Obama meets Aung San Suu Kyi

2014-11-14 2,788

ROUGH CUT, NO REPORTER NARRATION

U.S. President Barack Obama met Myanmar's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon, pressing for more change in the country.

Political and economic reforms launched two years ago seem to have stalled and taken the sheen off what was seen as a rare foreign policy achievement for Obama.

"Much hard work remains to be done, and that many difficult choices still lie ahead. the process for reform is by no means complete or irreversible," he said.

He also urged Myanmar to give universal rights to Yohingya Muslims, who are are stateless and live in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine state in the west of the predominantly Buddhist country. Almost 140,000 were displaced in clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012.

"And discrimination against the Rohingya or any other religious minority, I think does not express the kind of country that Burma, over the long-term, wants to be," Obama said.

Myanmar began its emergence f