The Myanmar military junta has hired a US lobby firm at a cost of US$3 million per year to help rebuild its relations with the US in the run-up to the regime’s planned election, which has been widely condemned as a sham designed to cement military rule in the guise of a civilian government.
The regime’s Ministry of Information (MOI) signed an agreement with Washington-based DCI Group, which “shall provide public affairs services” to the junta aimed at “rebuilding relations” with the US, especially on trade, natural resources and humanitarian relief, according to US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings viewed by The Irrawaddy.
Signed by DCI Group managing partner Justin Peterson and MOI Permanent Secretary Win Kyaw Aung, the contract is effective for one year from July 31.
According to the terms of the agreement, the junta will have to pay $3 million a year to the firm in two equal installments: $1.5 million upon execution of the agreement, and the remainder before December 31, 2025.
MOI Deputy Permanent Secretary Myint Kyaw is listed in the filings as the individual that Republican-linked DCI Group engages with. He is on the junta’s five-member information team.
Since the military takeover in 2021, the Myanmar junta has been ostracized by Western democracies due to its seizure of power from an elected government and its subsequent bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests. Washington has imposed a series of sanctions against the regime’s leadership over their atrocities against their own people for rejecting military rule.
In 2023, the US slapped sanctions on the junta’s Defense Ministry and two state-owned banks used by the junta to buy arms and other goods from foreign sources, including Russia, mainly to crush the ongoing nationwide anti-regime armed struggle. The junta has killed more than 7,000 people since the 2021 coup.
Justice for Myanmar, an activist group that exposes the Myanmar military’s economic interests, corruption and human rights abuses, said no amount of spin by Washington lobbyists can wash the blood off the Myanmar military’s hands.
“We condemn DCI Group’s decision to serve as an enabler for a junta that is committing atrocities with total impunity,” the group said.
The junta’s hiring of DCI came after Min Aung Hlaing last month asked US President Donald Trump to “reconsider easing and lifting the economic sanctions imposed on Myanmar”, and sought a tariff rate of 10-20 percent. The request came after the US said it would impose a 40 percent tariff on all goods from Myanmar from August 1. After a one-week delay announced by the Trump administration on July 31, those tariffs took effect Thursday.
Meanwhile, the junta is gearing up to hold elections in December and January. At home and abroad, the plan has been condemned as a political maneuver designed to entrench military rule under the guise of democratic transition.
DCI’s links to the Republican party are strong. In 2020, during Trump’s first term as president, he appointed Peterson as his administration’s representative to the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico.
The firm is no stranger to Myanmar, either, having done business with the previous regime, which ruled the country from 1988 to early 2016.
In 2002, DCI Group was paid $348,000 by the generals to push Washington to “begin a dialogue of political reconciliation” with the then regime, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record.
The firm also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta’s image, drafting releases praising Myanmar’s efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing “falsehoods” by the George W. Bush administration that regime forces engaged in rape and other abuses.
When DCI’s work for the junta was exposed in 2008, its founding partner Doug Goodyear resigned as coordinator of the 2008 Republican National Convention, a post to which he had been appointed by the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.
The current junta itself has a history of hiring foreign lobby firms. In March 2021, a month after the coup, as the junta’s bloody crackdowns on protesters shocked the world, it hired Ari Ben Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence official and the director of lobbying firm Dickens & Madson, to argue its claim that what happened on Feb. 1, 2021 was not a coup against the elected government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The regime paid US$2 million to the firm.
Ben Menashe duly arranged a trip to Myanmar for CNN and the Southeast Asia Globe, but the outlets’ reports reflected the actual situation on the ground, rendering the lobbying campaign a failure.
