For Obama, a Familiar Region With Familiar Troubles

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/world/asia/for-obama-a-familiar-region-with-familiar-troubles.html

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MANILA — For President Obama, a visit to Southeast Asia is a homecoming of sorts. Nowhere was that more evident than in the town-hall-style meeting he conducted on Sunday in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur with young people from across the region.

He noted that his half-sister, Maya Soetoro, was born in Jakarta and that her husband, Konrad Ng, is an ethnic Chinese whose parents were born in Malaysia. Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, spent years working in the region. And of course, “I lived in Indonesia as a boy,” he said, drawing whoops from the Indonesians in the crowd of 550 at the University of Malaya.

“The Asia Pacific,” Mr. Obama said, roaming the stage, “that’s all part of who I am. It helped shape how I see the world. And it’s also helped to shape my approach as president.”

Much of the president’s message was familiar to anyone who has watched these types of town-hall-style meetings, whether in Africa or Iowa: He described his misspent high-school years and how he got serious about social policy as a young man and moved to Chicago. And Mr. Obama, who is 52, said one of his great regrets was not spending more time with his mother, who became ill with cancer when she was six months older than he is now.

But the president came to life when a young Burmese man asked him how his country and its neighbors should deal with the rise of ethnic and religious tensions as their societies open up. Mr. Obama, who has restored diplomatic ties with Myanmar, called these tensions “the biggest source of conflict and war and hardship around the world.”

The danger in Myanmar, he said, is that people will start to organize around their ethnic and religious identities, risking conflicts “that could move Myanmar in a very bad direction,” he said. He referred to the persecution of the Muslim Rohingya minority in the country.

Mr. Obama also alluded to the legacy of tension in Malaysia between the Muslim Malay majority and the Chinese minority. “There are times where those who are non-Muslims find themselves perhaps being disadvantaged or experiencing hostility,” he said.

While he expressed optimism about Asia’s ability to manage these forces, he was less sanguine about his father’s country, Kenya. “They should be growing, but instead they spend all their time arguing and organizing politically only around tribe and around ethnicity,” Mr. Obama said. “And when power shifts, then it’s payback.”

Awkward Side-Step in Malaysia

Mr. Obama’s decision not to meet with the Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, prompted criticism from human rights advocates. However, his national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, met with Mr. Anwar in her boss’s stead.

Mr. Anwar, a former deputy prime minister whose 2012 acquittal on sodomy charges was thrown out by a court last month, has been fighting the charges since his conviction in 1999, in what analysts is a politically-motivated effort to keep him out of power.

“Ambassador Rice emphasized to Mr. Anwar that the United States has followed his case closely, and that the decision to prosecute him and the trial have raised a number of concerns regarding the rule of law and the independence of the courts,” the National Security Council said in a statement.

Mr. Anwar, who expressed disappointment at not getting time with Mr. Obama, said he appreciated “the availability of Ambassador Rice for these candid and frank discussions.”

The meeting will raise Ms. Rice’s profile in a part of the world where she is not well known. That could be helpful to Mr. Obama, whose second-term foreign policy team has been criticized for its lack of focus on Asia compared with the attention exhibited by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner in the president’s first term.

Quiet on the Northern Front

North Korea was the dog that did not bark during Mr. Obama’s trip, which included South Korea. For weeks, South Koreans speculated nervously that Kim Jong-un, the North’s erratic leader, would fire a missile or carry out a nuclear test while the president was across the border.

In the end, Mr. Kim did neither – though on Tuesday the North Korean military fired dozens of artillery shells near a disputed western sea border with South Korea. And last Friday, as Mr. Obama arrived in Seoul, North Korea announced that it had detained a 24-year-old American, Matthew Todd Miller, this month for what it said was “rash behavior” at the airport in Pyongyang.

The State Department said it was working on Mr. Miller’s case with the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, which often represents interests of American citizens in the country, since the United States has no diplomatic relations with the North.

But the White House, keen to keep the focus of Mr. Obama’s visit on expressing sympathy to South Korea in the aftermath of the deadly ferry accident, was mum about Mr. Miller.

Pit Stop in Manila

After the formality of Tokyo, the tensions of Seoul, and the awkwardness of a new relationship in Kuala Lumpur, Mr. Obama’s last stop in Manila ended with a levity typical of the Philippines.

At the arrival ceremony at Malacanang Palace on Monday, Mr. Obama was honored with 21-gun salute and a peppy rendition of the theme song to “Beverly Hills Cop,” the 1984 Eddie Murphy movie, played on xylophones and other instruments by a local band.

The president got the serious work out of the way quickly, announcing an agreement with President Benigno S. Aquino III to give American troops, warships, and planes expanded access to bases in the country — sending a signal to an expansionist neighbor, China.

That left Tuesday morning open for a visit to a Philippine-American joint venture that is building an electric mini-bus designed to replace the Jeepneys, the brightly colored, garishly decorated vehicles that clog the streets of Philippine cities.

Mr. Obama first inspected an old-fashioned red Jeepney with shiny chrome fenders before climbing into the new vehicle, painted in elegant white and blue. His reaction was not immediately clear, according to a White House pool report, because his words were lost in the engine noise of his motorcade. He was laughing, though.