YANGON, Myanmar » 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 sold bootleg copies of "The Interview." Since then, the sellers said, police officers have begun a citywide crackdown on the pirated copies, sometimes accompanied by North Korean officials.

The movie, which had been a best-seller here, has now disappeared from the city’s larger DVD shops, and many roadside vendors have also stopped hawking it.

U Daw Thin, a DVD seller in the city’s Chinatown district, said that during a raid, a police officer he has known for a long time told him that the North Korean Embassy had provided a list of shops selling the film.

U Ye Htut, the information minister and a presidential spokesman, denied that the latest clampdown on bootleg DVDs targeted any individual movie.

Repeated calls to the North Korean Embassy in Yangon went unanswered. But 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 the 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 the Myanmar authorities to help them wage their campaign against the film.

Myanmar severed ties with North Korea after blaming the North’s agents for bombing a presidential delegation from South Korea as it visited Yangon in 1983, and the two countries did not restore relations until 2007. But U.S. 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," as Myanmar was once known.

Sony has released the movie to some U.S. 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."

Daw Khine Khine, owner of another DVD shop in Chinatown, said: "’The Interview’ is produced by America. I don’t understand why the North Koreans are involved in seizing it."

Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, rules his impoverished country with the help of a personality cult surrounding his family. His government is particularly sensitive to any outside criticism or ridicule of the family, which has ruled the country for decades. Despite its proclamations that the movie was an act of "international terrorism," Pyongyang has denied involvement in the hacking of Sony, which the United States says it engineered.

Sony had shelved "The Interview" after the hacking and anonymous threats against theaters, but it later reversed its decision, releasing the movie online and at a limited number of theaters.

The crackdown in Yangon was not the first time North Korean diplomats had taken steps to protect their leader’s image in Myanmar.

A few days after a Burmese translation of a book about the former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, the current leader’s father, was published in 2010, North Korean diplomats visited the publisher and seized copies of it, according to Hein Latt, who translated the book.

"They told me they would destroy the copies, as facts about their leader in the book were incorrect," Latt said.

Wai Moe and Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times

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