Day: August 25, 2021

A North Korean used-clothing trader who kept two South Korean banknotes she found in a bundle of garments was hauled away by state security agents in June and hasn’t been heard from since — the victim of a tightening crackdown on foreign cultural influences, sources in the reclusive state told RFA.

The incident in the port city of Nampo is part of a stepped-up enforcement of laws passed last year designed to halt the spread of foreign influences, in particular, the spread of popular music, movies, and TV shows from South Korea, which many North Koreans have long embraced in secret.

“These days, there are very severe crackdowns on the possession or use of South Korean goods,” a resident of Nampo told RFA on Tuesday.

The campaign is enforcing the Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture Act passed in December 2020 in a rare session of Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the law would be “certainly observed by all the institutions, enterprises, organizations and citizens.”

The law had the goal of “further cementing our ideological, revolutionary, and class positions by thoroughly preventing the inroads and spread of the anti=socialist ideology and culture and firmly maintaining our idea, spirit and culture,” KCNA said.\

Punishments include up to 15 years in a prison camp for those caught with media from South Korea, and punishments for the production or distribution of pornography, the use of unregistered televisions, radios, computers, foreign cellphones, or other electronic devices, according the Daily NK, a Seoul-based website that reports from sources inside North Korea and had obtained details on the law.

The woman arrested by the State Security Department in Nampo this summer buys bundles of used foreign clothes and sells them individually at a local market, the source said.

Two years ago, she found two 10,000 South Korean won notes, worth a total of U.S. $17.12, in some clothing, and kept them. When she showed the two bills to a fellow retailer at the market, she was reported to authorities, and state security officials swiftly came to search her house and arrest her, the source said.

“The State Security Department is digging up the source of the money by investigating the wholesaler who delivered the goods to the woman and the one who sold the clothes to the wholesaler,” he said.

The garment trader has been detained by the State Security Department for more than two months, and no one knows what kind of punishment she faces, the source said

“The neighbors sympathize with the woman who had a good heart and had a good relationship with her neighbors, he added. “They are criticizing the informant as ‘a woman who doesn’t know how to distinguish east, west, north, and south.’”

“Unfortunately, even if she is charged with treason and punished, there is nowhere for her to complain,” said the source, who declined to be named in order to speak freely. It was not clear whether the trader faces treason charges.

Money of the ‘puppet’ country

In July, a state security agent in charge of a district in Nampo led a local neighborhood watch unit meeting and told the group that a resident who had kept the money of a “puppet” country had been found in the area, and warned the locals to avoid South Korean products, said the source.

Similar arrests are occurring elsewhere in the country of 25 million people that has been run by leader Kim Jong Un and his father and grandfather before him as a rigid one-party dictatorship since 1948. Pyongyang often slanders South Korea as a “puppet” of the United States.

A state security agent in charge of the Sunam district of Chongjin, capital of North Hamgyong province, appeared at a meeting of a neighborhood watch unit there and repeatedly threatened that anyone who was caught communicating with the “enemy” South Korea or possessing the belongings of “puppets” would not be forgiven, a resident of the province told RFA.

“The son of an acquaintance I know had a mobile phone made in South Korea and was arrested by the State Security Department, and it turned out that that is why the security agent attended the neighborhood watch unit meeting to warn the residents,” said the source who declined to be named for safety reasons.

The young man told authorities he found the South Korean Samsung mobile phone at a dumping ground near his house several months before the arrest, said the source.

“South Korean mobile phones are popular here and they are sold at high prices in the market,” he said adding that North Koreans who can obtain Samsung cell phone modify them to use locally.

The youth’s father thought his son would be released immediately, after a favorable evaluation by the neighborhood watch unit and the company where he worked, but he remains in custody, said the source.

“The State Security Department seems to be continuing to investigate, assuming that he kept on communicating with South Korea because of the fact that he did not report his mobile phone voluntarily, even though there was a large-scale propaganda project to purge the ‘yellow wind of capitalism,” he said.

The “yellow wind” is a North Korean term dating to the 1990s that refers to “anti-socialist” influences in society, especially cultural imports from capitalist countries.

Caught up in crackdowns

The resident of North Hamgyong province said that many people across the country are getting caught in such crackdowns.

“In the past, law enforcement agencies, including the State Security Department, took bribes from those who had power or money, while blaming the people with no money and power, in order to achieve arrest results,” the source said.

North Korean authorities have gone to great lengths to cut off South Korean influence and punish those who consume South Korean culture.

RFA reported in May 2020 that authorities were checking students’ text messages for South Korean spellings and slang.

In February 2021, RFA reported that police were cracking down on vehicle window tinting, which North Koreans were using to hide their surreptitious viewing of South Korean videos, labeling the practice as part of the “yellow wind of capitalism.”

Authorities ordered those with tinted windows to replace the windows or be fined for violating the Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture Act.

Reported by Changgyu Ahn for RFA’s Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Authorities in a Tibetan-populated region of western China’s Sichuan province are threatening to close a local school, saying it will be immediately shut down if it fails to provide classroom instruction exclusively in Chinese, Tibetan sources say.

The Gyalten School, operating in the Tehor Dhargay Rongpa Tsal subdistrict of the Kardze (in Chinese, Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, was founded in 1994 by religious leader Tulku Gyalten Lobsang Jampa, a local source told RFA this week.

“And though the school was founded by a Tibetan lama, it does not operate as a private school. It is registered and administered under the Chinese government and runs like a government school,” RFA’s source said in a written message sent under condition of anonymity.

“And yes, I have heard about a notice sent to the school to change its medium of instruction to Chinese,” the source said.

Also speaking to RFA, a Tibetan living in India confirmed the threat to close the school, citing contacts in the Kardze region.

“And if the school refuses to implement the changes, the Chinese government has threatened to shut it down,” the source said.

“Also beginning this school year, the annual entrance exams were all conducted in Chinese,” the source added.

The Gyalten School holds classes up through sixth grade where Tibetan, English, Chinese, math, science, and vocational training are taught as part of the curriculum, sources say. So far, 642 Tibetan students have graduated from the school.

Tulku Gyalten Lobsang Jampa, the school’s founder, also serves as vice-chair of the Buddhist Association of Sichuan and is a member of China’s National People’s Congress, the rubber-stamp parliament.

Private schools already closed

Authorities in Sichuan had already begun this year to close down private Tibetan schools offering classes taught in the Tibetan language, forcing students to go instead to government-run schools where they will be taught entirely in Chinese, sources told RFA in earlier reports.

The move is being pushed in the name of providing uniformity in the use of textbooks and instructional materials, but parents of the affected children and other local Tibetans have expressed concern over the imposed requirements, saying that keeping young Tibetans away from their culture and language will have severe negative consequences for the future.

Just under 1.5 million Tibetans live in historically Tibetan parts of western Sichuan province, according to China’s 2010 census.

Language rights have become a particular focus for Tibetan efforts to assert national identity in recent years, with informally organized language courses in the monasteries and towns deemed “illegal associations” and teachers subject to detention and arrest, sources say.

Reported by Sangyal Kunchok for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Four years after the Myanmar military attacked ethnic Rohingya communities in the country’s western Rakhine state, burning villages, killing residents, and driving hundreds of thousands as refugees across the border with Bangladesh, sympathy has grown for the Muslim minority, sources in the country say.

The military’s 2017 scorched earth campaign launched in response to attacks by Muslim insurgents against police posts in Rakhine, has since been described by international rights groups and foreign governments as constituting acts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”

On Wednesday, the day that marks the beginning of the 2017 attacks, the suffering of the Rohingya is being recognized across Myanmar, where the same brutal tactics used against the Rohingya have been turned on ethnic majority Bamar civilians by the military junta that deposed the elected government on Feb. 1.

On Tuesday, Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG), formed in opposition to military rule, expressed sympathy for the Rohingya displaced as refugees and vowed to hold Myanmar’s military accountable for its crimes not only against the Rohingya but against other people in Myanmar.

“The military has committed atrocities everywhere,” said Aung Myo Min, the NUG’s Minister for Human Rights, told RFA.

“During the past four years, they have committed mass killings and acts of sexual violence against the Rohingya people, and this has led to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya civilians fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.”

“On this four-year anniversary, we should not just mourn those losses. We should also provide justice and closure for the victims. And we should remember the lessons learned from the past so that this history will not repeat itself again in the future,” he said.

In June, the NUG unveiled plans to amend the country’s constitution to give citizenship to the Rohingya, who are not recognized as an official ethnic group in Myanmar and are often viewed as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Recognizing the Rohingya as citizens represents a sharp break from the policies deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi pursued toward the beleaguered group during her 2016-21 tenure. She refused to even say the word “Rohingya” in public and staunchly defended the Myanmar military against crimes against humanity charges in 2019 at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

A common enemy

“It is encouraging to see that many people in Myanmar have begun to see the truth,” said UK-based Rohingya activist Tun Khin, recalling the many years of prejudice suffered in Myanmar by the Rohingya.

“We have all seen that the military’s brutalities are not limited to the Rohingya,” Tun Khin said. He cited the killing by Myanmar security forces of at least 1,016 anti-junta protesters and other civilians, in a running tally maintained by the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP).

“They are now committing atrocities in cities like Yangon and Mandalay. It is now very clear that the military regime is our common enemy, and that we all have to eliminate the military’s power in order to end its rule,” Tun Khin said.

“People in Myanmar have definitely grown in sympathy toward the Rohingya people,” said Thin Zar Shoon Lae Yi, a youth activist and civil society leader in Myanmar, adding that many in the country were previously unaware of the suffering experienced by the Muslim minority group.

“Also, people were not free to talk about the Rohingya issue, and the military and its supporters directed a lot of hate speech and propaganda against them. As civil society groups, we tried to counter these things by providing fact checking and holding interfaith discussions,” he said.

The attitude toward the Rohingya of the NUG has also contributed to the shift in public opinion, Thin Zar Shoon Lae Yi said.

“People always look for moral leadership when it comes to controversial issues,” he said. “I feel positive about the [change in] people’s attitudes toward the Rohingya. We will become better people ourselves by having sympathy toward them.”

‘We want to go home’

Khin Maung, a Rohingya refugee at the Tharyin Khali refugee camp in Bangladesh, told RFA he wants to go back to his former home in Myanmar.

“It has now been four years since the military drove us out, and we are still mourning for the people who died in the attacks,” he said.

“And though we have lived for four years in the camps, we’re not happy here. We want to return to the country where we lived and grew up. We have no freedom or security in the camps, and we’re not receiving any education here. It’s also hard for us to make a living.”

Senator Jeff Merkley, a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joined a bipartisan group of 19 senators on Wednesday calling on the administration of President Biden to issue a Rohingya genocide designation, calling the move long overdue.

“Failure to do so will only further embolden the perpetrators of ongoing abuses against the Burmese people,” Merkey said in a statement. “It will also undermine the administration’s principled recognition of genocide in other parts of the world if such determinations are not applied consistently,” he said.

Reported and translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris launched the Hanoi-based Southeast Asian office of America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, saying Washington’s alliances in the region aimed to mutually advance people’s health and security.

The regional CDC hub is designed to enhance health cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), officials said, at a time when countries in the bloc are reeling from soaring numbers of COVID-19 infections driven by the highly contagious Delta strain.

“Our partnerships in Southeast Asia are of mutual importance to the health of our people, the strength of our economies, and our collective security,” Harris said on Twitter during her visit to Vietnam, as part of her first official tour of Southeast Asia, which earlier took the vice president to Singapore.

Harris is the most senior official of the new Biden administration to travel to Southeast Asia to date. The regional CDC office was first announced by the Trump administration last September.

“The CDC office will advance global health security by maintaining a sustainable presence in the region, enabling a rapid and effective response to health threats – wherever they occur – and reinforcing CDC’s core mission of protecting Americans,” the White House said in a news release about the vice president’s trip to Hanoi.

Harris also announced an additional 1 million coronavirus vaccine doses for Vietnam, taking Washington’s total donation to the country to 6 million. Washington will also provide U.S. $23 million to help Vietnam boost access to vaccines.

Vietnam’s deputy prime minister and health ministers from ASEAN members and Papua New Guinea watched as Harris inaugurated the CDC office in Hanoi, the White House said.

The CDC, meanwhile, has been in Southeast Asia for a long time, Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, said in a statement. Walensky and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra were with Harris in Vietnam.

“Our longstanding partnership with the countries of the ASEAN [region has strengthened public health laboratories, emergency operations centers, surveillance systems – all tools that are being called upon during the current pandemic,” Walensky said.

Vaccine rivalry

On the eve of Harris’ visit, China meanwhile said it would provide another 2 million doses of vaccines to Vietnam, taking Beijing’s total donation to Hanoi to 2.5 million doses.

A Sino-American strategic, diplomatic and economic rivalry between the two superpowers is playing out in ASEAN nations over coronavirus vaccine deliveries as well as the disputed South China Sea.

Before the donation to Vietnam that was announced Wednesday, Washington said it had so far donated more than 23 million vaccine doses and over $158 million in health and humanitarian assistance to the ASEAN countries.

Beijing, by contrast, has donated far fewer doses to members of the regional bloc than has Washington.

China has donated around 17 million doses – including the latest 2 million to Vietnam – to ASEAN countries, according to a total provided on the website of Bridge Consulting, a Beijing-based research firm.

Back in June, days after Washington said that its vaccine donations and pandemic aid came with “no strings attached,” Beijing said the same.

But as Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, said on Aug. 17 there are “no strings attached to China’s” donation of COVID-19 vaccines to the country, “except that their boats are there.”

Duterte was referring to the presence of Chinese vessels in Philippine waters of the contested South China Sea, which Beijing claims most of, in contravention of an international tribunal’s 2016 award.

Washington, on the other hand, may even “agree to transfer IP [intellectual property] so Vietnam can produce vaccines,” Carlyle Thayer, an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales and the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra, told Radio Free Asia (RFA), with which BenarNews is affiliated.

Manila residents wait to receive their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac, at the Holy Trinity Academy in Manila, Aug. 13, 2021. [Dante Diosina Jr/BenarNews]

Close to ‘red line’

Health-care systems across the region are being stretched because of spikes in coronavirus infections stemming from the Delta strain, experts warn.

The Western Pacific accounted for 10 percent of new cases globally, Dr. Takleshi Kasai, the Manila-based regional head of the World Health Organization, said on Wednesday. The U.N. health agency’s Western Pacific office covers 37 countries, including the whole of Southeast Asia.

“In some places, surges are pushing health systems dangerously close to what we call ‘the red line’ – where the number of critical cases exceeds ICU capacity, and hospitals can no longer provide the care that people need,” Kasai told a virtual news conference.

“[T]he Delta variant is now a real threat – which is testing the capacity of even the strongest public health systems in our region.”

For instance, quarantine centers in the Vietnam’s southern Binh Duong province are filled beyond capacity, with local authorities instructing patients not yet showing symptoms to quarantine at home, according to a report by RFA’s Vietnamese Service.

On Monday, Vietnam placed Ho Chi Minh City, its second largest city, under strict lockdown measures through September. Vietnam recorded 354,355 cases of COVID-19 from April 27, the first day of the fourth wave of coronavirus outbreak in the country, to Aug. 23.

Neighboring Laos and Cambodia also saw the number of infections climb this week.

In Manila, meanwhile, many healthcare providers have been forced to turn away patients, with the state-run Philippine General Hospital, which caters to the poor, announcing on Tuesday that it had been overwhelmed and would stop accepting coronavirus cases temporarily.

Already, 73 percent of all intensive care units in Manila’s 332 hospitals were already occupied, the health department said. Last Friday, the Philippines reported 17,231 new infections – a record.

Thailand last week breached one million COVD-19 cases, while Malaysia has recently, reported record new infections on several days – on Aug. 20 it reported 23,564 cases, the highest since the pandemic began.

Indonesia’s COVID-19 daily caseload has dropped lately. But as of Aug. 13, more than a quarter of the country’s total infections since the pandemic began early last year were recorded in the four weeks prior.

Southeast Asia’s largest and most populous country hit a peak of more than 56,000 new infections on July 15, crossing 3 million total infections a week later.

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

Indonesia is holding a Bahamas-flagged oil tanker, its Bangladeshi captain and 18 other crew members who are suspected of stealing nearly 300,000 barrels of crude oil from Cambodia, authorities said Wednesday.

The 600-foot ship, the M.T. Strovolos, was illegally anchored off Sumatra with its identification system turned off when authorities seized it on July 27, three days after Phnom Penh issued an Interpol red notice about the alleged theft, an Indonesian Navy official said.

An Indonesian warship, the KRI John Lie-358, intercepted the oil tanker near the Anambas Islands in the Riau Islands province after the Strovolos had sailed into Indonesian waters in the South China Sea without permission, said Rear Adm. Arsyad Abdullah, commander of Naval Fleet Command 1. 

“The success in seizing the tanker is thanks to cooperation among nations in Southeast Asia, and especially the coordination between the Indonesian Navy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” he said in a statement released by the navy.

“The Navy will not hesitate to take action against all forms of violations that occur in the waters in Indonesian national jurisdictions.”

Arsyad said the operation followed an Interpol red notice that had been requested by Cambodia and forwarded to Indonesian authorities.

It was not immediately clear why the Indonesian Navy waited nearly a month until publicizing the news about the seizure of the ship and its crew. The tanker had sailed into Indonesian waters from Thailand, the navy said.  

The nineteen crewmembers – 13 Indians, three Bangladeshis and three from Myanmar – were detained and later taken to a port on nearby Batam Island as part of an investigation, the admiral said.

The Bangladeshi captain has been named a suspect for allegedly anchoring in the Indonesian territorial sea without a permit and could face a year in prison, or a fine of up to 200 million rupiah (U.S. $13,865) if found guilty, the navy statement said.

“The case has been submitted by the Navy investigators to the Batam prosecutor’s office,” Arsyad said.

KrisEnergy, a troubled Singapore-based oil and gas company, had rented the tanker-ship for oil storage as part of Cambodia’s recent bid to extract its own petroleum, the AFP news agency reported, citing authorities.

The firm had filed for liquidation in June but was unable to pay the tanker’s crew, authorities said, according to the AFP report.

“The company … reported to our government that the tanker stole the oil. There are some 290,000 barrels of crude” aboard, AFP quoted Cheap Suor, director-general of petroleum at the Cambodian Ministry of Mines and Energy, as saying.

“(But) the tanker said KrisEnergy owed it money.”

In May, Indonesia released two oil-tanker captains from China and Iran as well as their vessels and crews, days after a court handed suspended sentences of one year each for carrying out an unauthorized ship-to-ship petroleum transfer in waters off West Kalimantan on Borneo Island.

Chinese national Chen Yo Qun, captain of the Panama-flagged MT Freya, and Mehdi Monghasemjahromi, skipper of the Iranian-flagged MT Horse, were found guilty of violating Indonesia’s navigational rules by conducting an oil transfer at sea without a permit in late January.

After the January incident, Aan Kurnia, the chief of Indonesia’s coast guard (Bakamla), called for tougher laws against navigational violations in Indonesian waters.

All foreign vessels, including warships, have the right of passage as long as they transit continuously and do not pose a security threat.

Indonesia requires all ships passing through archipelagic waters to activate their automatic identification systems, or report any damage to those systems. Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is the only nation that has designated archipelagic sea lanes.

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

Hong Kong’s national security police have written to the organizers of a now-banned candlelight vigil for the victims of the June 4, 1989 massacre in Beijing, asking them to reveal details of the group’s previous contacts with overseas-based organizations.

Chow Hang-tung, vice chair of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, said the group’s members have been given two weeks to comply with the request, made under Article 43 of a national security law imposed on the city by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from July 1, 2020.

A video clip shared to social media showed national security police delivering a letter to Chow at her home, which she signed for.

Chow said the police letter had described the Alliance as an “agent” of foreign organizations, which she denied.

“Just by pinning this label of foreign agent on us, they can then require us to hand over all of this information,” Chow told RFA on Wednesday.

“This is an extremely unfair accusation, and a completely false one,” Chow said. “How can the Alliance be a foreign agent? We are an organization formed spontaneously by the people of Hong Kong.”

“[They are] using this tactic to intimidate civil society groups,” she said. But she denied the Alliance had already made plans to disband, saying the issue was still unresolved.

Chow was mentioned in the letter alongside former Democratic Party lawmaker Emily Lau and Alliance co-founders Albert Ho and Lee Cheuk-yan, who are currently in prison on different charges.

“The national security department of the Hong Kong Police Force wrote to the Aliiance on Aug. 25, saying it was suspected of being a foreign agent,” the letter, which was shared with RFA by Chow, said.

“The Alliance is hereby required under Article 43 of the National Security Law to provide detailed information about the activities of its personnel in Hong Kong since its establishment,” the letter said.

Deadline for submission

It called for full records and contact details for overseas organizations to be submitted to police by Sept. 7, 2021.

“Failure to supply police with the requested information, unless you can prove that you have tried comply with the request to the best of your ability, or that you were prevented from doing so due to reasons beyond your control, will result in a fine of H.K.$100,000 and a prison sentence of six months if convicted,” the letter warned.

Among the organizations listed in the request were the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the Solidarity Center, and the Center for International Private Enterprise.

Also listed were the Canada-based Federation for a Democratic China, the U.S.-based New School for Democracy, founded by former 1989 student leader Wang Dan, and the Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group.

According to a person familiar with the internal operations of the Alliance, the group has been in touch with pro-democracy activists and dissidents in mainland China for many years.

Others may be targeted

Joseph Cheng, a former politics professor at Hong Kong’s City University, said other groups could also be targeted, including the Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, which has spoken out for the mainland Chinese legal profession since the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began a crackdown in July 2015.

“They are now targeting some of the more prominent activists, both within the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement and overseas, as well as the pro-democracy movement in mainland China,” Cheng said. “The relevant departments in mainland China likely already have a lot of material on them already.”

“The current sweep for documents and records is likely aimed at arresting them and bringing charges, or using the material to go after pro-democracy activists overseas,” he said.

Zhang Xianling, a co-founder of the Tiananmen Mothers group representing the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, said she had nothing to fear.

“Even if they eradicate an organization [like the Alliance] or stop it from meeting, they won’t necessarily be able to cover everything up,” Zhang said. “The traces will still be there in the historical record.”

“A lie is still a lie, even after 100 years have gone by.”

Hong Kong justice secretary Teresa Cheng declined to comment when contacted by RFA on Wednesday, saying she wouldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.