Long before Sony Pictures released The Interview, a comedy about a fictitious CIA plot to kill North Korea’s leader, Pyongyang had declared war against the movie. It has since been blamed for a cyberattack on Sony’s computers. Now, it appears that the country’s famously touchy diplomats have taken the dispute much further afield: to the streets of Yangon.
DVD vendors in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, said that in recent days, officials from the North Korean embassy had visited shops across the city, asking whether they carried bootleg copies of The Interview. Since then, the sellers said, the police have begun a citywide crackdown on the pirated copies, sometimes accompanied by North Korean officials.
The movie, which had been a best-seller in Yangon, has now disappeared from larger DVD shops, and many roadside vendors have also stopped hawking it.
Daw Thin, a DVD seller in the Chinatown district, said that during a raid, a police officer she has known for a long time told her that the North Korean embassy had provided a list of shops selling the film.
Burmese Information Minister and presidential spokesman U Ye Htut denied that the latest clampdown on bootleg DVDs targeted any individual movie.
Repeated calls to the North Korean embassy in Yangon went unanswered.
However, an officer in Yangon’s Special Branch police, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared he would be dismissed for talking to the media, said North Korean Ambassador Kim Sok-chol had complained about sales of The Interview when he met with Yangon’s chief minister a week ago, and had provided a list of shops selling it.
It remains unclear how North Korean officials apparently persuaded Burmese authorities to help them wage their campaign against the film.
Ties with North Korea were severed after North Korean agents weren blamed for bombing a South Korea presidential delegation as it visited then-Rangoon in 1983, and the two countries did not restore relations until 2007. However, US officials and security analysts have long suspected that the nations maintained a secret relationship, with North Korea helping Myanmar procure weapons and build underground military facilities.
Bertil Lintner, a Thailand-based author who has written about relations between Myanmar and North Korea, said the removal of The Interview from Yangon’s shops showed “that the North Koreans still have a lot of leverage in Burma.”
Sony has released the movie to some US theaters and Internet services, but has not begun selling DVDs, although bootleg copies have been widely available in many places — including in North Korea, according to defectors.
U Lin Lin, a DVD vendor near the Bogyoke market in central Yangon, said the police involved in the crackdown had mainly taken copies of The Interview and had been accompanied by North Korean officials during their raids.
“The Interview DVDs have been available since the first week of January,” he said. “For a small roadside vendor like me, I sold around 20 copies a day, and big shops in Chinatown sold more than 100 copies a day before the crackdown.”
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