Day: August 24, 2021

Security forces have detained more than 30 youths in Myanmar’s largest city Yangon as authorities conducted a series of raids in response to the country’s shadow government warning of a “D-Day” operation to oust the junta nearly seven months after it seized power through a coup.

Five people, including a couple that own a popular noodle shop, were arrested late on Monday in Yangon’s Sanchaung township, a resident of the area told RFA’s Myanmar Service, speaking on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal.

“They began the searches around 4:00 p.m., first near Thayettaw Road and Tayokekyaung Road, before moving to Zeyawaddy, Moe Ma Kha, and Gandamar Roads. They later searched the noodle shop on Ma Kyee Kyee Road,” the resident said.

“They conducted the searches from until around 3:30 a.m. I believe more than a dozen people were arrested. Every time they made an arrest, they would take the person to the police station and then come back again to make more arrests.”

Authorities also searched adjacent roads in the area and arrested several youths from New People’s Ward 4 during a check on household registration documents, residents said.

Other sources told RFA that more than a dozen people were also arrested Monday in Yangon’s Thaketa, Ahlone and Thingangyun townships.

“The military was searching for and arresting people last evening in Thingangyun township and other areas—about 20 people were arrested,” said a Thingangyun resident who declined to be named.

“What we heard was that they got information from one of those arrested about an online app that young people are using to communicate with each other. From that app, they found out the connections and made the arrests.”

RFA was unable to verify the exact number of arrests, but they come amid several in recent days that included the detention of four young men during a raid Monday morning in Yangon’s Tha-maing Myothit district.

‘D-Day’ operation

Authorities appear to be intensifying a crackdown on anti-junta activities that began soon after the military seized power from Myanmar’s democratically elected government in a Feb. 1 putsch. In the nearly seven months since the coup, security forces have killed 1,014 civilians and arrested at least 5,851, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP).

The junta says it had to unseat Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) government because the party engineered a landslide victory in Myanmar’s November 2020 election through widespread voter fraud. It has yet to present evidence of its claims and public unrest is at an all-time high.

The NUG recently announced plans to set a date for a “D-Day” operation to purge the country of the junta through a popular uprising supported by a network of People’s Defense Force (PDF) militia groups formed to protect the public from the military.

On Monday night, a bomb went off at a military-owned garment factory in Ward 7 of Yangon’s Hlaing Tharyar township where troops had recently set up camp, wounding at least two soldiers, according to a statement issued about 15 minutes after the blast by the Hlaing Tharyar guerrilla group (CGF).

In the statement, the CGF claimed responsibility for what it said was a remote-controlled explosion in retaliation for an attack by the military earlier on Monday.

A resident of Hlaing Tharyar township confirmed the bombing on Monday and said it was followed by what sounded like a short firefight.

“There was a bomb blast at about 10:00 last night … followed by about 20 gunshots and then another rounds fired,” the resident said.

“There were no arrests of civilians, but armed soldiers were patrolling the streets on motorcycles as well as on foot in civilian clothes … There are checkpoints everywhere.”

Situation intensifying

Shootings and bombings are on the rise after the NUG’s D-Day announcement, and the junta has responded by stepping up security measures in nearly every city. The military regime recently appointed police chiefs to replace the Minister for Transport and Communications in all states and divisions, including Yangon.

Sources told RFA that the junta has been using loudspeakers in major cities in recent days to warn people not to support the NUG government, demand that militia groups surrender, and offer rewards to those who provide information about the PDF.

Political analyst Than Soe Naing told RFA that the military’s efforts are unlikely to head off a challenge to its hold on power.

“Civil war is just beginning. The situation is becoming intense, and I believe the momentum will only get stronger after D-Day,” he said.

“In the meantime, we hear about fighting daily while the military is checking visitor lists in cities throughout the country and carrying out arrests … I think that as soon as the D-Day program begins, various movements will spring up nationwide.”

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

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris flew into Vietnam on Tuesday for a two-day visit aimed at strengthening a bilateral security partnership and helping Hanoi fight the coronavirus pandemic, as Washington tries to challenge what she called  Chinese coercion and intimidation in the region.

In diplomatic sparring that began before her plane landed in the Vietnamese capital late Tuesday night, Harris criticized Beijing’s aggressive posture in the South China Sea and its refusal to respect an international judgement rejecting sweeping clams over the critical waterway.

“We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea,” she said in a speech earlier Tuesday in Singapore.

“These unlawful claims have been rejected by the 2016 arbitral tribunal decision, and Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations,” she said, referring to the panel’s rejection of China’s claims in The Hague, Netherlands.

China—which rejected the ruling against its claims over waters which Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam also claim—quickly shot back at Harris.

The “order” sought by the United States was one in which it could “willfully slander, oppress, coerce and bully other countries and not have to pay any price,” said China’s foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, at a news conference in Beijing.

No alliance sought

After the sharp Sino-U.S. exchange, Vietnam issued a statement stressing that Hanoi did not want to choose sides.

“Prime Minister (Pham Minh Chinh) affirmed that Vietnam adheres to an independent, self-reliant, multilateral, and diverse foreign policy and is a responsible member of the international community,” the Vietnamese government said in a statement following Chinh’s unannounced meeting with Chinese Ambassador Xiong Bo.

“Vietnam does not align itself with one country against another,” it said, calling for solving South China Sea disputes according to international law.

Ambassador Xiong’s meeting with Chinh also unveiled a Chinese donation of 2 million COVID-19 vaccines to Vietnam, playing its hand in the vaccine diplomacy that is a key part of Harris’s two-day stop in Hanoi that comes as the country struggles to contain the deadly third wave of the pandemic.

China’s state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Xiong as saying Beijing wants to “help Vietnam both control the disease and advance socio-economic development, as well as to ensure the bilateral trade and the stability of the industrial and supply chains between the two countries.”

A People’s Liberation Army transport plane carrying a batch of China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine landed Monday at Hanoi’s Noi Bai International Airport on Monday, Xinhua said.

The visit by Harris, the first U.S. Vice President to travel to Vietnam since the unification of the country under the Communist North in 1975, follows last month’s call on Hanoi by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Austin announced plans to donate 77 ultra-low temperature freezers to help Vietnam store and distribute vaccines, and Harris is scheduled to help open regional office for Southeast Asia of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to tackle infectious diseases.

There “is a vaccine competition between the U.S. and China in Southeast Asia, but not Vietnam,” said Carlyle Thayer, an emeritus professor at Australia’s University of New South Wales and the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. He noted that Washington has been Vietnam’s largest donor of vaccines, sending 5 million doses of Moderna and striking commercial agreements with other drug firms.

“It is possible the Biden Administration will agree to transfer IP so Vietnam can produce vaccines,” he said.

“It looks like China took a quick lead but is faltering as time goes by. U.S. vaccines are more reliable and questions about the efficacy of Chinese vaccines are being raised,” added Thayer.

Political prisoner appeal

Vietnam is battling a large COVID-19 outbreak in Ho Chi Minh City, with under two percent of its 98 million people fully vaccinated, the lowest percentage in Southeast Asia, and more than 9,000 deaths.

On Monday Vietnam’s largest city, formerly called Saigon, entered a strict lockdown, with thousands of troops and as many as 35,000 army reservists carrying AK-47 rifles deployed to restrict people’s movements

In the run up to Harris’s seven-day trip to Singapore and Vietnam, Vietnamese political prisoners’ families, activists and U.S. lawmakers all pressed the vice president to raise human rights with Hanoi’s one-party Communist government.

“During the pandemic, the Vietnamese government detained over 50 bloggers, journalists, and human rights defenders” that were put at risk by “placing them in unhygienic, confined places,” said a letter by 60 Vietnamese-American pro-democracy, religious, media, and community organizations.

“My family, like others, hopes that the U.S. vice president will urge the Vietnamese government to release unconditionally the prisoners of conscience before the COVID-19 outbreak spreads into the prisons,” said Do Thi Thu, wife of detained land activist Trinh Ba Phuong.

“My wish is that Thuy who is now advanced in age and in poor health, be released,” said Pham Thi Lan, wife of Nguyen Tuong Thuy, a former blogger for RFA’s Vietnamese service who is serving an 11-year prison term for writing articles criticizing Vietnam’s government.

“If not, let him go to the USA to get health treatment under a humanitarian program, for example,” she told RFA.

According to the California-based Vietnam Human Rights Network, Vietnam is currently detaining around 300 political prisoners.

Reported and translated by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Written in English by Paul Eckert.

A Cambodian woman jailed for four years for throwing her shoe at a poster of Prime Minister Hun Sen has already served almost all of her sentence and should be released on humanitarian grounds in the face of coronavirus risks in prison, the woman’s younger sister said on Tuesday.

The prison term imposed on Sam Sokha, 38 at the time of her arrest in April 2017, for her act criticizing the country’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) was too harsh, her sister Sam Rachana told RFA’s Khmer Service.

“Our entire family feels that this was very unjust,” Sam Rachana said, noting that Sam Sokha has already served three years and seven months of her prison term.

“She committed a minor offense, but they have held her now for almost four years, separating her from her family and from her mother and sisters,” she said. “She had not committed any crimes previously, and yet this one mistake has caused her to spend almost four years in jail.”

Sam Rachana said that she has asked the Kampong Speu Provincial Court to release Sam Sokha, a former factory worker with two teenage sons, on humanitarian grounds, citing concerns for her health amid a growing spread of COVID-19 in Cambodian prisons and jails.

Attempts to reach court spokesperson Ou Phat and Ministry of Justice spokesperson Chhin Malin were unsuccessful on Tuesday.

On April 1, 2017, Sam Sokha filmed herself throwing a shoe at a poster of Hun Sen, accusing him of damaging the country. The video’s release next day on social media prompted a manhunt by police and Sam Sokha’s eventual summons to answer charges of “incitement.”

Speaking to RFA, Am Sam Ath—deputy director of the Cambodian rights group Licadho—said that the harsh punishment given Sam Sokha by the court in Kampong Speu was typical of the sentences handed down by courts in cases considered political in Cambodia.

The government and court should now release her because she has already served most of her jail term, he said.

“As an NGO, we consider first that [Sam Sokha] is a woman, and her children need her,” he said. “Secondly, the Ministry of Justice recently issued a notice allowing the release, under certain conditions, of convicts who have served almost all of their prison terms.”

“It is time for [the courts] to implement [that notice] and release convicts to make space in the prisons and reduce the risk of COVID-19 infections,” Am Sam Ath said.

Sam Sokha’s lawyer Sam Sokong wrote in June to the Kampong Speu Provincial Court asking the court to release his client, noting family concerns over her health and her time already served, but has received no reply to date, sources said.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Richard Finney.

At least eight Rohingya children drowned in the Bay of Bengal last week – casualties of a desperate people’s desire to get away from the Bangladeshi camps where they’ve been confined since fleeing Myanmar four years ago.

They were among three dozen souls aboard a small boat that capsized in bad weather on Aug. 14 off Bhashan Char island, leaving 26 dead or missing, and providing a bleak reminder of the plight of one million Rohingya who languish in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Three-quarters of them fled a 2017 Myanmar military crackdown, whose grim anniversary falls on Wednesday.

Bashir Ahmad was one of 12 people rescued by local fishermen from the capsized boat. He and ten family members had risked their lives to get away from the remote camp on Bhashan Char, where nearly 19,000 Rohingya have been shifted since December, with the promise of better conditions than in the sprawling camps of Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh.

“My wife and my four children are still missing,” Bashir told BenarNews. “We came here [Bhashan Char] with the hope for a better life, but we were deprived of it.”

Authorities have given up the search for the survivors.

The boat deaths in the Bay of Bengal came ahead of what Syed Ullah, leader of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, calls “a black day for Rohingya people.”

Rohingya refugees walk along an embankment next to paddy fields after fleeing from Myanmar into Palang Khali, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh November 2, 2017. (Reuters)

A life of fleeing

Aug. 25, 2017 was when a wave of attacks by poorly equipped Rohingya militants on Myanmar police posts in western Rakhine State, which borders Bangladesh, set off a bloody Myanmar military onslaught against Rohingya communities.

The crackdown displaced 740,000 people, and according to humanitarian organizations, thousands were killed. U.N. investigators have accused Myanmar’s military of carrying out mass killings and rapes with “genocidal intent”.

The Rohingya still say they want to return to their homes in Myanmar. But the prospects for their repatriation, and of fulfilling their desire for Myanmar citizenship, appear as slim as ever.

Complicating the situation is the military coup that was launched in Myanmar nearly seven months ago that has installed a junta and stoked bloodshed and further conflict across the country.

The hopelessness of their situation pushes Rohingya to keep trying their chances for life elsewhere, despite the peril of an uncertain sea voyage to make it happen.

Rashida Begum, 35, says she was meant to be on the boat that sank Aug. 14. “I skipped the journey due to my younger son’s sudden illness,” Rashida, a mother of three, told BenarNews over the weekend. “I don’t know when our life of fleeing will end.”

Rashida’s story is emblematic of the struggles of the Rohingya, a stateless people. She has spent most of her adult life in limbo.

She first fled her home in Maungdaw district of Rakhine State some 16 years ago after the Myanmar military allegedly killed one of her family members, and settled in Cox’s Bazar.

Then in February 2020, she said, she left on a boat that drifted at sea for two months, unable to enter Thailand, Malaysia or even Myanmar. Bangladesh coastguards rescued the boat and sent them back to the same Cox’s Bazar camp. Three months later she was arrested by Bangladeshi police as she tried to find work outside the camp.

Later, she moved to the camp at Bhashan Char from Cox’s Bazar, seeking better health and education for her children, but was disappointed – as many of the others who have made the same choice have been.

When senior officials from the refugee agency UNHCR visited the island in late May, a violent protest broke out among hundreds of refugees who complained about living conditions and being unable to earn any money, among other grievances.

“Now I am trying to flee from here,” Rashida said.

“People always try to stay in their birthplace and come up with dreams about their place. But it is a nightmare for our Rohingya people,” Rashida said. “I am on the run just for a better and a safe life.”

A Rohingya refugee stands among the remains after a fire broke out and destroyed thousands of shelters at the Balukhali refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, March 24, 2021. (Reuters)

Dreaming of home

She’s not alone. Last week, UNHCR reported that 2020 was the deadliest year on record for refugee journeys in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted many Southeast Asian countries to tighten their borders, leading to the highest numbers of refugees stranded at sea since the region’s “boat crisis” in 2015, UNHCR said, referring to a year when tens of thousands attempted to flee Myanmar and Bangladesh by sea.

It said some two-thirds of those attempting those voyages were women and children.

“These deadly journeys are not a new phenomenon,” the UNHCR report said. “The roots of these dangerous journeys are found in Myanmar, where the Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship and denied basic rights.”

Meanwhile, critics say Bangladesh remains opposed to international efforts to improve living standards for Rohingya in the camps because it could lead to a growing interest of the Rohingya in settling permanently rather than seeking to return to their villages in Myanmar.

Diplomacy between Bangladesh and Myanmar to pave the way for their return appears to be going nowhere. Shah Rezwan Hayat, Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner, said talks about repatriation had stalled because of upheaval in Myanmar and the COVID-19 situation.

But Rohingya refugees were still interested in going back to Myanmar, he said.

Refugees at Cox’s Bazar attest to that.

“We are still dreaming of going back home. Nobody can enjoy the life of a refugee, as well as the humiliation,” said Mustafa Kamal, a Rohingya who recounts how he twice fled to Bangladesh: in 2012, when there was an earlier wave of violence against minority Muslims in Myanmar, and during the 2017 crackdown.

Another camp resident, Nur Ahmed, said that he fled in 2017 after the soldiers set fire to his three-story home in Rakhine State.

“Refugee life is not a life at all. We are spending every moment here with various fears. We want to go back to our homeland with citizenship,” he said.

Refugees are not allowed to work in Bangladesh, and police on Monday arrested 74 Rohingya who were working as day laborers in lemon orchards near the southern city of Chittagong. A police officer told BenarNews they would be prosecuted, along with those who helped them.

Over the past two months, at least 600 Rohingya have been arrested in various parts of Bangladesh and sent back to the refugee camps, officials said.

A child crosses a flooded area in a makeshift raft at Maulovir Para, Cox’s Bazar, on July 30, 2021, after monsoon floods and landslides cut off villages across southeast Bangladesh and killed at least 20 people, including six Rohingya refugees. (AFP)

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

Uyghurs living in Afghanistan are terrified that the Taliban’s takeover of the country could mean they will be extradited to face harsh punishment in China or suffer other dangers in the war-torn South Asian nation.

Since Taliban militants seized control of the Afghanistan following the pullout of U.S. forces earlier this month, triggering an unabated chaotic exodus of thousands of civilians and foreigners, advocacy groups have been saying they fear the worst for the country’s estimated 2,000 Uyghurs.

The 12 million Uyghurs in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have since 2017 been the target of a systematic assimilation campaign of forced birth control and sterilization, forced labor, and mass incarceration that has sent as many as 1.8 million of the Turkic Muslims through a network of internment camps.

A Uyghur woman who has been living in Kabul with her Afghan husband for more than 10 years told RFA’s Uyghur Service that she fears both Taliban repression and mistreatment of women and being returned to China on account of their status as “Chinese migrants.”

“I’m terrified they’re going to come looking for me because I ‘belong to China,’” said the woman, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal for speaking to the media.

“It’s possible they could kill me or that they could return me to China,” she said.

The roughly 80 Uyghur families in Kabul are living in confusion and fear about life under the Taliban, says Mamat, a Uyghur man who was born in Afghanistan to parents who had parents had immigrated there in the 1960s.

Mamat, who lives in Kabul with his own family, said he was beaten and barely escaped an attack by Taliban militants Sunday when he went to buy bread for his children.

“You’re seeing that there are airplanes flying all over the place here,” he said, referring to airlifts conducted by the U.S. and other countries to evacuate their citizens and Afghans who have worked for them.

“Things look very chaotic here, but how are we [Uyghurs] doing?” Mamat asked.

“Kazakhstan is taking Kazakhs out of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan is taking Uzbeks out, Turkey and all the other countries are taking their own citizens away, but no one is even asking about how we’re doing. No one is helping us,” he added.

Uyghurs in the South Asian country are also facing new threats, said a Turkey-based Uyghur who was told by relatives in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city, that Taliban militants now are going into homes and kidnapping girls.

“It’s terrifying there. For example, they’re wondering what’s going to happen if [the Taliban] comes after their daughters, wants to force them to marry them, and then take them away,” said Abdulaziz, who fled Afghanistan for Turkey two years ago.

The Chinese identification documents held by many Uyghurs in Afghanistan have expired, though they still say “Chinese Turkestani migrant” on them, Abdulaziz said.

“If this information were to fall into their hands in the coming days, China might say that there are such and such Uyghurs who have left Xinjiang and that they want them to turn us over,” he said.

‘ETIM as a bogeyman’

Among the Afghanistan-based Uyghurs’ biggest fears is being branded as members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a key tactic China uses to discredit accounts of rights abuses of the ethnic minority in the XUAR, say analysts.

Seeking Chinese support to overthrow the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan-based Al Qaeda militants, the United States put the ETIM on its list of terrorist organizations in 2002 per Beijing’s request.

In October 2020, however, the U.S. State Department removed the ETIM from its designated terrorist list, with a U.S. official saying that “for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that the ETIM continues to exist.”

“The CCP has used ETIM as a bogeyman to justify its campaign against Uyghurs that has culminated into an ongoing genocide,” tweeted Michael Sobolik, a fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

“The Taliban’s ascent, coupled w/ our bungled withdrawal, could spell disaster for the Uyghurs,” he wrote.

Since January, the U.S. State Department and the parliaments of six other democratic countries have determined that the Chinese government is perpetrating genocide against Uyghurs in the XUAR. China denies these charges and says its policies are combating religious extremism.

Beijing has engaged with the Taliban diplomatically, but has indicated it will not consider recognizing the regime in the Afghan capital Kabul until a government has been formed.

“We’re very concerned about the situation of Uyghurs in Afghanistan,” said Omer Khan, founder of the Pakistan-based Omer Uyghur Trust.

“I’m working to get people to Pakistan, but even those who make it there are still in a problematic situation,” he told RFA. The 20 Uyghur families that have settled in Pakistan recently continue to live in fear and remain in a dangerous situation, he added.

“Airplanes are coming in from Turkey, Germany, from the United States. They’re taking Afghans out, but they’re not taking Uyghurs,” said Khan.

Reported by Gulchehra Hoja for RFA’s Uyghur Service. Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

The Hong Kong government on Tuesday tabled a legislative amendment that will add new requirements to current guidelines for the board of film censors, requiring them to prevent films from being screened if they contain scenes, ideas, or images critical of the authorities.

The amendment is aimed at “ensuring more effective fulfilment of the duty to safeguard national security … as well as preventing and suppressing acts or activities that may endanger national security,” the government said in a statement on its website.

The amendment is highly likely to be voted through by the Legislative Council (LegCo), which has been devoid of any genuine political opposition since the mass resignation and mass arrests of dozens of former lawmakers and democracy activists for “subversion.”

If passed, the amended law will require censors to “consider whether the exhibition of a film would be contrary to the interests of national security.”

Since the national security law was imposed on Hong Kong by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from July 1, 2020, mainland Chinese state security police have set up headquarters in the city.

The newly constituted national security police have since then launched a city-wide crackdown on dissent, public criticism, and political opposition in the form of opposition lawmakers, pro-democracy, media and protesters who use the now-banned slogans of the 2019 protest movement.

The amendment also empowers the city’s chief secretary to revoke approvals issued by the Hong Kong Film Censorship Authority before the law was enacted, ensuring that older films with content deemed problematic by the government will no longer be allowed to be screened in the city.

Censors will also be given the power to raid screenings of films in any location in Hong Kong, search the venue, and stop screenings that are found to contravene the proposed new rules.

The maximum penalty for screening films without approval will be raised to three years’ imprisonment.

“The main reference is the national security law … for instances, acts or activities which might endorse, support, glorify, encourage and incite such activities that might endanger national security,” Edward Yau, Hong Kong’s commerce secretary, told reporters on Tuesday.

On July 30, 2021, a court in Hong Kong handed down a nine-year jail term to motorcyclist Tong Ying-kit for “terrorism” and inciting “secession” after he flew a banned slogan from his bike during a street protest.

The slogan from the 2019 protest movement — “Free Hong Kong, revolution now!” — was found by the court to be an incitement to secession.

‘Why be afraid?’

Vincent Tsui, independent movie director and founder of indie filmmakers’ group Ying E Chi, said the law won’t affect the way he makes films in future.

“I am still going to make the movies I want to make,” Tsui told RFA. “Why be afraid?”

“Shooting the films shouldn’t be a problem. If they won’t let me show it, then so be it; that’s on them,” he said. “I’m going to do my own thing.”

Films made by Ying E Chi members have already been effectively banned in Hong Kong, including the documentaries “Taking Back the Legislature” about the July 1, 2019 storming of LegCo by protesters angry about plans to allow extradition to mainland China, and “Inside the Red Walls” about the November 2019 siege of Hong Kong Polytechnic University by riot police.

A screening of “Inside the Red Walls” was canceled in March 2021 after the cinema that planned to show it was denounced in the pro-China Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po newspapers.

Satire could also be banned

Actor Tin Kai-man, who is also the spokesman for the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, said the vagueness of the provisions under the amendment could mean filmmakers run afoul of the national security law for no good reason.

“As a creator and producer, the thing I am most concerned about is breaking that law,” Tin told RFA. “Will criticizing the government now be regarded as breaking the national security law?”

“We need to be clear if we are allowed to criticize the government now or not,” he said.

The wording of the amendment also suggests that satirical, political films like “Ten Years”, “From Beijing With Love,” and “Her Fatal Ways” could also be banned.

Commerce secretary Yau appeared to confirm this possibility on Tuesday.

“We need this provision to cater for circumstances where a film which was graded or approved before, but given the new law enacted and new guidelines issued, there could be a chance that we need to reconsider such cases,”  Yau said.

But he said there was as yet no blacklist of banned films.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.