Day: June 25, 2021

At least 10 people were killed when troops loyal to Myanmar’s junta attacked a base used to assist refugees in northwestern Sagaing region, but were outmaneuvered by militiamen using guerrilla tactics to overcome a deficit in firepower, sources said Friday.

A member of the People’s Defense Force (PDF) militia in Sagaing’s Mingin township, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, told RFA’s Myanmar Service that his group had been evacuating thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from an area east of the Chindwin River Thursday when a group of junta soldiers and regime-aligned paramilitaries known as the Pyu Saw Htee arrived and began to engage them.

“We were helping the IDPs with their health and security issues when the military council came into the forest,” he said, using regime opponents’ term for the junta, which calls itself the State Administration Council.

“They were posing as civilians. We let them get close to our hideout because we thought they were villagers from elsewhere and were taken by surprise. We saw nine of their bodies left behind [after we repelled the attack].”

The PDF fighter said that despite the surprise attack, members of his militia used their knowledge of the jungle to outflank the junta soldiers and only suffered one casualty.

According to the Mingin PDF, around 8,000 civilians from 11 villages have been living in a makeshift camp around 17 miles from where the fighting took place.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun for comment on the clash went unanswered Friday.

A local security analyst, who also declined to be named, told RFA that despite only possessing slingshots and the same crude flintlock “Tumee” rifles their forefathers used to fight off British colonizers in the 1880s, the local PDF was able to fight off the military “about 40 percent because of their knowledge of the terrain and the remainder because of their conviction that they are fighting against injustice.

On Feb. 1, Myanmar’s military staged a coup, seizing power from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), rejecting its landslide victory in November 2020 general elections as the result of voter fraud. The junta has provided no evidence to back up its claims and citizens from all walks of life have protested the takeover.

Amid nationwide turmoil, the military has stepped up offensives in remote parts of the country of 54 million that have led to fierce battles with a profusion of People’s Defense Force (PDF) militias formed to protect residents from troops loyal to the junta. Ethnic armies in other parts of the nation have used the instability to encroach on one another’s territory.

According to the Irrawaddy online newspaper, an ethnic Chin teenager was also killed by a junta landmine near Mindat’s Shat village on Thursday while going to farm with his family.

Mindat has been the site of several clashes between the military and the PDF since an April ceasefire broke down on May 12. A military raid on the township of 25,000 three days later prompted around 90 percent of residents to flee their homes.

While the two sides agreed a 14-day ceasefire on June 19, only around 30 percent of IDPs have returned, saying they continue to fear for their safety.

Two youths killed

Thursday’s violence came a day after military troops shot and killed two ethnic Chin youths in Sagaing’s Kalay township, according to residents, who said local authorities wrote off the deaths as “COVID-19-related,” referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The two youths—Mai Nuam Za Tian, 19, and Salai Ngun Nei Paing, 24—were shot dead by the military at around 9:00 p.m. in Taungphila ward, sources said, while riding a motorbike back to the region from Kalay township, scene of intense fighting since April.

A relative of Mai Nuam Tian said she had traveled around 12 miles from her home in Nyaungdon village to Kalay that evening to fetch medicine for her uncle. The relative said that Salai Ngun Nei Paing had offered her a lift back home on his motorbike and that the two were shot by soldiers when they refused an order to stop.

Mai Nuam Tian’s body was located at the local hospital on Thursday morning with a death certificate that said she had died of COVID-19, according to the relative, but an examination of her body revealed that she had been shot.

“Even then, her body was not allowed to be taken back to the village,” the family member said.

“It was taken to the cemetery straight from the military hospital for burial. When they arrived at the cemetery, the family did not believe what the military said, so they opened the coffin and checked the body before burying it. They also took pictures. They found a bullet wound below her knee.”

The body of Salai Ngun Nei Paing was found along the roadside on Thursday morning.

A resident of Taungphila ward confirmed that the two had been shot there by soldiers hiding by the roadside.

“I heard the sound of a motorbike at around 9:00 p.m. and then I heard four or five gunshots,” the resident said.

“One of them fell and died right in front of my house. The shooters were soldiers, of course. Sometimes they come here in boats. That day, they had been hiding from view since the morning.”

The Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) Deputy Executive Director Salai Zaouk Ling told RFA that junta troops have routinely attempted to cover up the deaths of people they have killed by labeling them the result of COVID-19.

“What the military did here is nothing new,” he said. “Two people in Haka [township] were recently tortured to death and the army said the same thing.”

“The military had no excuse—shooting people without cause is a war crime.”

Calls to junta spokesman General Zaw Min Tun seeking comment on the incident went unanswered Friday.

Village stormed

Also on Wednesday, junta soldiers in Sagaing region’s Watlat township destroyed 16 residences during a raid on the home village of Dr. Tay Za San, one of the first people to organize anti-coup protests in Myanmar’s second city Mandalay and who is currently in hiding.

The raid was the second in three days on Shwe Ohya village, a resident told RFA, and was carried out after troops said they had obtained information that local youths had been organizing a branch of the PDF.

“All the villagers ran as they entered. They opened fire at three boys who ran away from the school, and one got hit in the back, although he did not die,” the resident said.

“They were looking for the former village ddministrator and youths who were said to be forming a defense group, but they didn’t find anyone,” he added.

“They can arrest whoever they want, as long as they don’t harm anyone. People are worried they might set fire to the village.”

Efforts by the junta to stamp out local resistance to its rule continued Friday, when troops in Sagaing’s Yinmabin township arrested a fireman who had joined the nationwide Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM).

“As usual, they started shooting when they entered the area,” said a resident of the fireman’s home village of Banbway.

“Shortly afterwards, they had arrested two people—a villager and a fireman with the CDM.”

The Banbway resident said people are forced to flee whenever soldiers come to the village because they forcibly search homes and beat up those who live there.

Several villages in the area had earlier fought back against the military with Tumee guns, he said, and sources claimed that local PDF forces had recently destroyed a vehicle carrying junta soldiers with an improvised bomb in the vicinity of nearby Pale township’s Khin Aye village.

RFA was unable to independently confirm the bombing or whether anyone had been killed in the incident.

According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), the military has killed at least 880 people, while some 5,104 people have been detained, charged, or sentenced in the five months since the coup.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

China’s targeting of ethnic Uyghurs beyond its borders to silence dissent has been steadily rising for decades, with at least 28 countries complicit in China’s persecution of Uyghurs, according to a new report on the transnational repression of the largely Muslim minority group.

The report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) and Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs documents China’s transnational repression of Uyghurs with public sources, including government documents, human rights reports, and reports by credible news agencies to establish a detailed analysis of the expanding scale and scope of China’s global repression.

China uses a variety of techniques to repress Uyghurs who live abroad, including espionage, cyberattacks, threatening phone calls for Chinese government officials, physical attacks, rendition, the report says. Some have reported being threatened after speaking publicly about human rights in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Others have received demands that they spy on their diaspora communities on behalf of the Chinese government.

The report also says that the transnational repression is part of a greater trend of global authoritarianism that threatens to erode democratic norms worldwide, and that stopping China’s from perpetuating it is not only a moral imperative but also crucial to maintaining state sovereignty and the integrity of international organizations like Interpol and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The new report comes amid efforts by foreign governments to take measures against China and Chinese entities involved in the suppression of Uyghurs in the XUAR in light of various reports of severe rights abuses against the minority and members of other Turkic groups.

The dataset in the 62-page report titled “No Space Left to Run: China’s Transnational Repression of Uyghurs,” included 1,546 cases of detention and deportation of Uyghurs from 28 countries outside China from 1997 until March 2021. It notes 647 such cases in the Middle East and North Africa and 665 cases in South Asia.

Of the total number of cases, there were 1,151 incidents of Uyghurs being detained in their host country and 395 cases of Uyghurs being deported, extradited, or rendered back to China.

The report argues that China’s transnational repression of Uyghurs consistently increased over time, rising dramatically with the imposition of mass surveillance systems in the XUAR from 2017 onwards, showing a correlation between repression at home and abroad.

“Although China’s terrorizing of the Uyghur diaspora spans decades, it has escalated dramatically since 2017, as policy in the Uyghur region grew increasingly repressive,” said Bradley Jardine, research director at the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs, in a statement.

“The data show that far from a territorially bounded campaign of state violence, Xinjiang’s technologically advanced surveillance state has become a truly global problem, spilling across international boundaries and undermining human rights wherever it goes,” he said.

‘The tip of the iceberg’

The report details three stages of transnational repression with the first stage beginning in 1997, when the first cases of rendition of Uyghurs to China were recorded in Pakistan, and lasting a decade during which nearly 90 Uyghurs from nine countries, mostly in South and Central Asia, were detained or sent to China.

During the second phase from 2008 to 2013, roughly 130 Uyghurs from 15 countries were repressed, while during the third phase from 2014 to March 2021, nearly 1,330 individuals were detained or rendered from 20 countries.

Since 2017, 682 Uyghurs have been detained in Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, the UAE, and Uzbekistan, according to the report.

In July of that year, Egyptian authorities rounding up and detaining more than 200 Uyghurs, including students, in Uyghur restaurants, the report said. In many of the cases the report identified, their relatives in the XUAR had been forced to place calls to the students abroad, demanding their return to China.

Additionally, China puts pressure on countries, such as Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, and Myanmar, to trade human rights for economic opportunities, by taking advantage of their indebtedness under China’s Belt and Road Initiative — a U.S. $1 trillion lending and infrastructure program — to get them to crack down on Uyghurs living inside their borders, the report said.

These recorded instances are “just the tip of the iceberg” because unreported cases would increase the figures substantially, it said.

“International organizations and host governments, particularly those with close political and economic ties to the PRC [People’s Republic of China], can often be complicit in China’s use of transnational repression against Uyghurs, many of whom have sought refuge abroad,” the report says.

The report recommends that states that host Uyghur diaspora communities take measures to combat China’s transnational repression and protect Uyghurs and other vulnerable populations by refusing to extradite them, strengthening resettlement programs by increasing refugee and emigration quotas, and restricting networks of enablers such as tech companies and diaspora groups and organizations serving as fronts for the Chinese government.

To rein in China’s efforts, the report also recommended the restrictions of the export of surveillance technology that can be used to monitor vulnerable communities and an increase in accountability by increasing the costs of undertaking campaigns of transnational repression.

“The scale of China’s transnational repression is no secret to Uyghurs abroad, who have been targeted for decades,” said UHRP executive director Omer Kanat in a statement.

“Virtually every Uyghur living outside East Turkistan has experienced some form of repression at the hands of the Chinese government, from phone calls from Chinese police and attempts to block international travel, to even more serious dangers such as detention, arrest, or deportation to China,” he said, using the name Uyghurs prefer for their homeland.

A solar power company from China has agreed to invest $10 billion in Malaysia over 15 years, as Chinese firms look to Southeast Asia to expand production and avoid “obstacles” put in by Western countries, a business leader said Friday.

Chinese firms favor doing business in Southeast Asia over countries in other corners of the globe because of synergy with Beijing’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) projects in the region, said Tan Yew Sing, president of the Malaysia-China Chamber of Commerce.

“China is keen to work in Malaysia because the United States and Western countries are putting more obstacles for China to invest there. They are looking into ASEAN countries, the Middle East, and Africa,” Tan told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

“Of the three regions, ASEAN is still their favorite, especially because of the One Belt One Road policy,” he added.

On Thursday, the Malaysian government announced that solar power giant Risen Energy Co. Ltd, a private Chinese company, would invest 42.2 billion ringgit (U.S. $10.1 billion) from 2021 until 2035 in its first major plant in Southeast Asia. It will be located in northern Kedah state.

The Chinese firm’s investment was “timely” for Malaysia, which has been struggling to attract foreign direct investment, said Asrul Hadi Abdullah Sani, director of the Malaysia office of political consultancy firm Bower Group Asia.

“The federal government has been previously criticized for its failure to bring in FDI,” Asrul told BenarNews. FDI in Malaysia fell 56 percent in 2020, according to government data.

The Chinese company’s solar project investment, coming on top of Beijing’s donation of 500,000 doses of the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, will further strengthen the Sino-Malaysian relationship, he said.

Also on Thursday, the United States announced that it was halting imports from a major Chinese producer of polysilicon, Hoshine Silicon Industry Co. Ltd, over the alleged use of Uyghurs as forced laborers in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Washington also blacklisted units of three other Chinese companies, some of which are major producers of monocrystalline silicon and polysilicon used in solar-panel production.

More than 90 percent of all solar panels producing electricity need polysilicon – the purified variant of the grey silicon metal made of quartz – and four of the world’s five largest producers of polysilicon are based in China, according to Bernreuter Research, a German research firm.

Statements by Malaysia’s prime minister and the minister of International Trade and Industry did not say from where Risen Energy’s Malaysian factory would get polysilicon. But they said the Chinese company would manufacture solar – or photovoltaic – cells and solar panels under its Malaysian subsidiary, Risen Solar Technology Sdn Bhd.

BenarNews contacted the Prime Minister’s Office for details but it did not immediately respond, while the Ministry of International Trade referred the news service to a public statement on the investment.

Six other solar power companies are operational in Malaysia, three of which are Chinese.

‘Malaysia has abundant raw materials’

Meanwhile, a trade ministry source, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to talk to reporters, told BenarNews that construction on Risen Energy’s Malaysian facility had begun.

Construction of the new facility is scheduled to be completed by year’s end and become operational by the first quarter of 2022, said a statement from Mohamed Azmin Ali, the minister of International Trade and Industry.

The facility is expected to have an annual production capacity of three gigawatts (3GW) of high-efficiency photovoltaic (solar) modules for the first five years “to meet growing global demand,” Azmin said. It is also expected to create 3,000 jobs over 15 years.

Azmin’s office told BenarNews that technical experts from China would be brought into Malaysia for training purposes, once the facility is ready.

Xie Jian, chairman and president of Risen Energy Co. Ltd., said the firm chose Malaysia because of its strategic location in Southeast Asia.

“Further, Malaysia has abundant raw materials, [a] high quality of human resources, and harmonious ethnic relations whereby people get along well,” the statement from the trade ministry quoted him as saying.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online system.

Chinese state-run companies and banks have been investing in electrical utilities in Latin America, generating income for the firms and creating leverage for Beijing to advance its interests in a region sometimes referred to as “America’s backyard.”

One of the most comprehensive reports on the subject has been written by R. Evan Ellis, research professor of Latin American Studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

COVID-19 caused economic setbacks in a number of these countries, so they may now be more likely to agree to some Chinese projects that they would have rejected in the past, Ellis says.

The Wall Journal has recently analyzed data from a number of Latin American nations that reveal a staggering COVID-19 death toll.

According to The Journal, the country with the world’s highly daily death rate as of June 21, was landlocked Paraguay, with 19 times as many deaths as the United States per capita.

And with 50 million people, Colombia has recorded about 4,200 deaths from COVID-19 over the past week—about 50 percent more than the whole of Africa.

Fewer than one in 10 people in Latin America have been vaccinated, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

Carissa F. Etienne, director of PAHO, has at the same time urged leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) nations to speed up delivery of a billion vaccines they promised to developing nations by the end of 2023.

China has meanwhile been importing about 75 percent of the world’s traded iron ore and some 60 percent of its copper ore from Latin American countries for years.

Latin American countries have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, often referred to as the BRI, which funds overseas infrastructure projects in nearly 70 countries.

BRI enlists 18 of 31 countries

David Dollar, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based-Brookings Institution, says that the BRI is controversial in the West because of a lack of transparency that makes it difficult to get reliable information on the finances of the initiative as well as on specific projects and their terms.  

According to the U.S.-based Atlantic Council, Panama in November 2017 became the first Latin American country to officially endorse the BRI, five months after switching diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China.

In the next two years, 18 of the 33 countries in the region would join the BRI, with some notable exceptions.

Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico—the four largest economies in the region, accounting for nearly 70 percent of its GDP—have closely followed the initiative, but have yet to sign on. They are expected to do so at some point, however.

For many Latin American governments and companies, the BRI offers an opportunity to expand access to China, a growing export destination and source of external financing.

Over the past 20 years, bilateral trade grew twenty-five times, from $12 billion in 1999 to $306 billion in 2018, placing China as Latin America’s second-largest trading partner after the United States.

Since 2005, Chinese banks have provided more than $141 billion in loan commitments to Latin America, exceeding, in several years, the lending of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Development Bank of Latin America combined. 

China is also becoming an increasingly important foreign direct investor for the region, especially through mergers and acquisitions.

But the BRI has yet to spur a visible surge of Chinese commercial activities in Latin America.

China has been less active in promoting the BRI in the Western Hemisphere than in other regions. The six BRI economic corridors across Eurasia still take top priority globally. 

Low-risk gamble

There are concerns that the BRI may cause confrontations with the United States, Latin America’s long-standing hemispheric ally and most important commercial partner, which has consistently warned about the BRI’s “debt-trap diplomacy.”

Despite the seeming lack of immediate gains associated with BRI, however, most Latin American and Caribbean countries appear to have responded neutrally or favorably to the initiative.

On the risk side, many consider Chinese lending alone to be insufficient to trigger systemic debt issues in most Latin American economies. And as a result, for many in Latin America, the BRI appears a low-risk gamble for greater economic growth and international cooperation.

The high concentration of Chinese activity in Latin America’s agricultural sectors has meanwhile placed a heavy strain on water supplies and increased deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2015 study coordinated by Boston University’s Global Economic Governance Institute.

Some projects, such as hydroelectric projects, have triggered protests from indigenous groups in several Latin American countries

China appears to have its most positive and constructive relationship in Latin America with Uruguay, one of the smallest nations in the region.

Uruguay’s day-to-day relationship with the PRC is shaped by two key figures: China’s ambassador to Uruguay, Wang Gang, and Uruguay’s ambassador to China, Juan Fernando Lugris Rodríguez.

According to Ellis, observers generally regard Wang as low-key and effective, quietly working with Uruguayan institutions, facilitating significant Chinese support to Uruguay during the COVID-19 pandemic, and showing sensitivity to the distrust that many people in Uruguay have toward China.

Arms for Venezuela

China in recent years has also sold self-propelled artillery, armored vehicles, rocket launchers, helicopters, and fighter planes to a variety of Caribbean and Latin American nations.

As Ellis noted in Latin America and the Asian Giants, a book published in 2016 on Latin America’s evolving ties with China and India, Venezuela provided China with its first opportunity to sell sophisticated military systems in the region in 2005.

Within a few years, China then began selling weapons to Bolivia, which earlier had received Chinese donations of rifles and anti-aircraft weapons, and Ecuador – under a policy that appeared designed to support Venezuela and fellow left-leaning socialist or populist regimes, which had banded together in an eight-nation, anti-U.S. “Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas.”

But in recent years China’s arms sales have expanded not only in those three nations but also across the continent.

While in earlier decades the U.S. was a major supplier of weapons to military regimes in Latin America, China now has the advantage by offering low prices for weapons with few strings attached.

The United States is now prohibited by law from selling weapons to a number of Latin American countries, including Venezuela.

Power grid investments

Regarding weapons sales to Venezuela, Ellis told RFA that “China…has effectively supplanted the Russians in the past two years as the country’s major arms supplier.”

“And China has often beaten out Russian competitors in Peru and elsewhere,” noted Evan Ellis some years ago.

As an article by Allan Nixon published 2016 in The Diplomat made clear, the arms sales have to be seen in the context of China’s long-term goal of achieving great-power status and influence.

In recent years, China has regularly deployed military forces to the South American region to conduct combat exercises and humanitarian missions.

And while the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has yet to establish alliances or basing agreements in the hemisphere, its 2015 white paper on Chinese defense strategy lists the protection of its global commercial interests as an important mission for the People’s Liberation Army.

Now China is making a bid to dominate “electrical connectivity” in Latin America, a subject covered by Evan Ellis and published recently in a China Brief on the website of the U.S.-based Jamestown Foundation.

Ellis’s article published on May 21 shows how Chinese companies have become involved in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity across the region, expanding its position in activities key to the “connectivity” underlying Latin American economies. 

This approach also extends to the construction and operation of ports, roads, railroads, telecommunications, ecommerce, and other infrastructure.

But not everything has worked out as planned.

A Chinese-backed transcontinental railway meant to link Brazil, on the Atlantic Coast, with Peru on the Pacific Coast triggered criticism because it failed to take environmental concerns into account. It would pass through sensitive ecosystems in the Amazon region.

At the same time, a transcontinental highway through Brazil has been plagued by bad construction work.

According to “The World Mind,” an American University website focused on relations with Latin America, the highway project, begun in 2006, was never fully completed because parts of it weren’t structurally sound. Some sections remain damaged or impassable.

 Dan Southerland is RFA’s founding Executive Editor.

Like more than 100 areas in the Mekong River region earmarked as development zones, the Yatai Shwe Kokko Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Myanmar was promoted as a way to spur economic growth and deliver material benefits to the local community.

But instead the Chinese-backed U.S. $15 billion real estate mega-project along the Thaungyin River in southeastern Kayin state has gained notoriety in recent months as a bastion of illegal activity, according to a report released Wednesday by the Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), an independent research outfit that studies transnational organized crime networks.

Shwe Kokko New City, as the area is called, was funded by Hong Kong-registered developer Yatai International Holding Group in partnership with the Chit Lin Myaing Company owned by the Kayin State Border Guard Force (BGF), an ethnic Karen force aligned with the Myanmar military. It includes the Myanmar Yatai Shwe Kokko Special Economic Zone.

But the area became a hub for illicit activity because of weak national laws, a diffusion of responsibility, and a lack of development plans, says the 76-page report titled “Zoned Out: A Comprehensive Impact Evaluation of Mekong Economic Development Zones.”

The study identified 110 official and unofficial foreign-invested EDZs in the Mekong region, including 40 in Cambodia, 15 in Laos, 20 in Myanmar, 16 in Thailand, and 19 in Vietnam, and used publicly available information to assess them in terms of economic development, illicit activity, and geopolitics.

To assess the impact of EDZs, the researchers examined both quantitative indicators derived from personal activity intelligence, including mobile phone location data, change detection in satellite imagery, and nightlight data, along with qualitative research on illicit activity and geopolitical trends.

Because of the strong correlation between nightlight data and economic activity, the researchers measured nighttime luminosity in the EDZs to objectively evaluate the relative economic performance of the zones. They also used information from publicly available reports that detailed illegal activities, including corruption, environmental degradation, land conflict, drug trafficking, and wildlife trafficking.

Shwe Kokko is not the only example of an EDZ gone wrong. The study found that while the establishment of the zones speeds up development, the EDZs themselves can facilitate adverse outcomes that undermine economic growth benefits.

They also found that limited data access concerning the Mekong region’s EDZs can hurt host governments and local communities, and that collaboration among stakeholders from government, grassroots organizations, the private sector, and civil society will increase transparency and better match objectives to end results.

“Without proper management, EDZs can serve as staging grounds for multiple types of transnational illicit activity and geopolitical machinations,” the report says. “Further complicating the situation is a paucity of accessible data, leaving policymakers and observers alike struggling to draw informed conclusions on the effects of zones.”

Lack of regulatory oversight

In the case of the Shwe Kokko SEZ First, the developers allegedly received a 70-year land lease with the possibility of extending to 99 years, violating Myanmar law which limits lease terms to 50 years for official Economic Development Zones (EDZs). Then the BGF confiscated land for the site, but shortchanged residents paying them only U.S. $1,600 an acre — half the amount they sought.

A lack of regulatory oversight enabled the illegal land confiscations along with Chinese gang activities once the project had been built, illegal casinos, money laundering, and environmental degradation, the report says. It also notes that She Kailun, Yatai International’s China-born chairman, had a previous conviction for operating an illegal lottery business that earned nearly U.S. $300 million.

In response, Myanmar’s civilian-led government announced plans in January to address alleged irregularities, including the land confiscations, illicit activities, and local concerns about the impact of the casinos.

The government also cracked down on Chinese criminal groups in the area and requested that the national military enforce the law in Shwe Kokko. When Myanmar’s military overthrew the government in a Feb. 1 coup, it became unclear what would happen next in Shwe Kokko.

“A combination of legal ambiguity, limited host government enforcement, and poor zone management have created numerous negative externalities in Shwe Kokko, including increased criminal activity, decreased geopolitical power, and environmental degradation — all without delivering economic gain for the region itself,” the report says.

Aung Naing Oo, minister of investment and foreign economic relations under the State Administrative Council, the official name of Myanmar’s military government, told RFA that the Myanmar Investment Commission had examined and approved the Shwe Kokko project during the previous civilian-led government, but determined that its scope was much larger than the original proposal.

“Then we checked the project again and ordered that business activities not included in original proposal be stopped, he said. “Because the project was much larger and there were other issues such as land use, we ordered the project to be halted since previous government. They were ordered to do only what had been approved.”

“The activities that were not included in the proposals were the building of hotels among other [sites],” he said. “We asked them to stop, [and] the order has remained unchanged…We have supervised them very closely about the suspension.”

The report details other case studies of other zones plagued by illicit activities, such as the Boten SEZ in Laos, rife with illegal sales of wildlife, such as endangered pangolins, and the Golden Triangle EDZ, also in Laos, a hub for a hub for illicit drug and wildlife trafficking.

An official in the Special Economic Zone Control Department of the Lao Ministry of Planning and Investment told RFA that he could not comment on whether there is illicit activity in the Boten and Golden Triangle SEZs.

China ‘used its influence’

Cambodia’s Sihanoukville SEZ, considered part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, suffered from high crimes rates among other factors, the report said.

“The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) promises benefits for local communities. In the case of the Sihanoukville SEZ, however, development was greatly undercut by increasing crime rates, rising rents, overwhelmed infrastructure, and the suppression of local culture in the city of Sihanoukville,” the report says.

“China allegedly used its influence to pressure Cambodia to ban online gambling as part of a broader campaign against gambling by China. This ban further disrupted the city of Sihanoukville by devastating the local gaming economy and causing thousands to leave the city,” it said.

The Cambodian Investment Board did not respond to an email request for comments on the report’s findings concerning the Sihanoukville SEZ. Emails sent to two contact addresses listed on the website of the Cambodian Special Economic Zone Board were undeliverable. Both government agencies deal with investment projects in SEZs.

To improve the impacts of EDZs in the Mekong region, the researchers recommend the development of open, centralized repositories of information on EDZs, the use of emerging technologies such as nightlight capture, satellite imagery, and machine learning to create monitoring processes, and the convening of cross-sector interdisciplinary task forces to address negative impacts.

“Through collaboration and data-driven analysis, host governments can ensure that EDZs serve the needs of the host country economy and the local population,” the report says.

Additional reporting by RFA’s Lao and Myanmar services.