Lee making 1st visit by South Korean leader to Myanmar since 1983 assassination attempt

By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, May 14, 1:25 PM .... 

YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar tightened security for an official visit by President Lee Myung-bak on Monday, the first by a South Korean leader since an assassination attempt by North Korean commandos nearly 30 years ago.

A statement from his office said Lee was flying first to Naypyitaw to meet with Myanmar’s President Thein Sein as part of a two-day visit that “is expected to strengthen ties” between the Asian countries.

Lee is the latest dignitary to visit Myanmar as it transitions from a military dictatorship to a fledgling democracy and opens its massive investment potential to the eager international community. The statement said Lee planned to discuss how to increase economic ties and cooperation in energy, the development of natural resources and other sectors.

Truckloads of riot police were stationed around Yangon, where Lee was to visit Tuesday and meet opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Security was particularly tight at the Martyr’s Mausoleum, a shrine to Suu Kyi’s father where then-South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan was nearly killed in 1983.

The bomb blast killed 21 people, 17 of them South Korean, including four Cabinet ministers and the South Korean ambassador to what was then known as Burma. Chun was not hurt because he was stuck in traffic and arrived a few minutes late at a ceremony to pay tribute to Gen. Aung San, the country’s slain independence hero.

Three North Korean agents were arrested for the attack. One of them blew himself up while being arrested, a second was hanged in prison and a third died inside Yangon’s infamous Insein Prison in 2008.

After the bombing, Myanmar’s then-dictator Ne Win severed diplomatic relations with North Korea, but those ties were restored in 2007. The United States and other nations have expressed concern about Myanmar’s ties with nuclear-armed North Korea.

Arms experts say Myanmar— which faces an arms embargo from many Western states — gets weaponry from Pyongyang in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Some believe there is ongoing nuclear cooperation between the two countries, which Myanmar denies.

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