President Obama demanded the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader, during an unprecedented encounter yesterday that put him at the same table as the Prime Minister of the pariah country’s military Government.

His message, in which he also pushed for the release of other political prisoners held by the Burmese regime, was delivered across the table to Thein Sein during a meeting with the leaders of the ten countries that make up the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean).

The White House spokesman Ben Rhodes said that the President used the meeting to urge Burma’s rulers to release the opposition leader and all other political prisoners. “So, privately, he said the exact same thing that he said publicly in enumerating the steps that the Government of Burma must take: freeing all political prisoners, freeing Aung San Suu Kyi, ending the violence against minority groups, and moving into a dialogue with democratic movements there.”

Mr Obama’s comments follow last week’s meeting between Ms Suu Kyi and a group of US diplomats who were allowed to visit the pro-democracy leader despite her persistent and widely reviled house arrest that has locked her away from the world for 14 of the past 20 years.

Mr Obama and the Burmese leader came face to face in the closing hours of the US President’s visit to Singapore for the Asia Pacific leadership summit (Apec). They did not shake hands and Mr Obama’s message was delivered indirectly.

After a morning of meetings on issues ranging from currency exchange rates to climate change, Mr Obama became the first US President to join a meeting of Asean leaders — his predecessors have avoided them precisely because of the presence of the Burmese leadership.

The carefully choreographed, and at times awkward, event involved the leaders standing in a line and linking hands: Mr Obama and the Burmese Prime Minister were strategically positioned three places apart.

When they sat down at the round negotiating table they were buffered by four Asian leaders. The last US president to be in the same room as a senior member of Burma’s ruling clique was Lyndon Johnson in 1966.

The Asean group, which has been bringing together Asian leaders for more than 40 years, has never before hosted a US president.

It issued a concluding statement after its meeting in which it emphasised “the importance of achieving national reconciliation and that the general elections to be held in Burma in 2010 must be conducted in a free, fair, inclusive and transparent manner in order to be credible to the international community.”

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