Day: July 6, 2021

Cambodia’s government has bought 3,000 coffins made in Thailand to prepare for COVID-19 deaths, a move that has angered residents who say Prime Minister Hun Sen should be more concerned with spending resources to help the living, sources in the country told RFA.

Cambodia was nearly untouched by the coronavirus for all of 2020, reporting daily cases of zero or single digits until it broke into the double digits in late February this year. From then, average cases rose into the high triple digits by early May. Now Cambodia is averaging almost 1,000 new cases per day.

Cambodia has confirmed more than 55,000 cases and 748 deaths, nearly 500 of which occurred in the past month.

The government’s preemptive purchase of the coffins was revealed Tuesday by Banteay Meanchey Deputy Governor Ngor Menchruon and reported in local media.

But sources told RFA that the government should have at least looked for domestic producers and buying them from abroad shows their incompetence.

“Now that our people have food shortages, the government should provide us with food and money, not waste it to buy thousands of coffins from another country to be prepared for our deaths,” Pov Na, a resident in the western province of Battambang, told RFA.

“People cannot work, and we need help, and the government should be solving our immediate problems. If they want coffins, they should make them domestically using confiscated wood,” she said, referring to wood taken from operations that illegally harvest timber from protected forest areas.

“They cannot even build their own coffins? How come they are leading the country?” Pov Na said.

In Art, a trader from Banteay Meanchey province, told RFA that people today are afraid of contracting COVID-19 and need the government’s help to provide healthcare, education, food and livelihoods.

In a climate where so many live in poverty under crippling debt, the government should not spend money on Thai coffins, he said.

“Living people should be the priority. Why are they focusing on coffins? The priority should be on educating the people on COVID-19 prevention measures. The living have no food to eat and they owe so much to the banks. That is what the authorities should pay attention to,” said In Art.

RFA attempted to reach Ministry of Health spokesperson O Vandin, Ministry of Economy and Finance spokesman Meas Sok Sen San and Banteay Meanchey Deputy Governor Ngor Menchruon for comment on Tuesday but calls to all three went unanswered.

Seng Somony, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Cults and Religions, told RFA he could not comment on the order for 3,000 coffins from Thailand, but he defended the Khmer practice of preparing coffins in advance, sometimes before the people they are intended for have died.

“The Khmer people have a belief that if children prepare a mature-wood coffin for their parents, those children earn merit for their good virtues,” Seng Somony said.

“This preparation is a deed of good virtue, so don’t be confused. Some people, while they are still living, even build a stupa for their own bodies or ashes. There is a scripture saying that those who build a stupa or coffin to prepare for their own death will have long lives,” he said.

Pech Pisey, President of the Cambodia office of Transparency International, told RFA that he supported the purchase, but his organization also understands why people have complaints.

“Based on the number of deaths we have now, I don’t think we are short on coffins,” he said.

“If too many people die though, yes we should be ordering them from abroad, but if we could have produced these domestically, we should have ordered them from within the country,” said Pech Pisey.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Sok Ry Sum. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Nearly 500 people in northwest Myanmar’s strife-torn Kalay township are believed to have died of COVID-19 over the past 30 days, as the country struggles with a third wave of the coronavirus.

Myanmar’s efforts to contain the coronavirus were dealt a substantial blow on Feb. 1, when the military orchestrated a coup d’état, claiming that a landslide victory by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) in the country’s November 2020 elections was the result of widespread voter fraud—launching the country into chaos.

The junta has yet to provide evidence for its claims and has violently suppressed mass demonstrations against the takeover, killing at least 894 people and arresting more than 5,000, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a Thailand-based rights group.

Tens of thousands of people have walked off the job to join the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) in opposition to the military, bringing services such as health care to a near standstill. In Myanmar’s remote border regions, where residents have formed People’s Defense Force (PDF) militias and engaged in fierce fighting with government troops, access to medical services is even more curtailed.

According to the latest statement from the junta’s Ministry of Health and Sports, more than 160,000 have been infected with COVID-19 and more than 3,400 have died since March 2020, when the virus was first reported in Myanmar.

Aid workers and local residents told RFA’s Myanmar Service that they now estimate the death toll over the past 30 days in the Sagaing region’s Kalay township—a population center of around 400,000 people that has been the scene of some of the worst fighting between the military and the PDF in recent months—has surpassed 500.

A Kalay resident told RFA that among the dead are 270 members of the ethnic Chin minority and 100 Bamars, or members of the country’s ethnic majority. In the first five days of July, 136 people have died, the resident said.

Between June 1 and July 6, Kalay’s cemeteries have been overflowing since about 500 bodies were brought in from the countryside. 

Though it is not confirmed that all of the deaths were caused by COVID-19, the causes of death are in most cases symptoms of COVID-19, including fever, nausea and vomiting, according to local aid groups and Many family members of the dead have tested positive for COVID-19. 

On Tuesday, a crematorium in Kalay was overwhelmed when 14 bodies arrived before noon.

“There are more than 10 bodies here and the crematorium can’t cope with the situation. Six bodies have so far been cremated and there are eight more left. The death toll has risen and so far, there were 14 bodies today,” Kyaw Htay, a Kalay resident told RFA.

“More might come in the evening. Those who died at home and those who died at the hospital, plus those who died in nearby villages, all end up here,” Kyaw Htay said.

According to estimates, the average COVID-19 death toll has risen to between 20 and 30 a day in Kalay since the last week of June.

“To be frank, the situation is very bad. There is no cure for this disease. COVID centers don’t have enough health workers or volunteers,” an elderly Kalay resident told RFA.

“There isn’t enough oxygen, so we have to find it ourselves. There were vaccinations given sporadically but a lot of people are just taking home remedies,” the man said.

Residents had been able to order oxygen from Myanmar’s two largest cities, Yangon and Mandalay, but this is now no longer possible, he said.

A week ago, the cost of a 15-liter cylinder of oxygen has risen from 130,000 kyat (U.S. $1 = 1646 kyat) a week ago to about 180,000, and that of a 40-liter cylinder has risen from 250,000 to 350,000. 

To address the need for more oxygen, donations from various sources will go toward setting up a small plant in Kalay, capable of producing 70 40-liter tanks of oxygen each day and it is expected to be operational by the end of the week.

But residents told RFA that this will be nowhere near enough, when patients with severe symptoms need six to 12 tanks per day, and the town needs about 1,000 each day for all its patients.

“Oxygen is so hard to find, and it is now scarcer than gold here,” a resident who declined to be named told RFA.

“As soon as families of patients get up in the morning, they have to go around the city looking for oxygen tanks distributed by charity groups. It’s been going on like that for several weeks now,” the resident said.

Beyond the lack of oxygen supplies, the lack of health workers is another major difficulty Kalay has to navigate through this health crisis.

RFA contacted Win Cho Cho Aung, the deputy director of the Kalay District Public Health Department, who said he was not authorized to discuss the situation in Kalay.

“I’m not the district Health Chief. He’s now at the hospital and he himself is on sick leave. You cannot contact him,” he said

In neighboring Chin state’s Tunzang and Falam townships, 57 people died of COVID-19 symptoms over the past month. Tunzang has a confirmed caseload of 613 people with 21 deaths, while Falam’s caseload was 359 with 36 deaths

Myanmar’s third wave of COVID-19 crossed over from India, which shares a border with the Sagaing region, in early May, when it arrived in Tunzang, spreading to other townships and villages from there. 

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, Myanmar was reporting fewer than 500 new COVID 19 cases per day until June 19. It surpassed 1,000 cases per day just ten days later, then breached 2,000 per day on July 1. On July 5, the country reported almost 3,000 new cases.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Eugene Whong. 

The United States and India reached out on Tuesday to greet Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama on his 86^th birthday—a gesture likely to anger Beijing, which regards the exiled spiritual leader as a separatist working to split Tibet from Chinese rule.

Writing in a Tweet, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—whose country has clashed with China over disputed border areas in the last year—said he had greeted the Dalai Lama personally by phone to convey his good wishes.

“We wish him a long and healthy life,” Modi wrote.

It was a rare public statement of personal support from a leader of India, which has traditionally tried to balance its decades-long support for the Dalai Lama and a large Tibetan exile community in the country with concern for stable relations with Beijing.

In Washington, State Department spokesperson Ned Price on Tuesday conveyed birthday greetings from the United States, saying, “Today, we wish a Happy Birthday to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whose grace and compassion have served as an inspiration to all of us.”

“We commend his dedication to the global Tibetan community and to all those around the world who share in his important message of peace and kindness and his commitment to equality, and importantly to human dignity,” Price said.

“We join all of those in wishing His Holiness many more years to come.”

Also writing in a Tweet, House Speaker of the U.S. Congress Nancy Pelosi sent her own birthday greetings to the Dalai Lama, calling the exiled spiritual leader’s birthday an opportunity to celebrate “the message of hope and spiritual guidance that he has shared with the world.”

“And it is an opportunity for all people to recommit to ensuring the Tibetan people can practice their religion, speak their language and celebrate their culture freely without interference or intimidation from Beijing.”

“May his birthday bring happiness, health and security to all,” Pelosi wrote.

Good wishes from Taiwan

Birthday greetings also came from Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen, who thanked the Dalai Lama in a Tweet “for teaching us the importance of coming together to help one another through this [COVID-19] pandemic.”

Taiwan’s foreign ministry in July 2020 said the self-governing island would welcome a visit by the Dalai Lama in his role as a spiritual leader “in accordance with the principle of mutual respect and at a time of convenience for both sides.”

A visit to Taiwan by the Dalai Lama would be his first since 2009 and would certainly anger Beijing, which claims democratic Taiwan as a renegade province and has threatened to take it by force.

The Dalai Lama fled Tibet into exile in India in the midst of a failed 1959 Tibetan national uprising against rule by China, which marched into the formerly independent Himalayan country in 1950.

Displays by Tibetans of the Dalai Lama’s photo, public celebrations of his birthday, and the sharing of his teachings on mobile phones or other social media are often harshly punished.

Chinese authorities maintain a tight grip on Tibet and on Tibetan-populated regions of western China, restricting Tibetans’ political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity, and subjecting Tibetans to imprisonment, torture, and extrajudicial killings.

Reported by RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime could not have stated it more clearly in a report released last month: Production of synthetic drugs is surging in Southeast Asia.

Every day somewhere in the region, it seems, authorities are making major seizures of methamphetamines. On June 19 alone, Thai police intercepted 1.2 tons of heroin and methamphetamines destined for Malaysia; two weeks later, they seized 300 kilograms of crystal meth and 140 kilos of heroin.

The long-term economic ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and an intractable crisis caused by the coup d’état in Myanmar on Feb. 1 will exacerbate the threat from the regional production and trade in illicit narcotics. And that will pose an enormous challenge to governance, anti-corruption, and rule of law in even the strongest states in Southeast Asia, let alone the more poorly governed ones.

According to the recent report by the U.N.’s counter-narcotics office (UNODC), seizures of methamphetamines across Southeast Asia went from under 10,000 kilograms in 2011 to over 140,000 kilograms in 2020 – a 14-fold increase.

There’s no sign of this letting up. In the first two months of 2021, Thai officials seized 14 million pills.

Meanwhile, the street price of meth has fallen to its lowest level in a decade. That means only one thing: while more is being seized, even more is getting through.

Golden Triangle

Myanmar’s border region with Thailand has been the epicenter of regional meth production since 2014, after Chinese officials cracked down on domestic meth production.

Since then, there have been fundamental changes. Among these, major criminal groups are setting up shop in Shan and Kachin States.

The labs are also getting larger, churning out millions of pills per production run.

In addition, more precursors are being sourced locally. 

In 2014, UNODC notes, there were only three major varieties of synthetic drugs being produced in the region, but in 2019, there were 28.

Even the arrest of major syndicate heads like Tse Chi Lop, the head of “Sam Gor,” in the Netherlands in January 2021, had no discernible impact; others have quickly filled the vacuum. 

Pandemic’s impact

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the sales of illicit drugs, for several reasons.

First, it has helped to develop new markets. With border closures and gummed-up global supply chains resulting in a sharp decrease in shipping and flights, syndicates have had to reduce exports to more lucrative markets in Australia, Japan, and the West. In their stead, they have developed new markets in Southeast Asia.

From May to December 2020, after COVID lockdowns were imposed, 18,651 kilos of crystal meth and 25.5 million meth tablets were seized in Thailand, Myanmar, and Malaysia alone, according to the U.N.

Second, few governments are looking adept at this time because the pandemic has taken a toll on governance in many countries. If nothing else, the governments are consumed with vaccine rollouts, which have been very slow, so that they can restart their economies.

Remember that every economy in the region, except for Vietnam, contracted in 2020. Economic forecasts for 2021 by the Asian Development Bank and other international financial institutions were over confident. They failed to take into account the slow rollout of vaccines and the rapid spread of the highly contagious Delta strain of the coronavirus.

Most governments can usually cope with one or two crises at a time; a third overwhelms them. And they’ll have to do this with a smaller tax base due to the economic contractions. 

Third, for the sake of economic growth, governments will turn a blind eye to the trade in the licit chemical precursors moving across their borders, even though these should be closely scrutinized.

Fourth, we need to consider the long-term economic impacts of the pandemic. In a region known for some of the highest rates of economic disparity, prolonged lockdowns have led to the collapse of the middle class.

Millions of people will fall into poverty. The pandemic has increased the marginalization of groups like migrant workers and ethnic minorities.

Impact of Myanmar coup

The border regions that are contested between the ethnic armed organizations and the Burmese military (the Tatmadaw) is where the vast majority of the region’s methamphetamines are produced. As such, the February 2021 coup will have profound implications for the regional supply of illicit narcotics.

While many of Myanmar’s Ethnic Armed Insurgencies (EAOs) have joined the National Unity Government in exile, and have stepped up attacks on the Tatmadaw, some have not, hoping that the junta, facing multiple fronts, will be more willing to cut autonomy deals.

More important, they expect that the internationally sanctioned and cash-strapped junta will allow them to churn out illegal narcotics, getting their share in the process.

Even EAOs opposed to the junta and supportive of NUG [Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government] are also likely to allow the trade to grow within their borders so that they can tax it, in order to support their war efforts. With an influx of civilians from the cities, organizing the People’s Defense Forces requires money. Either way, a surge in production is expected – and not only in the manufacturing of synthetic drugs.

The UNODC is concerned that the coup could result in a reversal of progress in combating opium and heroin production.

The agency estimated that in 2020, only 405 metric tons of opium were produced in Myanmar, half the production in 2013. Recent seizures have included large amounts of heroin. So while production may be down from historic levels, it is not irreversible, especially with the collapse of the Myanmar economy. 

Governance under threat

So what does this mean for regional governance and security?

First of all, the amount of money is breathtaking. UNODC estimates that criminal gangs in the region raked in more than $100 billion in profits in 2020, up from $71 billion in 2019, between drug trafficking, smuggling, money laundering, and other crime.

To put that into perspective, that’s more than the GDP of Myanmar and Laos combined, and one third the gross domestic product of Vietnam’s booming economy. 

That volume of money can have deleterious effects; a corrupting influence on state institutions, law enforcement, customs, and the courts. One only has to look at Honduras or Guatemala to understand the long-term impact of narco-money on state institutions.

And in poorly governed or contested regions, the ability to root out drug syndicates, who thrive on weak governance, is a decades-long effort. The longer syndicates operate in a region, the harder it will be to dislodge them.

Finally, governments under pressure to respond look to easy but performative solutions, which both fail to stem the problem and undermine the rule of law.

The use of security forces such as extrajudicial hit squads in Thailand under Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra or in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte are cases in point. In neither case did drug trafficking decrease; just the opposite. Instead, it quickly undermined the rule of law, due process, and trust in the government and security forces.

Once political leaders unleash their security forces and turn them into vigilantes, it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle; and it’s all too easy for them to begin to use those hit squads against political rivals, all in the name of their war on drugs.

Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University, or BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

A court in Myanmar on Tuesday rejected objections by the defense team of deposed country leader Aung San Suu Kyi to the introduction of prosecution evidence against her on a sedition charge, arguing that it failed to follow established judicial procedure, a member of her legal team said.

The former state counselor, ousted and arrested with other top political leaders during the coup by the Myanmar military on Feb. 1 faces seven charges, including sedition, which her lawyers say are trumped-up offenses to discredit her. Ex-president Win Myint also has been charged with sedition.

Military forces overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government based on accusations that November 2020 landslide elections won by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) were marred by voter fraud. The junta, which has not produced evidence of fraudulent elections, has led a violent crackdown on protesters opposed to its rule.

The junta has charged Aung San Suu Kyi with seven criminal offenses for allegedly violating the colonial-era Official Secrets Act and for corruption, sedition, violation of the Telecommunications Law, possession of unlicensed walkie-talkie radios, and two violations of protocols set up to contain the spread of coronavirus.

During the hearing, the prosecution submitted as evidence a letter dated June 23 from the Union Election Commission to the Naypyidaw Region Council. But Aung San Suu Kyi’s lawyers objected because they said that the letter was not included on a list of evidence to be submitted to the court when the case was filed. The court rejected the objection and allowed the hearing to proceed.

In all, the plaintiff and five witnesses for the prosecution appeared at the hearing regarding the charges under and Section 505(b) of the Penal Code covering the sedition charge, and Section 25 of the National Disaster Management Law for the violation of COVID-19 prevention measures.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s defense team requested an adjournment of the examination of prosecution witness scheduled to appear Tuesday at a special trial court set up in Naypyidaw to hear cases against her because lawyers said they had to wait for a decision from the higher court regarding an amendment on the charge of sedition, also known as incitement, said lawyer Min Min Soe.

“If the defendant’s amendment is upheld by the Supreme Court, then the testimonies heard today will mean nothing,” Min Min Soe said. “Therefore, we asked the court to make an appropriate decision on this case, but the court rejected our request for an adjournment and decided to go ahead with the testimony from prosecution witness Soe Soe Shwe.”

Min Min Soe said the evidence presented by the prosecution on Tuesday was a list of names of the members of the NLD’s Central Executive Committee. It was not immediately clear how that list would be used in court.

At a previous hearing on June 29, the court dismissed an objection by the legal defense team to documents presented by military prosecutors as evidence in her trial on the sedition charge, though her attorneys pledged to fight the decision in an appeal.

The incitement charge under Section 505(b) carries a maximum two-year prison sentence.

Before her trial on Tuesday, Aung San Suu Kyi met with her lawyers for about 30 minutes.

Min Min Soe said the deposed 76-year-old leader appeared healthy and that reports on social media that she had contracted the COVID-19 virus were not true.

“She has had her vaccinations against COVID,” the lawyer said, adding that Aung San Suu Kyi requested that Myanmar citizens help each other by heeding pandemic restrictions.”

Aung San Suu Kyi has been kept under house arrest in the capital Naypyidaw since the Feb. 1 coup. Her hearings initially were held via videoconference beginning on Feb. 16.

The military regime converted a building in Naypyidaw into a special closed court for Aung Sun Suu Kyi’s hearings now held in person every Monday and Tuesday since June 14.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

A Vietnamese rights activist wanted by police for writings opposing the government was arrested by police in Hanoi on Tuesday and quickly transferred to the custody of authorities in his nearby hometown, the activist’s partner said.

Don Nam Trung was arrested in the early morning hours of July 6 by a large group of police officers who broke into the house he shared with his girlfriend Nguyen Thi Anh Tuyet, the young woman told RFA’s Vietnamese Service.

“This morning while I was sleeping, I heard dogs barking. I went down to the ground floor and saw around 20 security officers both in uniform and plain clothes coming up the stairs,” Tuyet said. “When they saw me, they asked me to come downstairs to meet with them,” she said.

After arresting Trung and taking his set of keys to her house, police then searched the entire house, she said.

“They looked through every room in my three-floor house, including my child’s, and took away some of Trung’s papers,” Tuyet said, adding that officers showed her a search warrant and a document saying that Trung had been arrested on charges under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Penal Code.

Trung’s and Tuyet’s movements had been watched by plainclothes police for at least two days before his arrest, Tuyet said.

After his arrest, Trung was sent back to the Red River Delta city of Nam Dinh, about 85 km (52 miles) from the capital Hanoi.

Article 117 of Vietnam’s 2015 Criminal Code imposes penalties for “creating, storing, and disseminating information, documents, items, and publications opposing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” and is frequently used by authorities to stifle peaceful critics of the country’s one-party communist government.

Those convicted of crimes charged under Article 117 can be sentenced to from five to 20 years in prison. Details of the specific charges made against Trung were not immediately available.

Born in 1981, Trung had taken part in several social movements and had spoken out against official corruption in his writings on social media. He had also posted criticisms of the build-operate-transfer (BOT) highways that Vietnam has adopted in recent years, sparking rare protests over toll collections described by many motorists as unfair.

Trung had earlier served a 14-month prison term after being arrested in 2014 on a charge of “abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to violate the interests of the State and the legitimate rights and interests of organizations and individuals” under Article 258 of the 1999 Penal Code.

Harsh forms of persecution

With Vietnam’s media all following Communist Party orders, “the only sources of independently-reported information are bloggers and independent journalists, who are being subjected to ever-harsher forms of persecution,” the press freedoms watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says in its 2021 Press Freedoms Index.

Measures taken against them now include assaults by plainclothes police, RSF said in its report, which placed Vietnam at 175 out of 180 countries surveyed worldwide, a ranking unchanged from last year.

“To justify jailing them, the Party resorts to the criminal codes, especially three articles under which ‘activities aimed at overthrowing the government,’ ‘anti-state propaganda’ and ‘abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to threaten the interests of the state’ are punishable by long prison terms,” the rights group said.

Vietnam’s already low tolerance of dissent deteriorated sharply last year with a spate of arrests of independent journalists, publishers, and Facebook personalities as authorities continued to stifle critics in the run-up to the ruling Communist Party Congress in January. But arrests continue in 2021.

Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Richard Finney.