Lawmakers call for pressure on Myanmar over Pyongyang ties

The Trump administration has slapped sanctions on companies across the globe to punish illicit trade with nuclear-armed North Korea, yet Myanmar, which is suspected of acquiring ballistic missile systems from the pariah state, has escaped the full force of the "maximum pressure" campaign.

US lawmakers of both parties say that's a worrying gap in the US sanctions regime.

A recent United Nations report cites Myanmar's "ongoing" arms relationship with North Korea underscoring long-standing suspicions Myanmar has failed to sever those military ties as it has transitioned to democracy.

"I want Burma to succeed," Republican Sen. Cory Gardner told The Associated Press, using the alternative name for Myanmar.

"I want its civilian leadership to succeed. But we can't stand idly by and watch this military trade with the tyrant in North Korea," said Gardner, who chairs a Senate panel on Asia.

Republican Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also said Myanmar officials "buying arms and propping up the North Korean regime" must be sanctioned.

President Barack Obama lifted all sanctions on Myanmar in the fall of 2016 after Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to power, ending five decades of army rule. That removed dozens of people and companies that had been blacklisted by the Treasury Department for human rights abuses and ties to the junta. But it also provided a reprieve to a handful of Myanmar companies and military officials accused of military trade with North Korea that violated UN Security Council resolutions.

After President Donald Trump took office, Myanmar's main player in that trade, the Directorate for Defence Industries, was designated again, but this time under a weaker sanctions authority that restricts it from US government contracts and export licensing.

However, the other Myanmar companies and persons that used to be blacklisted have not been sanctioned again, and none has been put back on the Treasury Department's list of Specially Designated Nationals. Such a designation bars them from holding any US property, doing business with Americans and conducting transactions in the US financial system.

Joseph DeThomas, a former senior State Department sanctions expert, said that for any reputable company it's bad to be under any U.S. sanctions, but "nothing makes your life more miserable than having every bank in the world know you are on the SDN list."
SDN listing is a tool that Trump has used extensively on North Korea in his "maximum pressure" campaign that he credits for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's recent offer of negotiations on "denuclearization."
Myanmar is increasingly in Washington's bad books again for a scorched-earth crackdown on Rohingya Muslims that the US has called "ethnic cleansing."