Day: August 8, 2021

ASEAN’s newly appointed special envoy to Myanmar will insist on meeting with jailed politicians and members of the opposition, he told reporters Saturday in his first public remarks about the role.

A plan to visit Myanmar was “in the pipeline,” but Second Foreign Minister of Brunei Erywan Yusof did not give a time frame, citing a need to consult all countries and actors concerned.

“This time around, it’ll be a more substantive discussion on the five-point consensus, particularly cessation of violence, dialogue, and mediation,” Erywan told reporters in Bandar Seri Begawan, the Bruneian capital.

The five-point consensus “clearly states that it will involve all parties concerned. And that’s something that we will uphold. Because that was what the leaders agreed, with Myanmar included, so there is no two ways about it,” he said when asked if he would speak with toppled civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Erywan is one of two Bruneian officials who visited Naypyidaw in May to meet Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the architect of the Feb. 1 coup, and present him names of envoy candidates.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations hammered out its five-point plan on post-coup Myanmar at a special summit in Jakarta in April, calling for appointment of a special envoy; provision of humanitarian assistance; cessation of violence; dialogue among all parties; and for the envoy to mediate that dialogue.

Addressing criticism of the time it took to begin implementing the plan – he was named envoy just this week – Erywan said that in addition to operating by consensus, ASEAN had prioritized naming an envoy that Myanmar’s military leaders would accept.

“We wanted to avoid the same situation that was faced by the U.N. Secretary General’s Special Envoy on Myanmar,” he said, referring to Swiss diplomat Christine Schraner Burgener, who has not been allowed into Burma.

“Whilst we can appoint anybody … what use would that be if Myanmar is not willing to, or not comfortable, and thus not willing to allow or to talk to them,” he said.

Humanitarian assistance

While he did not give a date for his maiden trip to Myanmar as special envoy, he said that ASEAN was moving “immediately” on the provision of humanitarian assistance and medical equipment.

Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi has been in touch with international agencies and those inside Myanmar, and would be staging a donor conference not later than the second week of August, he said.

He also sought to tamp down expectations about what the envoy could accomplish.

“A lot of the hype is that I’m going to solve the situation,” Erywan said. “[T]his is a Myanmar-led and Myanmar-owned initiative, outcome. All I can do is only facilitate and help,” he said.

On Wednesday, Burmese political analyst Than Soe Naing cast doubt about who the ASEAN envoy could negotiate with, since officials from the elected civilian government were now in jail.

“The military council has put everybody concerned into the prison and filed various charges,” Than Soe Naing told RFA’s Myanmar Service.

On Aug. 1, coup leader Min Aung Hlaing appointed himself prime minister of Myanmar and announced that elections would not take place until 2023.

Six months earlier, the military overthrew the democratically elected government, claiming voter fraud had led to a landslide victory for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in the country’s November 2020 election.

The junta has violently suppressed demonstrations calling for a return to civilian rule, killing some 950 people over six months. Thirty-two have died under suspicious circumstances while undergoing interrogation by security forces, according to previous RFA reports.

A Burmese human rights attorney greeted Wednesday’s announcement of the envoy with optimism.

“[H]e could bring something to the table, instead of the continuing stalemate,” Min Lwin Oo said. “I think the ASEAN envoy needs to execute the tasks, such as pushing for the release of detained leaders.”

But an international relations expert in Jakarta said Erywan was chosen to mollify ASEAN members who are not invested in human rights.

“He has not been chosen for his ability to navigate complex issues in Myanmar, but to come to terms with other ASEAN members that are half-hearted in their efforts, or even actively rejecting efforts to find a solution rooted in democracy and human rights,” said Dinna Prapto Raharja, of Synergy Policies, a Jakarta-based think-tank.

Among ASEAN members, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam are one-party states and Brunei is a sultanate. Thailand is governed by a former coup leader who awarded Min Aung Hlaing a royal decoration in 2018.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

The United States on Saturday condemned a thwarted plot to attack Myanmar’s U.N. ambassador in New York, saying it fits a “disturbing pattern” of authoritarian leaders and their supporters seeking to persecute opponents around the world.

 

Two Myanmar citizens have been arrested in New York state for plotting with an arms dealer in Thailand — who sells weapons to the Burmese military — to kill or injure Myanmar’s U.N. ambassador, U.S. authorities said Friday.

 

Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, who represents Myanmar’s elected civilian government that was overthrown by the military in February, told Reuters on Wednesday that a threat had been made against him and U.S. authorities had stepped up his security.

 

The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on Saturday that the threat “fits a disturbing pattern of authoritarian leaders and their supporters reaching across the globe … to persecute and repress journalists, activists, and others who dare speak or stand against them.”

 

Thomas-Greenfield cited Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, a Belarusian athlete who refused to return home from the Tokyo Olympics and sought refuge in Poland, and a thwarted plot by several Iranians to kidnap a New York journalist and rights activist who was critical of Iran.

 

“These are only the most recent acts of transnational repression, and they must be met with the condemnation of the world and with full and certain accountability,” Thomas-Greenfield said in a statement.

 

 

Source: Voice of America

In September, Lam Hong Le faces what may be the last step in his deportation process. He was told to obtain a Vietnamese passport and bring it with him to his next hearing on September 8 in Yuba, California.

“I left Vietnam 42 years ago,” said Le, 53, who fears a difficult life ahead. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, with its capital in the northern city of Hanoi, considers Vietnamese from the south who fled the communist regime to be traitors.

Le is one of many Southeast Asian refugees who faced a rough landing upon arrival in the United States in the years after the fall of Saigon in 1975. His trajectory ended with a 1990 shooting at a California birthday party. Le was convicted of murder when he was 24. Sentenced to 34 years to life, prison authorities paroled Le and on December 23, 2019, released him from San Quentin State Prison into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

After his release, Le began working at a San Francisco homeless shelter, which deemed the Oakland resident an essential worker during the pandemic. He’s up for a promotion.

 

Now, to avoid deportation to Vietnam, Le is seeking a pardon from California Governor Gavin Newsom. In 2019, the governor pardoned several Cambodians  and Vietnamese.  Just months ago, in May, Newsom pardoned two Laotians with life stories similar to Le’s.

 

But Newsom’s past performance is no indicator of Le’s future. A spokesman for Newsom’s office on August 4 responded to a request for comments by VOA Vietnamese, saying via email that the office “cannot discuss individual clemency applications but can ensure that each will receive careful and exclusive consideration.”

 

Petitions and protests

 

Le’s case is the topic of petitions and protests in the San Francisco Bay Area. Satsuki Ina, an activist who is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in community trauma, told VOA Vietnamese that Le “is someone who we really feel deserves to be protected.”

Vietnam War refugees like Le, who came to the U.S. before July 12, 1995 – the date on which Washington and Hanoi officially reestablished a relationship upended by the war – were supposed to be protected under a bilateral agreement signed in 2008.

 

But President Donald Trump’s administration singled out pre-1995 refugees with criminal records for deportation to Vietnam in a November 2020 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the U.S. and Vietnam.

 

Representative Alan Lowenthal, a California Democrat, criticized  the MOU with Vietnam as “morally disturbing,” saying it violated “clear promises the U.S. made to these refugees after the Vietnam War.”

 

Le said he shouldn’t be sent back to Vietnam where he has no connections.

 

His story is echoed throughout the U.S.  as the nation’s policy on immigrant offenders undergoes revisions. At a time of increased fear in Asian American communities because of COVID-19-related backlash and hate crimes, the deportations increase the uneasiness.

Violent past

 

Large-scale immigration from Vietnam to the United States began at the end of the Vietnam War, when the fall of Saigon led to the U.S.-sponsored evacuation of an estimated 125,000 refugees, according to a report by the Migration Policy Institute. As the humanitarian crisis and displacement of people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos intensified, the U.S. admitted more refugees and their families under the 1980 Refugee Act, which amended the earlier Immigration and Nationality Act and the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act.

 

Le was 12 and his younger brother Mickey Le, 10, in 1979 when they left Ho Chi Minh City, which had been known as Saigon, without their parents. After a year in a Hong Kong refugee camp, the brothers arrived in Los Angeles in 1981. They were among more than 231,000 Vietnamese who arrived in the U.S. in the early 1980s.

 

Most Vietnamese refugees entered the U.S. through sponsorships just like Le and his brother. The sponsors included churches, individual families and companies with links to refugees through Vietnamese employees, according to the Online Archive of California.

 

The refugee settlement process assigned the brothers to different sponsors. Although Mickey settled in and adjusted to his American life, his older brother fled what he described as an abusive situation when he was 14. Le took refuge in a gang, a common story among southeast Asian refugees in the U.S.

 

Le was first imprisoned in 1986 when he was 19 years old for assault with a deadly weapon, a felony that carried a sentence of five years. He was released after serving two years. After murdering a member of a rival gang, he received a sentence of 34 years to life in 1990.

 

“I thought I was going to die there,” said Le, even though his sentence carried the possibility of parole.

 

Transformation and release

 

But Le transformed himself in California’s San Quentin State Prison, participating in educational programs, attending church and assisting other inmates.

 

In December 2019, the state’s Board of Parole Hearings granted him release, and he left prison after serving a total of 32 years.

 

Waiting for him at the gates were officers of ICE, who had been notified by state prison officials of Le’s release. He was remanded to an ICE detention center in Yuba County, where he was held for two months and eight days before being released for deportation proceedings.

 

While awaiting word from Newsom’s office, Le lives in a transitional house in Oakland, California, and works in nearby San Francisco.

 

“[Le] got a full-time job providing services to homeless people in San Francisco and he’s about ready to be promoted to supervisor because he’s done so well, being kind to people, and it’s gotten a lot of praise,” said Ina, who is a co-organizer of Tsuru for Solidarity, a Japanese American social justice organization focused on ending mass detention and “racist, inhumane immigration policies” in the U.S.

“He has volunteered as a street ambassador in Oakland’s Chinatown where he cleaned the streets and also escorted elders during the anti-Asian hate,” said Ina, who was born in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.

 

In May, Le used CPR to save the life of a homeless man who had overdosed, according to Ina.

 

Jeffrey Gray, the man revived by Le, told Bay Area TV station KTVU that he is “very thankful Le was there.”

 

Ina’s group is working with the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, a national rights group; the Sacramento Immigration Coalition and other advocacy groups to mobilize support to persuade Newsom to pardon Le.

 

‘His survival is in question’

 

“If deported, [Le] will face a hostile Vietnamese administration subject to government surveillance and stigmatized as a traitor. … He will face discrimination in finding employment and other opportunities to find a secure existence. With no family connections and meager resources, his survival is in question,” read a petition with more than 3,450 signatures.

 

Le, who is at risk of being deported soon, needs a direct pardon from the governor. Waiting for California’s pardon review process to decide on his case could take years, according to Ina.

 

Ina said that deporting Le is a violation of the original agreement protecting refugees who arrived before 1995. She hopes that Newsom will make an exception and expedite Le’s case.

 

“We feel like if we could get him a pardon, it would bring enough attention that other Southeast Asian, particularly Vietnamese refugees would be protected from being deported back,” said Ina.

 

After being released from ICE custody, Le reunited with his younger brother in Oakland in January 2020.

 

“We cried,” Mickey Le said of meeting his brother after nearly 30 years.

The brothers next met over the July Fourth holiday weekend in Los Angeles. Mickey, who is married with three children and runs a small business in Los Angeles, said, “I am so happy to see what [he] is doing to serve the community, and I hope that he would be able to stay in the U.S.”

 

Le said his life has been completely transformed with his release and his job.

 

“Now I have a chance to make a real change,” Le said, adding that he dreams of living a peaceful life and being able to pay back the community groups supporting him.

 

“I would like to get an opportunity to share my experience with children,” Le said, referring to his past as a young offender. “I would want to advise homeless children not to go the wrong way like I did.”

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America

Espionage between Taiwan and China has grown more sophisticated because of fewer people-to-people exchanges and more use of cyber tools, as relations between the two remain chill, analysts in Taipei say.

China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and insists that the two sides eventually unify, by force if needed. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, bolstered by domestic opinion polls, rejects unification and relations have soured since she took office in 2016. Analysts say those conditions make each side want to know more.

Attention has riveted on spying over the past week as Taipei prosecutors evaluate whether former Deputy Defense Minister Chang Che-ping and others made contact with a representative of the Central Military Commission — China’s national defense organization — and if so, whether the contact constituted spying.

Chang and his wife traveled to China, expenses paid, after he met a Hong Kong businessperson who the commission sent to Taiwan in 2012, Taiwan-based United Daily News reports.

The former deputy minister’s case would follow the 2019 flap over Chinese national Wang Liqiang, who defected to Australia and said he had secretly helped China in relation to Taiwan affairs. Earlier this year, a Taiwan court gave jail sentences to two former Taiwanese legislative aides for setting up a network of Chinese spies.

On the other side, Chinese security agencies say they have “foiled” hundreds of espionage cases involving spies from Taiwan and arrested several of them, China’s party-run Global Times news website reported in October.

“This is not an isolated operation, as the mainland carries out similar actions every year, given that the rising number of spying operations by Taiwan authorities in the Chinese mainland over the years,” the Global Times says.

Spying takes place now, as always, through business transactions and academic exchanges, as well as through use of cyber tools, the experts say.  Intelligence gathering through hacking or mining public data can avoid the risk of detection that actual agents on the ground face. Such online methods are more important now because COVID-19 and cooled Taiwan-China relations have reduced face-to-face cross-border exchanges, the analysts add.

“In that sense, I think maybe the espionage is decreasing but the intensity may increase too,” said Alex Chiang, associate professor of international politics at National Chengchi University in Taipei.

“The variety of espionage activity probably will be more diverse,” he said, adding that diminished personal contact reduces the odds of spies being caught, he added.

Chang’s case would stand out because of his rank, said Chen Yi-fan, assistant professor of diplomacy and international relations at Tamkang University in Taiwan.

“The former deputy defense minister’s case if true would be the highest-ranking military personnel who is involved in espionage cases,” he said.

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, the government body handling mainland China affairs, said in a November statement that in “recent years” China had “maliciously extended to overseas espionage” its effort to protect national security. The council had protested a month before over China’s “framing” of Taiwanese citizens to become spies.

The signing of 23 transit, trade and investment deals with China under Taiwan’s former president Ma Ying-jeou had increased contact, expanding the pool of people who could buy and sell secrets.

Today’s tense relations have reduced the number of Chinese entrepreneurs and university students in Taiwan while cutting back academic visits by Taiwanese to China, meaning fewer in-person meetings presenting an opportunity for espionage.

From 2010 to 2016, Taiwan unearthed least 33 cases involving citizens who sold sensitive defense-related information to China, Hawaii-based Asia researcher and author William Sharp told VOA at the time.

Cyber-spying poses a particular threat now, some experts say.

Chinese spies had used the internet for at least a decade before 2015, said Russell Hsiao, executive director of the Global Taiwan Institute policy incubator, on his blog. Hackers from a Chinese city “infiltrated” computers in Taiwan in one 2011 case and installed programs that “stole a large trove of data,” Hsiao said, citing local media reports. The attack infected 42 government websites and 216 computers.

Today’s hacker-spies are hard to differentiate from Chinese “nationalists” who use the internet on their own to spite Taiwan, said Sean Su, an independent political analyst in Taipei.  China may be “ramping up”, he said.

Although more reports of spying are likely to emerge as Western countries focus harder on China’s activities directed at foreign countries, Su said, actual levels of the crime will probably hold constant.

“We will think that there’s more spying but in reality, it feels like it’s just the same old, same old all this time,” he said.

 

Source: Voice of America

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN– The Brunei government announced stricter social distancing measures, after the country reported eight new COVID-19 cases yesterday, including seven local infections and one imported case.

The local infections were the first to be reported since May 6, 2020.

According to Brunei’s Ministry of Health, the control measures were reinstated for two weeks with immediate effect, including closing religious places, schools switching to online learning, no dine-in for restaurants, and closing indoor and outdoor sports facilities, leisure centres and cinemas.

Meanwhile, to address the concerns on the spread of the Delta variant around the world, including Brunei, the Ministry of Health now requires that face masks be worn at all times, especially indoors or in crowded places, and cover the nose and mouth. The directive is applicable to all individuals regardless of their vaccination status.

With the eight new cases reported yesterday, Brunei’s national tally of COVID-19 cases increased to 347.

According to the Ministry of Health, five of the seven local cases had no history of travelling abroad in recent months, and were related to a monitoring centre in Brunei.

The remaining two local cases have unknown origins of infection, with mild symptoms but no overseas travelling history.

The imported case is a 37-year-old man, who arrived in the country on July 30 from the Middle East, via Kuala Lumpur.

The health ministry said that contact tracing for the new cases is underway.

 

 

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK