The Myanmar Military's PR Offensives

The Irrawaddy

In July, Myanmar's generals signed an agreement with DCI, a Washington-based PR firm with the aim of rebuilding relations with the US. Have they still not realized that the only one way to improve their sordid reputation is to behave in a civilized manner and stop killing their own people?

An important event that Myanmar’s generals believe will reverse their declining fortunes took place on July 31: they signed an agreement with DCI Group, a Washington-based PR firm that will be paid US$3 million per year for “public affairs services” with the aim of “rebuilding relations” with the United States. The emphasis, the contract says, will be on trade, natural resources, and humanitarian relief. Myint Kyaw, a former military officer who now serves as deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information, is the liaison.

It is not clear exactly what form the lobbying is to take, but it is worth noting that this is not the first time that DCI has been involved in Myanmar affairs. In 2002, the group was paid $348,000 to serve as consultants to the then junta for a period of eight months, and the attempt flopped dramatically. In 2008, the Atlantic magazine quoted DCI’s then CEO Doug Goodyear as saying, “It was clear that we couldn’t accomplish what we set out to accomplish. We were going to try to make relations between the two countries [Myanmar and the US] more normal. It was very clear that we couldn’t do what we wanted to do.” Just before the Atlantic interview was published, Newsweek had also printed an article about DCI’s past as an image consultant for the Myanmar junta, and together the revelations had become so embarrassing for Goodyear that he resigned as a volunteer for Republican Senator John McCain’s campaign for the 2008 presidential election.

The Myanmar military has a long history of hiring foreign PR and lobbying outfits to divert attention from the atrocities it has committed and sell a softer, kinder image of its top brass. On Aug. 10, 1991—almost exactly three years after the bloody suppression of the 1988 pro-democracy uprising—the then junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), signed a US$30,000, three-month contract with Van Kloberg and Associates, one of Washington’s most notorious PR companies, which specialized in despotic regimes. Over the years, Van Kloberg represented Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Liberian coup maker Samuel Doe, Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu, and Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

The contract with SLORC stipulated that Van Kloberg would “arrange meetings between His Excellency [the Myanmar ambassador] and influential decision makers” in order to attract “American business investment in Myanmar and facilitate business transactions.” Van Kloberg would also “counter the unrestrained negative representation of Myanmar and its administration.” Needless to say, those efforts produced no positive results for SLORC, and indeed none of the firm’s efforts had done its other dictatorial clients any good.  Sick and broke, the firm’s founder Edward von Kloberg III committed suicide in 2005 by jumping from the walls of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, like Tosca in Puccini’s opera.

Next up was Jefferson Waterman, then headed by Ann Wrobleski, architect of the much-lampooned “Just Say No” anti-drugs campaign. Ironically, Wrobelski had served as assistant secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan and, at that time, been instrumental in denying Myanmar U.S. anti-narcotics aid following the 1988 massacres, saying that the country was unlikely to make progress in fighting narcotics “until a government enjoying greater credibility and support among the Burmese people than the current military regime in Rangoon.”

Yet in February 1998, Jefferson Waterman undertook to improve SLORC’s image for a fee of US$400,000 a year, and Wrobleski now considered Myanmar “a beautiful and exotic country” and parroted the generals’ claim that the U.S. was engaging in terrorism by supporting pro-democracy groups outside the country. Her volte-face, however, did not help the military dictatorship’s reputation in the U.S. or elsewhere, nor did attempts by the Atlantic Group (a lobbying outfit not connected to the magazine), which worked more directly to help overturn U.S. sanctions.

At about the same time, Khin Shwe, the CEO of the Zaykabar construction company, hired another U.S. firm, Bain and Associates, founded by former television reporter Jackson Bain and his wife, to promote a favorable image of the Myanmar regime. That, too, failed. They managed to bring Myanmar’s then Foreign Minister Ohn Gyaw to New York for a rare meeting with Western reporters in a hotel in Manhattan, but none of the journalists seemed to believe his glossy account of the supposedly booming Myanmar economy and, according to the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 3, 1997, a crowd of several dozen protesters stood on the sidewalk outside screaming: “U Ohn Gyaw Lies!” and “Killers!”

Khin Shwe eventually fell foul of both sides in the fight for democracy in Myanmar. In 2007, he was added along with around 100 junta-affiliated Myanmar businessmen to the U.S. Special Designated Nationals list, his name removed only with the lifting of sanctions in October 2016. But then, in the aftermath of the 2021 coup, he too was arrested and sent to Insein Prison along with this son Zay Thiha, apparently following a conflict over a failed building development on military-owned land in Yangon. Khin Shwe was pardoned by the junta and released in September 2024 on reported health grounds.

For over two decades, no more efforts were made to convince the outside world that Myanmar’s military rulers are actually humane and peace-loving philanthropists—until, in March 2021, the new junta, the State Administration Council (SAC), hired Dickens & Madson, a firm headed by Israeli-Canadian lobbyist Ari Ben-Menashe, to promote “the real situation in the country” and communicate with the U.S. and other nations which had “misunderstood them,” according to documents filed with the U.S. Justice Department.

One of Ben-Menashe’s first efforts on behalf of the SAC was to arrange for a CNN camera team to visit Myanmar. It proved a disaster. CNN reporters managed to interview ordinary people, who condemned the coup and told them about atrocities the military had committed. That same July, Ben-Menashe cut his ties with the junta because U.S. sanctions had made it impossible for him to get paid.

And now DCI Group is back. Have Myanmar’s generals still not realized that there is only one way they can improve their sordid reputation—to behave in a civilized manner and stop killing and oppressing their own people?