Myanmar’s rebranded State Security and Peace Commission (SSPC) has announced elections for December 28, in a flurry of domestic dictatorial reformation. But they also want to deceive world opinion too, with the early-August announcement of a US$3 million contract with Washington DC-based public relations firm DCI Group.
The filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) claims the contract is to “provide public affairs services to Client (SSPC) with respect to rebuilding relations between the Republic of the Union of Myanmar and the United States, with a focus on trade, natural resources, and humanitarian relief.”
The contract will run through the Ministry of Information, whose current minister is former General Maung Maung Ohn, who once commanded the military’s Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare. This evinced much indignation from a range of anti-military revolutionary groups. But this wasn’t the first time military regimes from Myanmar have appealed to US PR firms.
The notorious Washington PR spin doctor Edward von Kloberg, who lobbied for Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein, briefly worked for the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) after the 1988 coup. Jefferson Waterman International (JWI) was the next DC PR firm to work with a military regime, although its FARA document from March 1997 claims the main contact was a Myanmar company called Myanmar Resources Development Ltd, a front for the SLORC.
JWI’s president and Myanmar client leader was Ann Wrobleski, a former senior State Department counter-narcotics official. The contract was terminated after two years because the client refused to pay their fees, according to reporting from Ken Silverstein.
The next round was with DCI Associates in May 2002, in a $35,000 a month contract with the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and the former head of Military Intelligence General Khin Nyunt, that the FARA filing stated was for the “evaluation and analysis of potential means of improving relations with the United States and Myanmar.”
Like the previous JWI contract, a major imperative was to improve Myanmar’s record of being a major narcotics-producing state and regaining official US ‘certification’ of cooperating in the war on drugs through what DCI claimed was a “moderate faction” of the regime. Several months after the contract, the SPDC tried to murder Aung San Suu Kyi in the Depayin Massacre of May 2003. So much for finding moderation in Myanmar military regimes.
The Thein Sein administration hired the DC-based Podesta Group in April 2015 for a $840,000 contract to strengthen “government relations and public relations services to strengthen the ties between” Myanmar and the US.
Co-founder John Podesta was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and later Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager for her 2016 presidential run. The PR firm hired Mark Tavlarides, former director of the Clinton administration National Security Council, and former Washington Post journalist and Politico editor John Anderson to handle the Myanmar account.
In the months following the 2021 coup, the Canadian-Israeli lobbyist (and arms dealer) Ari Ben Menashe briefly worked for the State Administration Council (SAC) through his firm Dickens & Madson. His FARA filing claims the contract was “to seek support and humanitarian aid for the benefit of the citizens of…Myanmar and to strive for the removal or modification of sanctions.”
Ben Menashe only lasted a few months, again because of difficulties getting paid by the regime due to sanctions. This brief history of Washington shysters should scream a warning to the DCI Group. But it should also alarm anti-SSPC forces that Washington is not, and never has been, a completely Myanmar-friendly place.
Depending on how you broadly define assistance, previous regimes that proudly boast self-reliance and independence have long relied on foreign countries for help. The Myanmar military has received, and still does, a range of military support services, from Russia, China, India, North Korea, Israel and the United States.
But what of the anti-military revolutionary side? Little has been publicly disseminated about the long reliance on foreign advisors to previous rights and democracy movements, governments, or on advisors to anti-military revolution forces.
Myanmar was awash in foreign advisors during the 2011-2016 Thein Sein administration and the 2016-2021 Aung San Suu Kyi and National League for Democracy (NLD) government. Naypyidaw had embedded advisors in various ministries (those not controlled by the military), the Union Electoral Commission (UEC) and the legal system.
Suu Kyi had a small inner circle of Western advisors, including the former Oxford scholar Michael Marett-Crosby, the Australian economist Sean Turnell and the on-loan British diplomat Joe Fischer, among many others. During the decade-long “peace process”, foreign mediation organizations such as the Switzerland-based Center for Humanitarian Dialogue and Jonathan Powell’s Intermediate attracted far more funding than a relatively meager $3 million.
Many of these foreigners stuck around after the 2021 coup to advise the National Unity Government (NUG) and in various ways the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC) and the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), as well as certain Western-leaning ethnic armed organizations (EAOs).
Not Sean Turnell, of course, who was imprisoned by the military regime for over two years on trumped-up charges after the 2021 coup. But Marett-Crosby has been an advisor to at least five NUG ministries, funded by an assortment of Western donors, including contractors for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Chicago-based Upland Advisors, led by Jason Gelbord, a former legal advisor to EAOs during the peace process, works with a range of these exiled government actors, paid for by the Joint Peace Fund (JPF).
The Prague-based educator Igor Blazevic, a frequent commentator in the Myanmar media, advises NUG Foreign Minister Zin Mar Aung amongst other moving parts of the exiled government. The Myanmar country director of the Hanns Seidel Stiftung, Achim Munz, also works closely with Zin Mar Aung and other NUG ministries.
The former head of the Asia Foundation in Myanmar, Matthew Arnold, was a key advisor to the NUG and produced a number of conflict reports and mappings for the exiled government, though many of these reports have now been overtaken by events.
Another prominent governance expert was Philipp Annawitt, who penned several laudatory articles about the NUG being the country’s legitimate government, having effective territorial control and a functioning administration for the Asia Times and The Diplomat between 2021 and early 2023. Annawitt also discussed these issues at length on the Insight Myanmar Podcast in an episode called “You Down with NUG?” in late 2022.
Marcus Brand, the once Myanmar country head of International IDEA, was also a self-appointed spokesperson for the NUG in the years following the coup, repeating the same unconvincing talking points of the NUG being the legitimate government and expanding its territorial control. There were more, but some drifted away as the money dried up or when poor workplace behavior caught up with them.
Has the broad revolutionary movement, including the NUG and EAOs, ever produced a foreign advisory organigram to map out who all these people are? Do they have anything resembling a FARA filing process in the service of transparency? How many foreign Svengalis are out there?
Two questions must be asked of these advisors. Why are they so white male-centric? And more importantly, exactly what positive impact have they all had for the people of Myanmar as the civil war drags into a fifth abysmal year?
The NUG is in decline and faced frustrated calls for major reform in the past three years. The shadow government was sharply critiqued by prominent Mandalay activist Tay Za San in July for poor leadership, military incompetence and administrative chaos – a rebuke that was roundly supported in many revolutionary quarters.
There are rumors of an impending NUG reform conference to be sponsored by the European Union in Brussels. But is this too little, too late? Is any change now tantamount to chee chauk ye hnoo (pouring water on dried excrement), as the Burmese saying goes, akin to flogging a dead horse?
DCI’s contract with the SSPC stinks to high heaven. But there is some malodorous malfeasance on the resistance side, too. How much expenditure (much of it Western donor money) has gone to these myout phyu baw ma (Western flatterers)?
Could this be better spent on rebuilding a bombed hospital in Karenni, or schools in Sagaing, or for food aid to starving people in Sittwe, or on paying Myanmar female journalists who lost their jobs in the USAID cuts?
Perhaps the road to real NUG reform and EAO revolutionary success is through more confidence and independence, and less dependency on questionable foreign advice.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian, and human rights issues on Myanmar
