Two senior U.S. diplomats and a lawmaker will make separate trips to Burma next week to encourage its new government on its path to reform.

U.S. Congressman Joe Crowley will travel for a two-day visit to Burma on January 12 for talks with government officials, ethnic minority leaders and the main opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. In the past, Crowley called for tougher sanctions on Burma's former military leaders for their repression of freedom and human rights. 

Derek Mitchell, who has visited the country several times since his August appointment as U.S. special envoy for Burma, will travel there Monday. In addition to visiting the capital Naypyidaw and Burma's largest city of Rangoon, Mitchell will also travel to Bagan to see microfinance programs and other development work.

Also traveling to the Asian country Monday will be State Department's ambassador-at-large on combating human trafficking, Luis CdeBaca. The purpose of his trip is to assess the human trafficking situation and ways to help the government's anti-trafficking efforts. In Naypytaw, he will join Mitchell in discussing steps to address transnational sex trafficking and improve labor conditions.

The U.S. officials' visit to the Southeast Asian country comes on the heels of Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague who ended his two-day visit to Burma this week. Hague repeatedly urged the new Burmese government, which took over in March, to free all the remaining political prisoners. Speaking to reporters Friday, Hague said there is no reason for delay.

"It is very important to countries like the United Kingdom, to our partners in the European Union, that the release of prisoners is completed, and that the remaining prisoners are released, and I see no reason for any further delay in releasing those people from jail," said Hague.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Burma in November. The flurry of diplomatic activity in Burma started after the new government made significant moves toward democracy. The new nominally civilian leadership has modified laws that barred opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from participating in the political life and has started a dialogue with ethnic minorities. The leaders also put a halt on a controversial dam project. But western governments and rights groups insist that Burma must release all political prisoners before sanctions can be lifted.

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06 January 2012Foreign Secretary William Hague concludes first visit to Burma by a UK Foreign Secretary in over 50 years.

At a press conference in Rangoon today, marking the end of his visit to Burma, the Foreign Secretary said: 

"I am delighted to be here, making the first visit by a British Foreign Secretary in 56 years. 

It has been made possible by the initial steps taken by President Thein Sein, including the release of over 250 political prisoners, the easing of restrictions on the media and political parties and dialogue with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD. 

My visit is a gesture of good intent on the part of the United Kingdom in the light of these changes. I have come to hear directly from the country’s leaders what they plan to do to continue progress, and to speak to opposition figures and members of civil society about British support for their endeavours. 

My message is that if the country continues on this promising path, as we hope it will, we are ready to offer a new relationship based on friendship and prosperity. 

I have held meetings with the President, the Foreign Secretary, and the Speaker of the Lower House, and I met representatives from ethnic groups. It was a particular honour for me, last night and this morning, to meet Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and representatives of her Party. She embodies the long struggle for democracy in this country and is an inspiration to me and to countless people around the world. 

In my meetings with her and with the Government I discussed the many bold steps that still need to be taken. 

First, there are hundreds of men and women still remaining in jail here for their beliefs. This has no place in any democracy, and it has no place in the future of this country. I was encouraged to hear that the Government plans to release remaining political prisoners. But more ambitious action will be needed and we look to them rapidly to honour this commitment. 

Second, it is vital that the by-elections on 1st April are credible, free and fair and enable all parties to compete. We welcome the NLD’s courageous decision to participate in these elections, and the world will watch these elections closely. 

Third, for too long this country’s border regions have been scarred by conflict and suffering, particularly in Kachin state, where fighting has displaced tens of thousands of people in recent months. These is an urgent need for the UN to be allowed to deliver humanitarian assistance independently and with access to all areas, for an end to offensive operations in Kachin State, and for meaningful political dialogue with ethnic armed groups. I encourage all sides today to seize this moment of change, to agree to a formal cessation of hostilities and uphold international law, and to begin serious political dialogue as part of a national reconciliation process. 

These are indispensable steps for confidence in the country’s development and they are achievable in the near future.

As I heard yesterday from ethnic minority representatives, reconciliation is the most important challenge facing this country. Achieving a durable and equitable peace will be complex. But it is essential to meet the aspirations and rights of all the citizens of this diverse country. Sustainable peace must be built on trust and dialogue between all groups, to provide a solid foundation for economic and political progress.

The British Government and the British people have a strong commitment to the people of this country, as we have shown by our staunch support for democracy here over many years. 

We are ready to move towards a strong, positive and open relationship as reforms take place, and to respond bilaterally and through the EU. We will judge progress by actions and events and will respond in good faith to measures as they are taken. 

We are already the biggest bilateral aid donor, with £185 million committed for the next four years. I have announced on this visit that UK funding for microfinance initiatives will assist up to 55,000 more people in rural areas to access loans to assist them in establishing and developing small-scale enterprises and build better futures for themselves, their families and their communities. We will also provide additional support for peacebuilding efforts in Kachin State and for 13,000 people displaced by conflict there, particularly women and children, to include food, nutrition, shelter, water and sanitation.

Two days ago, this country celebrated its independence day, marking 64 years since independence from British rule in 1948. Today it may again stand on the edge of a new era. As we enter 2012 it is my hope that this year will also be come to be seen as a new dawn in the history of this nation."

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As the Foreign Secretary William Hague concludes his visit to Burma today, Christian Solidarity Worldwide welcomes his assessment that although there is “momentum for change” in Burma, that “much more is needed to be done” before EU sanctions are lifted.

Mr. Hague told reporters, "It is not possible to say a country is free and democratic while people are still in prison on the grounds of their political beliefs. It is vital that they be released if [sanctions] are to be removed."

During his two-day visit, the Foreign Secretary met with government officials, Aung San Suu Kyi and representatives of ethnic political parties which are not banned by the government.

CSW wrote to Mr Hague ahead of his visit, the first by such a senior British official since 1955, requesting him to use the opportunity to “urge the regime to stop attacking ethnic people, declare a nationwide ceasefire, release all political prisoners, and engage further in a meaningful process of dialogue with the ethnic nationalities and the democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi”. These steps “must be priority benchmarks of progress”.

The letter highlighted specific incidents of rape, forced labor, torture, killings and attacks on churches in Kachin State, as well as the continued detention of Buddhist monks, including U Gambira, one of the leaders of the 2007 pro-democracy protests, and continuing discrimination against the Muslim Rohingya.

CSW's East Asia Team Leader Benedict Rogers said, "William Hague's visit to Burma was an historic opportunity to deliver a clear message to the regime, that if they introduce genuine, substantial and long-lasting reforms, end the systematic and widespread violations of human rights, especially the attacks on ethnic civilians, and release all political prisoners, the international community will be ready to respond positively. Until that happens, pressure must be maintained, while encouraging every step towards reform and welcoming every indication of progress. That is absolutely the right message to deliver at this crucial and potentially very exciting time for Burma. The Burmese government's words about reform are very welcome, but they must be matched by action."

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By Palash R. Ghosh , International Business Times

As Myanmar (or Burma) gradually opens up to Western nations after a half-century of isolation, observers are wondering how far the Burmese government will actually go into enacting democratic reforms. 

Having elected a (nominally) civilian government last year, the new president of Burma, Thein Sein, has promised a series of liberalizing measures, including the legalization of trade unions, the release of (some) political prisoners, as well as “fair and free” elections. He has even opened up talks with pro-democracy activist and opposition figure, Aung San Suu Kyi. 

However, given the still-heavy presence of military figures in the “civilian” government, there are doubts that Burma will reform at all. 

In addition, Burma has one of the worst human rights records of any nation on earth. The military-led abuse and mistreatment of its ethnic minorities remains a sordid, black mark on the country’s psyche. 

Among the victims of this state-sanctioned oppression are the Rohingya people, an ethnic Muslim group that has long suffered in Buddhist-dominated Burma. 

About 2-million Ronhingya live in the northwestern parts of Burma, near the Bangladesh border. 

Hundreds of thousands of Burmese Ronhingya are currently living in neighboring Bangladesh, where they are unwanted refugees. But lacking Burmese citizenship, they are essentially stateless and existing in a kind of limbo. 

Late last month, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that the Burmese government agreed to take back some refugees from Bangladesh – excluding Rohingya. 

According to the United Nations, the Rohingya who live in Burma don’t have it much better – they are forbidden from owning property, marrying or even travelling without state permission. Many are subject to forced slave labor and extortion by authorities. 

Mizzima, the India-based Burmese news agency reported a few years ago that Rohingya women in Burma are frequently subject to sexual abuse and rape by Burmese soldiers. Reportedly, Burma’s military continues to commit atrocities against the civilian Rohingya population. 

As such, desperate Rohingya pour across the borders into Bangladesh every year – although they are Muslims like the overwhelming majority of Bangladeshis, the Rohingya are despised and rejected there as well. Bangladesh, already impoverished and overpopulated, simply cannot cope with the influx. 

Mojibar Rahman, a Rohingya refugee living in a United Nations camps in Bangladesh, told AFP: "We thought that after the election [of a civilian government in Burma], the situation would improve for Rohingya in Myanmar, but it hasn't… no one wants to go back.” 

Indeed, Rohingyas are trapped in a hopeless Catch-22… unwanted in Bangladesh, rejected by Burma since they lack Burmese citizenship.

Some Rohingya refugees have made it as far as Malaysia I the east or the Arab countries towards the west. Many are also in Thailand. But wherever they are, Rohinya remain vulnerable. 

Refugees International has reported that “in both Bangladesh and Malaysia, repressive government policies and lack of adequate international support force the Rohingya to struggle for survival in both countries. The inability of the Rohingya to access basic services in both Bangladesh and Malaysia is further compounding their vulnerability.” 

An elder Rohingya refugee living in a camp in Kutupalong, Bangladesh, told BBC: "We have nothing in Burma. We are disabled people, like slaves. We cannot work because our hands and feet are cut off. If we don't permission to travel we are sent to jail. We are really like slaves there.” 

A younger Rohingya at the same camp lamented: "If I stay in Bangladesh, what will I do? Even if I build a house here people will treat me as Burmese... this is a hated word. I have a ray of hope in my heart that one day there will be peace in Burma and my people will get back all their lives." 

Panchali Saikia, a research officer at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in India, recently wrote of the Ronhingya: “After providing shelter to the Rohingyas for nearly three decades, Bangladesh is now concerned about the annual increase in their numbers. Apart from being an economic burden, the Rohingyas’ involvement in insurgent activities along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is feared by the government. Hence to reduce the influx, the government has declared that it will no more consider any asylum seeker as refugee.” 

She further stated: “Anti-Rohingya communities in Bangladesh have also pressurized the government to repatriate the Rohingyas. Due to the denial of protection, assistance, and fear of repatriation, the Rohingyas are now escaping to Malaysia through the sea route. Malaysia is seen as the best destination because of the religion factor. Also, the Malaysian government’s permit to access the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has attracted asylum seekers.” 

Saikia added: “The plight of the Rohingyas and the growing concern over their influx is not only confined to Myanmar, Bangladesh and Thailand. Other regional powers like India, Indonesia and Malaysia must also engage themselves considering its security implications. The forcible push-backs are a major threat to the maritime as well as border security of these countries. Left with no other option, the Rohingyas are vulnerable to being recruited by sea pirates and involved in arms and drug smuggling.” 

Now, as Burma appears to be opening up to western nations, it will be interesting to see how its human rights abuses – and the plight of the Rohingya – will be assessed and handled. 

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ၿဗိတိန္ႏုိင္ငံအပါအ၀င္ ကမၻာ့ႏုိင္ငံအမ်ားစုတြင္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကို လႊတ္ေပးသည္ဆုိရာတြင္ အကုန္လႊတ္ေပးျခင္းမ်ဳိးျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံကဲ့သုိ႔ တစ္ရစ္ၿပီးတစ္ရစ္

လႊတ္ေပးေနျခင္းမ်ဳိးမရွိေၾကာင္းလည္း ၄င္းက ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။ မစၥတာ၀ီလီယံေဟ့ဂ္က ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္အပါအ၀င္ အစိုးရအဆင့္ျမင့္ပုဂၢိဳလ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေတြ႕ဆုံခဲ့ရာတြင္၊ ေတြ႕ဆုံခဲ့ေသာ အဆင့္ျမင့္ပုဂၢုိလ္မ်ားက ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကို ထပ္မံလႊတ္ေပးရန္ရွိေၾကာင္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္ဟု ၄င္းကတစ္ဆင့္ျပန္လည္ေျပာျပသည္။

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Rangoon (Mizzima) – British Foreign Secretary William Hague says his government will watch the mood on the streets in Burma before considering removing sanctions on the Burmese government. 

British Foreign Secretary William Hague answers questions from the media at the British Council in Rangoon on Friday, January 6, 2012. Photo: MizzimaHague was speaking at a press conference in Rangoon at the end of a two-day trip to Naypyitaw to gauge the changes taking place in Burma and encourage the move to meaningful democracy. Speaking to a packed crowd of local and foreign journalists at the British Council in Rangoon, the foreign secretary said he could see positive changes taking place in Burma but was worried about the word on the street that indicated not much had changed on the ground level.

The British government would watch what is happening and would reconsider the issue of sanctions in the next few months. 

Hague said he was in line with the position of countries in the European Union who want more proof of democratic changes and the release of all political prisoners.

“First, many hundreds of men and women still remain in jail here for their beliefs. This has no place in any democracy, and it has no place in the future of this country,” he said at his final press conference. “There is an urgent need for the U.N. to be allowed to deliver humanitarian assistance independently and with access to all areas, for an end to offensive operations in Kachin State, and for meaningful political dialogue with ethnic armed groups.”

Hague's visit is the first time in over half a century that a British foreign minister has visited Burma, a country it once ruled. 

In response to a question on direct British investment in Burma, he said this would depend on the political situation.

During his two-days of non-stop meetings, Hague met with Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin on Thursday followed by a meeting with President Thein Sein in Naypyidaw, the sprawling new capital city.

After the meetings, he told reporters that Britain wanted to see progress on the release of political prisoners, fair by-elections, resolution of conflicts with armed ethnic groups and humanitarian access to the war zones. 

Hague said the foreign minister assured him the recent changes are irreversible. “I stressed that the world will judge the government by its actions,” he said.

However, the BBC later reported that in an interview Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwi said Burma did not acknowledge there were political prisoners.

"Prisoners are the ones who violated the law", he said, and it was up to the president to decide when prisoners were released. Burmese officials refuse to use the words “political prisoners.” 

The Financial Times quoted Hague saying, “I have assured him that if they do [release political prisoners], there will be a strongly positive response from the UK and, I believe, the rest of the European Union.”

The EU’s annual review of Burma policy comes in early April. Some European diplomats have suggested that if reforms continue and the elections are deemed fair, the EU could lift sanctions this year.

In a press conference on Friday, Hague said, “We must not relax our pressure. That is something we will guard against.”

The big tests, say diplomats, is whether the upcoming elections will be fair and whether all political prisoners will be released. 

Estimates vary on the exact number of political detainees in Burmese jails, ranging from around 600 to up to 1,500. Getting accurate numbers is impossible due to the government’s failure to acknowledge it has political prisoners, and a lack of information and transparency. Burma is notorious for protecting information held by various ministries, and for not allowing reporters access to information. Only recently have government ministers consented to talk to non-government affiliated reporters.

On Thursday evening, Hague travelled to Rangoon for talks with leaders of the country's ethnic minorities and with Aung San Suu Kyi, with whom he had a private dinner, according to reports.

Hague's visit follows Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, in December and Suu Kyi's recent decision to run for a seat in Parliament in the April 1 parliamentary by-election.

Assessing the stance of the British government, Mark Farmaner of Burma Campaign UK, said: “The British government knows that there has not been significant deep reform in Burma, and that the pace of changes that were taking place has slowed. By visiting Burma, William Hague is demonstrating that the UK is willing to engage and lift sanctions, but only if there are genuine political reforms, and an end to human rights abuses.” 

On the sincerity of the new civilian government, he said, “The fact that most political prisoners remain in jail and that attacks against ethnic civilians continue are reasons to doubt the commitment of the military-backed government to genuine reforms. 

“The British government has prioritized human rights over business interests and deserves credit for that. We have urged William Hague to push for the release of all political prisoners, and to make the point that while cease-fires talks are welcome, they need to go beyond cease-fires and start talking about a political solution to ethnic issues. The British government must veto moves by other EU members to relax economic sanctions before genuine reforms take place,” he said.

While many are optimistic that Burma’s road to the future will reach true democracy, others who have long experience in the country aren’t quite so sure. A founder of the National League for Democracy, Win Tin, holds fast to his experience of Burma over the past 50 years.

Win Tin told The Guardian newspaper: “Hague should keep in mind that, yes, we have found a light in the tunnel here in Burma. But we are still in the tunnel. Maybe we can reach the light, maybe we can make it brighter, and maybe we can even leave the tunnel. But we don't know yet. And meanwhile, we are still in the dark.”

Credit : Mizzima -Burma VJ

BROUK welcomes and strongly supports UK Foreign Secretary William Hague’s historic visit to Burma on Thursday. The visit has demonstrated the UK Government’s serious  commitment to helping the people of Burma to achieve their democratic aspirations.

Last Monday U Thein Sein government’s sham Amnesty made great disappointment  to the people of Burma in which only 32 out of more than 1,500 jailed activists were released. If the regime is sincere in taking steps for democratic reform then it must release all the political prisoners who were unlawfully imprisoned.

Burmese military offensives against Kachin and other ethnic peoples have continued; no significant changes towards national reconciliation have been done. In addition, ‘systematic racism’ against Rohingya has been institutionalized; and religious persecution against non-Buddhist people, especially Muslims and Christians, has increased. 

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi meet Denmark Minister for Development Cooperation Mr. Christian Friis Bach at Daw Aung San Suu Kyi residence today at 3;00-4;15 pm.

At Press Conference

 Rohingya with other – Chin, Kachin, Shan, Kayah and Mon - ethnic groups’ representatives met British Foreign Secretary William Hague at the residence of the British ambassador in Rangoon yesterday at 5pm- 6pm, according to a source from Rangoon and BBC Burmese. 

“The Rohingya political party leaders from the 1990 general election and the 2010 general election who attended the meeting are; - Master Yunus from National Democratic Party for Human Rights(NDPHR) and Abu Taher from National Democratic party for Development (NDPD).”

“Abu Taher highlighted the situation on Rohingya people of Arakan who are facing recently on – force labors, extortion, health, education, movement restriction, marriage restriction, religious persecution, unprecedented taxation, arbitrarily arrest and land confiscation- with recent report and appeal letter of NDPD to Burmese government which mention to find a solution about Rohingya issue of Arakan,” according to a Rohingya elite from Rangoon. 

Abu Taher is Central Executive member, Head of Political Bureau and Research and development. He won from People’s Parliament, Buthidaung Township in 2010 election. But, Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) forcedly denounced his victor, according to NDPD press released and case file against Shwe Maung of USDP.

NDPD complained to Township Election Commission, the votes were recounted by the Commission where Abu Taher (NDPD) got 56,882 votes and Shwe Maung (USDP) got 53,702 votes, according to election watch in Buthidaung report.

Master Yunus is CEC of NDPHR – 4 seats winner of 1990 general election from Maungdaw and Buthidaung - mentioned about Rohingya citizenship rights – the historical facts - in Burma which still the Burmese government not clearly mention on it. 

British Foreign Secretary William Hague arrived in Nay Pyi Taw yesterday on an official visit to Burma to observe the latest development of the country, according to official sources. “It is the first visit by a British foreign secretary to Myanmar since 1955.”

 

Credit : kaladan press

Credit : FCO & Mizzima

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ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ ၿဗိတိန္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး Willam Hague တို႔ ယေန႔ည ၇ နာရီက ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕၊ ဒဂံုၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ အလံျပဘုရားလမ္းရွိ ၿဗိတိန္သံအမတ္ႀကီး ေနအိမ္၌ ျပဳလုပ္ေသာ ညစားစားပြဲတြင္ ေတြ႕ဆံုၾကစဥ္
BBC — နွစ္ေပါင္း ေျခာက္ဆယ္ နီးပါး အတြင္း ပထမဆံုး အျကိမ္ အျဖစ္ ျဗိတိသွ် နိုင္ငံ ျခားေရး ဝန္ျကီး တေယာက္ ျမန္မာ နိုင္ငံကို သြားေရာက္ ေနပါတယ္။

နိုင္ငံျခားေရး ဝန္ျကီး ဝီလီယံဟိတ္ဟာ ေန ျပည္ေတာ္ကို တိုက္ရိုက္သြားျပီး ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ ျခားေရး ဝန္ျကီးနဲ့ ေတြ႔မွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေန့လည္ပိုင္းမွာ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္နဲ့ ေတြ့ျပီး ညေနပိုင္းမွာ တိုင္းရင္းသား ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေတြနဲ့ ေတြ့ျပီး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္း စုျကည္နဲ့ ညစာ စားဖို႔ ရိွပါတယ္။

William Hague holds talks with Burma's foreign minister, Wunna Maung Lwin, in Naypyitaw. Photograph: Reuters


The UK will continue to reward further signs of political reform in Burma with closer ties, William Hague has said at the start of the first visit to the country by a British foreign secretary in more than half a century.

A day after Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition pro-democracy leader, made an impassioned appeal to her followers "to continue the march on the road to freedom", Hague met Burma's foreign minister, Wunna Maung Lwin, in Naypyidaw, the new capital city constructed six years ago by the then-ruing military junta.

After the meeting Hague told reporters he had told the minister, part of a still military-dominated civilian regime which took power almost a year ago, that the UK wished to see definite progress on the release of political prisoners, fair byelections to the country's parliament – Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy has said it will take part in these after boycotting a general election in November 2010 – as well the resolution of conflict with armed ethnic groups and humanitarian access to conflict areas.

"I have assured him that if they do, there will be a strongly positive response from the UK and, I believe, the rest of the European Union," Hague said.

"The foreign minister has reaffirmed commitments that have been made to release political prisoners. He said the changes are irreversible and I welcome that way of thinking. I stressed that the world will judge the government by its actions."

Later on Thursday Hague was due to meet Thein Sein, the former general who was appointed president last year. He will then travel to Rangoon for talks with leaders of the country's ethnic minorities.

He will have two meetings there with Aung San Suu Kyi: a private dinner on Thursday and more substantive discussions on Friday, followed by an encounter with another famous former political prisoner, an actor and director known as Zarganar, who was among 250 political prisoners freed in October as part of the government's political reforms.

During Wednesday's celebrations of Burma's independence day at her party's headquarters, Aung San Suu Kyi told members of her NLD that "all Burmese people deserve freedom".

"We have to struggle for more freedom. What we do is anchored by our belief in freedom. Sometimes we face many difficulties. Now we cannot say we are free so we must work for more freedom," she said.

Burma is undergoing rapid political changes as a new nominally civilian government pursues what a key aide to Thein Sein told the Guardian was "a mission of democratisation". However, many analysts and campaigners are sceptical about the depth of recent reforms and the willingness of the military, which has ruled the country since 1962, to relinquish power.

Hague's visit follows that of Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, last month and Aung San Suu Kyi's recent decision, following reforms, to stand in April's parliamentary byelections and seek entry to the new national assembly, even though it is dominated by the army.

Min Yaing, a founder of the youth protest movement Generation Wave, said he welcomed the succession of foreign diplomats visiting Burma, which is also known as Myanmar, because they would counter Chinese influence in the country.

With American and European Union sanctions in place, Beijing has been able to build a major presence in Burma in recent years.

"This is good for our movement. Before, the government was just looking to China all the time. Now they are not just listening to one voice," Min Yaing, 31, said.

Thi Ha Saw, editor of a newspaper in Rangoon, added that Hague's visit would "help reformers within the regime" as it would be seen as "evidence of recognition by western powers".

There was a danger of a backlash against the reforms, he warned. "The president is a moderate but there are hardliners who could take over. There is pressure to move fast and get as much change done as possible so a point of no return is reached," Thi Ha Saw told The Guardian.

Nay Zin Latt, the president's political adviser, acknowledged resistance within the regime to recent changes. Beyond the gradual acceptance of the NLD as a legitimate opposition party, there have been new labour laws and a reduction in media censorship as well as reduced surveillance of democratic activists.

"There is always resistance to change. But it is a question of the speed of that change and differing points of view. No one within the government is opposing change entirely. Some want it to go faster than others," Nay Zin Latt said.

Sceptics point out that somewhere between 600 and 2,000 political prisoners remain in jail and that military operations are still continuing against Burmese ethnic minorities. There was widespread disappointment at the limited extent of an amnesty announced on Tuesday which saw sentences cut but resulted in the actual release of only between 10 and 30 political prisoners.

None of the most important dissidents or ethnic minority leaders currently held in extremely harsh conditions on often arbitrary or trivial charges were released. The limited scope of the amnesty, the fourth in a series that has seen more than 200 prisoners freed, has put Aung Sun Suu Kyi in a difficult position, with many campaigners unhappy at continued dialogue with the authorities while fellow activists remain in jail.

"This is just playing a political game. If they were serious they would release everybody," said Than Naing Oo, who was released from Insein jail near Rangoon on Tuesday. He was serving a three-year sentence for distributing pro-democracy leaflets.

Hla Soe, a politician from the Arakhai minority, said that he distrusted the government and the "deal" they had done with Aung San Suu Kyi. "The government is still ignoring ethnic rights. That is what I want to tell Mr Hague and the international community," he said.

However, on one central street in Rangoon on Wednesday night, crowds witnessed a daring bid to force the speed of change as images of police repression during unrest in 2007 were projected on a big screen as part of a film festival. Inside a nearby conference hall thousands had gathered to watch a series of politically charged films that provoked gasps and applause from an audience unused to such open defiance of Burma's strict censors. A banner read: "Free Art, free thought, freedom."

The event was organised by Zarganar, who is due to meet with Hague. "This is free expression. This is a step in the right direction. And we are not afraid. We are never afraid," he declared.

Min Thai Ke, winner of best short film for his depiction of the plight of the poor and political prisoners, said Burma was living "through a very fragile time" but that he too was not afraid. 

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William Hague is to become the first British Foreign Secretary to visit Burma for more than 50 years in a move intended to bolster the country's budding reform process.

New president Thein Sein last year unexpectedly embarked on a series of liberalising measures, including opening talks with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, releasing more than 200 political prisoners and legalising trade unions.

Speaking ahead of his arrival in the capital Naypyitaw, Mr Hague welcomed the "encouraging" steps taken by the government and urged it to continue on the path of reform after years of hardline military rule.

Critics however cautioned that significant numbers of political prisoners remain behind bars, despite government promises to free them, while reports of abuses against ethnic minorities continue.

Mr Hague is expected to use his meetings with Thein Sein and other senior figures to press for the release of the remaining political prisoners - variously estimated to number between 590 and 1,700 - and for free and fair elections.

Aung Sang Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy has now re-registered as a political party and will contest a series of 48 parliamentary by-elections due to take place on April 1, in what is being seen as an important test of the reform process.

Britain is also pushing for a process of national reconciliation to end the fighting between the government and the country's ethnic minorities, such as the Kachins, and to bring them into the mainstream political process.

"I am visiting the country to encourage the Burmese government to continue on its path of reform, and to gauge what more Britain can do to support this process," Mr Hague said.

"Further steps are needed that will have a lasting impact on human rights and political freedom in Burma.

"In particular, we hope to see the release of all remaining political prisoners, free and fair by-elections, humanitarian access to people in conflict areas, and credible steps towards national reconciliation."

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Diplomats and advocacy groups reaching out to the international community through the media.