State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi presided over a meeting with ministers and city officials in Naypyidaw on Friday to discuss plans to encourage foreign embassies to move from Yangon to the sparsely populated capital.
At the meeting, Suu Kyi, who also serves as Myanmar’s foreign minister, stated that Naypyidaw is where the country’s government sits, and as such, should be the location of the country’s foreign embassies.
She told the gathered officials to review the government’s policies on moving foreign embassies to the capital in an effort to make future moves more convenient for embassies and their personnel.
Services in the capital such as communication, transportation, education, and health must be improved in order to make life in the capital more convenient for embassy staff, she said.
No foreign embassies have fully moved from Yangon to Naypyidaw since the new capital opened in 2005. China has a temporary liaison office in the ACE Villa Compound, and the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have offices in other five-star hotels in the city. The UNDP has an office in a residential section of the city.
Staff at these offices enjoy closer proximity to Myanmar government offices and have an easier time scheduling meetings with officials, but many of them struggle with boredom and a lack of resources in a city that did not form organically.
Naypyidaw’s official diplomatic zone has 120 plots for foreign embassies, but they remain unused. Much of the area was forcibly cleared of farmers who lived there before the construction of the city began, complicating any foreign embassy’s potential decision to move there.
As an anti-military activist under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi opposed the construction of the new capital, arguing that it was a waste of money for a poor country that was unable to provide basic services such as health and education to its citizens.
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