have told a US senator that they intend to release John Yettaw , the American who created outrage when he swam to the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, leading to her being confined to house arrest for a further 18 months.

Senator Jim Webb, a Democratic senator who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Sub-Committee for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, met both regime leader General Than Shwe and Ms Suu Kyi on a visit to Burma on Saturday.
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“It is my hope that we can take advantage of these gestures as a way to begin laying a foundation of goodwill and confidence-building in the future,” Mr Webb said in a statement on Saturday.

Mr Webb’s visit to Burma comes less than a week after the Burmese authorities defied intense international pressure to convict Ms Suu Kyi of breaching the terms of her house arrest.

The charges arose in early May when Mr Yettaw, a 54-year-old Vietnam War veteran who suffers from diabetes and post-traumatic stress disorder, swam the lake that backs on to her dilapidated villa to warn her that he had had a vision in which she had been killed by terrorists and she allowed him to stay the night to overcome his exhaustion.

Mr Yettaw was sentenced to seven years in prison at the same trial. He was given three years for breaching security regulations, three years for immigration violations and a year for illegal swimming. Mr Webb said he expects Mr Yettaw to be released Sunday and will accompany him on a US military flight to Bangkok, the capital of neighbouring Thailand.

Mr Webb’s visit was highly controversial.

“The meeting will certainly serve to validate the junta at a time when international revulsion has reached one of its periodic, crisis driven peaks,” said Walter Lohman, the Director of The Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Centre.

Exiled opposition activists say that they are happy to see anybody escape the brutalities of the Burmese prison system, but there is a smouldering anger that the west’s scant diplomatic capital had to be spent on releasing another delusional foreigner rather than bringing real pressure on the regime or getting any of the 2,100 Burmese political prisoners released.

However, the visit is part of Mr Webb’s belief that the previous administration’s policy of trying to isolate the Burmese regime has failed . It was a view which was reinforced by a visit he made to Burma in 2001.

“It was fairly clear that by ceasing our economic engagement in Burma we were allowing particularly the Chinese presence to solidify – because they have a very amoral foreign policy – and so I have been saying for several years that we need to have a different approach with Burma,” Mr Webb told the Washington Post in May.

There is an increasing consensus that the sanctions have not isolated the regime but pushed them into the economic and political orbit of nations which have little regard for human rights, such as China and North Korea.