Month: September 2021

A teacher and mother of four young children who left her job to join Myanmar’s Civil Disobedience Movement against the military junta that seized government control in a coup eight months ago is now barely eking out a living, hunkered down with her family to a border camp in ethnic army-controlled territory.

Kay Mo, an ethnic Karenni who taught at a government-run primary school in eastern Myanmar’s Kayah state, left her home to avoid arrest when soldiers began cracking down on striking teachers and other professionals across the country who joined civilian protesters in opposing the junta that overthrew the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1.

For Kay Mo, who fled her village in May with her four sons — two under the age of 10, an infant and a toddler — this is not the first time to flee her home for safety in the jungles of eastern Myanmar. As a child she and her parents took refuge in the forest countless times during decades of civil war between the Myanmar military and ethnic rebels, she said.

“My house is the happiest place for me, but when things turn bad, I have to run and live wherever I can. I can’t think of anything else now. I want to live in the safest place with my children,” she told RFA’s Myanmar Service.

Violent clashes between rebel and junta forces erupted across Kayah state following the coup, forcing some 100,000 residents to flee their homes, taking shelter in Buddhist monasteries or in nearby hills and jungles.

Kay Mo, her husband and four sons are staying in a camp for war refugees in a zone of the state controlled by the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), the dominant ethnic political organization in the state, which lies near the Thai-Myanmar border.

She and her family are facing hardship made worse by the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly 17,700 people in the nation of 54 million. The spread of the virus has made it difficult to find paid work inside or outside the camp, she said.

Kay Mo and her sons are subsisting on beans and lentils donated by well-wishers, but when food rations run out, she has to forage for legumes in wooded areas.

“I mostly cook bamboo shoots and sometimes chickpeas,” she said. “Once in a while, I cook lotus and pumpkin leaves. Most of the time we eat bamboo shoots.”

“Every time the camp nurse weighed my second son, she said he was malnourished. She said he needed to eat eggs and nutritious bread, but I couldn’t feed him. I couldn’t afford that.”

At the camp, which has 178 tents to house more than 1,100 people, Kay Mo is in charge of the food management team and provides whatever food is available to those who are living there temporarily.

“What we provide to the refugees is mostly rice, oil, salt, and chickpeas,” she said. “Sometimes we have chillies but it’s not every month. This month, we have turmeric in our rations.”

The teacher’s husband, who has not been able to find work, is trying to earn money selling vegetables in the camp in the mornings, but what he makes is not enough to sustain the family.

Despite the difficulties of living in the camp, Kay Mo says she has not given up hope for the day when Myanmar is at peace again and it is safe enough for her to return to her normal life.

“I want to live in a place where there is no fear,” she said. “I just want to go back to my village, my home.”

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

A former bodyguard and close friend of detained Myanmar national leader Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested by junta security forces last week on charges of communicating with a shadow government formed in opposition to military rule, RFA has learned.

Cherry Htet, a 30-year-old second lieutenant in the Myanmar police, was taken into custody at her office in the capital Naypyidaw on Sept. 21, nearly eight months after former state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi was ousted in a military coup and placed under house arrest.

Arrested at the same time was Aung San Suu Kyi’s security team leader, Capt. Pyae Phyo Naing, said a source close to the group, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The bodyguards lived in their dorm and went to work every day. And then both were arrested the other day while at the office, and the military later came to the dormitory and took their clothes and accessories away,” he said.

The pair’s mobile phones had been confiscated two days before their arrest, the source said, adding, “As far as I know, they must have been under watch all this time.”

Cherry Htet had been appointed Aung San Suu Kyi’s bodyguard in late 2016 following the victory of her National League for Democracy (NLD) party in a general election the year before, and had accompanied the Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto national leader, on her travels in Myanmar and overseas.

The two gradually became close, with Aung San Suu Kyi giving Cherry Htet a necklace she had personally designed to celebrate her promotion from sergeant to lieutenant, and Htet sewing a face mask for her to wear when Myanmar was hit by its first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cherry Htet was always vigilant for threats to Suu Kyi’s safety during her frequent trips, said an NLD member who was close to both of them.

“When people saw Amay [Mother] Suu during her trips, they would gather around her to cheer and greet her, and Cherry would look so worried for her. Her concern could be seen clearly on her face,” she said, also speaking on condition on condition of anonymity to protect her identity.

“We see her as someone who clearly cares about Amay Suu,” she said.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s bodyguards were at their hostel close to the leader’s home when the military launched its Feb. 1 coup, and were unable to protect her from arrest, the NLD member said.

In touch with the resistance

Speaking on Sept. 26 to the Mandalay-based Voice of Myanmar, junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun said that Cherry Htet had been arrested for communicating with members of the opposition National Unity Government (NUG), formed six months ago by former lawmakers, students, and other activists to work against military rule.

A police statement said that Htet in June had contacted former NLD parliamentarian Thiri Yadanar, who had sent her photos of a jungle camp and weapons used by the resistance, along with formal statements by the NUG, and that the two had also exchanged videos from foreign-based news agencies.

Postings on Cherry Htet’s social media accounts earlier in the year had also called out what she called “injustice” under Myanmar’s military rule and had expressed love and support for Aung San Suu Kyi.

The junta has now filed a case against Htet under Section 505(a) of the country’s Penal Code.

Myanmar’s military justified its February overthrow of the country’s democratically elected government by claiming voter fraud had led to a landslide victory for national leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD party in the country’s 2020 election.

The junta has yet to provide evidence of its claims and has violently suppressed nationwide demonstrations calling for a return to civilian rule, killing 1,146 people and arresting 6,921 over the past eight months, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP-Burma).

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Richard Finney.

A Chinese official report asserting that population growth in Xinjiang since 1949 refutes a series of reports on mass internment, forced birth control and other Chinese policies to reduce the proportion of Uyghurs in the region has angered the Uyghurs, while experts accused Beijing of cherry-picking the numbers.

The State Council Information Office’s Xinjiang population white paper comes amid vigorous Chinese efforts to avoid scrutiny and condemnation of a litany of documented abuses in the region, including mass internment camps, sexual assaults, forced abortions, and forced labor.

Amid a surge in international awareness of the situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) that began about three years ago, a territory the size of Alaska or Iran, the U.S. and other western states have determined that the treatment of Uyghurs constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity.

China, which rejects the genocide allegations, has launched an all-out propaganda drive to counter the reports, which have led to sanctions against XUAR officials, and moves by Western customs authorities to block Xinjiang products suspected of having been produced with forced labor.

State media and Chinese diplomats regularly vilify the scholars who revealed the mass internment and birth control programs, and Xinjiang officials hold frequent news conferences to promote Beijing’s views. China has not, however, permitted UN or other independent outside observers visit the region to investigate.

The newest document in that campaign, “Xinjiang Population Dynamics and Data,” claims that an increase in the population of Xinjiang, particularly that of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, in the seven decades since Communist China was founded, refutes studies of the past decade showing forced birth control and other measures to curb the Uyghur population.

The report cites census data indicating that of the region’s total population of 25.85 million, ethnic minorities in Xinjiang totaled 14.93 million — up from 4.45 million in 1953 — while Han Chinese comprised the remainder.

The number of Uyghurs increased from 3.61 million in 1953 to 11.62 million in 2020, and accounted for nearly 84 percent of the population in the four prefectures in southern Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs are concentrated, the white paper said.

The report says the Uyghur population grew at a 1.67-percent compound annual growth rate during the first two decades of the current century — much higher than that of the overall ethnic minority population of China, which increased at the rate of 0.83 percent since 2020.

The newest report follows the release in July of another white paper,
“Respecting and Protecting the Rights of All Ethnic Groups in Xinjiang,” which asserted that Beijing has upheld political, economic, cultural, and social rights as well as freedom of religious belief throughout the XUAR.

A ‘high number of bald-faced lies’

Holes in China’s claims were quickly identified by outside scholars.

A “central distortion” of the white paper is a claim that the Uyghur population in Xinjiang increased from 2010 to 2020 that ignores a decline in the population growth rate from 2017 onwards, when “Uyghur births were brutally suppressed,”
Wrote Rian Thum, a historian of Islam in China and the Uyghurs.

“So they’re hiding the crash in Uyghur population growth rates 2017-2020 by presenting all data in a block that includes a period of high Uyghur growth rates (2010-2016). They never say what happened between 2017 and 2020,” Thum tweeted.

“There’s also an unusually high number of bald-faced lies for a white paper,” he said, adding that he found it telling that the Chinese government document did not disclose the current population growth rate for Uyghurs in the XUAR.

“How did 2020 compare to 2019? This would seem to be crucial data for a state looking to convince the world that it is not preventing births in an indigenous group,” he said.

Uyghur political commentator Asiye Uyghur also pointed out a discrepancy in the white paper’s population data.

“The Xinjiang Investigative Team of China’s Statistical Bureau announced its findings on Sept. 5, 2010, and stated 3.7 million births were prevented in Xinjiang due to the enforcement of the family planning policy for more than two decades up to 2006,” he told RFA.

The government white paper did not refer by name to Adrian Zenz, the German anthropologist whose studies based on excavations of data and Xinjiang policy debate from official Chinese documents have revealed the detention of some 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in “re-education” camps, the forced sterilization of detained Uyghur women, and plans to dilute the Uyghur population in southern Xinjiang.

A report on the white paper by China’s state-run Xinhua news agency accused foreign media and politicians of spreading rumors and fabrications about Xinjiang.

“This is a calculated campaign to undermine the Chinese government’s enormous efforts to protect ethnic equality, and misrepresent the historic progress that has been made on human rights in the region,” the agency said, quoting the paper.

“Their goals are to discredit China, interfere in China’s internal affairs, restrict China’s development, and destroy stability and prosperity in Xinjiang,” the white paper said.

‘Statistics are the CCP’s tool’

The Communist Party-affiliated Global Times tabloid lumped researcher Zenz as among “these anti-China scholars, who have no professional demographic knowledge, are racking their brains to seek ‘evidence’ for their guilty presumption against China.”

The Global Times quoted Li Jianxin, a demographer at Peking University who contributed to the white paper, as saying that social and economic development; rising education levels, especially for young women; and a change in fertility patterns; and “de-radicalization” all helped bring down the Uyghur population.

Zenz, however, drew on government documents showing that population growth rates in the region had declined by 84 percent in the two largest Uyghur prefectures between 2015 and 2018, and declined further in several minority regions in 2019.

Government documents from 2019 showed that authorities had plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization in rural Uyghur regions, subjecting women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to birth prevention surgery or forced sterilizations, Zenz wrote in a July report on the sterilization of detained Uyghur women.

Zenz also documented official discussion of “population optimization strategy” to dilute the Uyghur majority in southern Xinjiang by raising the proportion of Han Chinese through immigration while imposing strict birth controls on the Uyghurs.

Using population projections by Chinese researchers, Zenz calculated that this could result in a drop in births among Uyghurs of 2.6 million to 4.5 million by 2040.

“These findings provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria cited in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely that of Section D of Article II: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the [targeted] group,” Zenz wrote in his birth control report.

Dolkun Isa, president of the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress exile group, said the report “attempts to present the so-called normal and natural growth of the Uyghur population as if China hasn’t arbitrarily locked up millions of Uyghur people in concentration camps, forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of Uyghur women, separated Uyghur children from their parents, aborted countless Uyghur babies, forced Uyghur women to marry Chinese men, and coerced tens of thousands into forced labor.”

“China will never be able to escape its criminal responsibility for the commission of genocide and crimes against humanity in East Turkestan by manipulating and manufacturing the Uyghur population growth data,” he said, using the Uyghurs’ preferred name for the XUAR.

Chinese human rights lawyer Teng Biao told RFA that the government’s statistics, including the nationwide population census, are meant to serve the political aims of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“They falsified the census statistics for many years,” he said. “Statistics are the CCP’s tool only. They are definitely not credible. China’s narrative is to counter Western accusations of genocide.”

Reported by Mihray Abdilim and Alim Seytoff for RFA’s Uyghur Service. Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Rural citizens in North Korea are angry that their government is building mosaic murals at their expense that idolize the ruling Kim family at a time when people are struggling to find their next meal, sources in the country told RFA.

Chronically short of food, the country of 25 million has seen starvation deaths in the wake of the closure of the Sino-Korean border and suspension of trade with China in January 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Authorities told the public that they are on their own to find food, RFA reported previously.

Giant murals depicting leader Kim Jong Un’s father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il; grandfather and national founder Kim Il Sung; and the eldest Kim’s first wife, Kim Jong Suk, are commonplace in the country where the members of the Kim family enjoy almost god-like status due to a firmly entrenched cult of personality.

The murals are a common feature of major thoroughfares in cities, but the government is ordering them in the countryside for the first time, sources said.

“These days, the people are all complaining about this idolization project, which must be completed by the end of October,” a resident of Musan county in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service Sept. 23.

As with almost all public projects, the government is forcing local citizens to donate their time, money or materials for the murals.

“With this mural installation, the people’s dissatisfaction with the country has reached its peak,” the source said.

“The residents are suffering from major livelihood difficulties but now we have to pay 20,000 won (U.S. $3.28) in ‘loyalty funds’ per household, and we must also provide cement and prepare meals for the construction workers,” said the source.

The design of the new murals is still a secret. The source said nobody knows if the three figures will be depicted as usual or if they will present a new design.

“But nobody cares about the design in these difficult times, because they have more important things to worry about,” the source said.

“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting border closure, most people are at the crossroads of life and death every day due to these food shortages. In such an emergency, the people are outraged that the government is burdening them by extorting money for the murals,” said the source.

Another source, a party official from Chunggang county in the northern province of Chagang, told RFA that the collection of funds in his jurisdiction has begun.

“The murals will be built at the borders of each county and at the borders between each district,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

“We already have mosaic murals at several industrial sites in Changang province, including timber processing facilities in Chasong and Kopung counties, and mines and timber processing plants in the cities of Kanggye and Yanggye, so I don’t understand why they are telling us to build more at the boundaries of districts,” said the second source.

North Korea’s government has told citizens to prepare for a “second Arduous March,” referring to the 1990’s North Korean famine which killed as much as 10 percent of the country by some estimates. The second source said citizens in Chagang have begun referring to the current crisis that way.

“Many residents are perplexed because the state is passing on the cost of installing idolization murals to the residents instead of taking care of their livelihood at a time like this,” said the second source.

“The people say things like, the murals aren’t going to give us rice, and the government is against the people, making us do this project to deceive us. The people must pay to idolize our leaders when they cannot even get basic food and medicine,” the second source said.

Reported by Jeong Yon Park for RFA’s Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

The Philippine foreign secretary on Thursday ordered that new diplomatic protests be filed against Beijing over the ongoing presence of more than 100 Chinese ships in waters claimed by Manila in the South China Sea.

Teodoro Locsin Jr., who is in the United States for an official visit, issued three messages via Twitter ordering the Department of Foreign Affairs to file the protests. The new diplomatic protests are the latest since the Philippines began filing daily protests against Chinese incursions in Manila’s exclusive economic zone in the sea earlier this year. 

“File now our protest on China’s incessant & unlawful restriction of Filipino fishermen from conducting legitimate fishing activities in Bajo de Masinloc,” Locsin said, using the Philippine name for the Scarborough Shoal. 

Manila considers Scarborough Shoal, a reef located 118 nautical miles (218.5 km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon, to be within its 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

In his other tweets, Locsin ordered protests on “Chinese radio challenges unlawfully issued against Philippine maritime patrols,” and on the “continued presence of Chinese fishing vessels in [the] vicinity of Iroquois Reef.”

Additional details about the Chinese ships were not released.

In early April, Locsin said the Philippines would file “daily diplomatic protests” with Beijing during a quarrel that began in March, when the Philippine military reported spotting more than 200 Chinese fishing boats which, it alleged, were manned by militia. The fishing boats later scattered, but security analysts said they may have moved to other parts of the disputed region.

BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, could not immediately determine if the daily protests had stopped. Diplomats previously said that, for as long as there were Chinese incursions, the protests would continue.

Locsin’s orders came a day after Rep. Ruffy Biazon said that 150 Chinese fishing ships had been spotted in the West Philippine Sea, Manila’s name the South China Sea. Without elaborating, Biazon said the Chinese ships appeared to be part of a fishing fleet and were moving from one area to another.

The Chinese Embassy in Manila did not immediately respond when contacted by BenarNews. 

Last month, the military’s Western Command (Westcom), based in Palawan province, said Philippine aircraft were warned by China while they patrolled the skies above the South China Sea. An internal Westcom report claimed that China had fired five flares between June 16 and 22 at Philippine military aircraft conducting security patrols.

China took control of the shoal in 2012 and engaged with the Philippine Coast Guard in a tense standoff before both sides agreed to leave waters around it.

The Philippines stuck to the deal but the Chinese never left, forcing Manila to file a case with an international arbitral tribunal, which in 2016 ruled in its favor. China however has said that it does not recognize the ruling by the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague. 

China claims nearly the entire South China Sea, including waters also claimed by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. While Indonesia does not regard itself as party to the dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia’s EEZ as well.

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

The Hong Kong Journalists’ Association (HKJA) has criticized editorial guidelines issued for government broadcaster RTHK, as the government moves to take over greater editorial control over “sensitive” content.

In an editorial guidelines document handed to staff on Sept. 29, RTHK said its producers and journalists must uphold China’s national interests and avoid “glorifying” or depicting “criminal” activities that could incite others to do the same.

In an apparent reference to the reporting of protests similar to the 2019 anti-extradition movement, the guidelines said the station should avoid portraying the actions of “criminals or criminal suspects” as “glorious, heroic deeds.”

The HKJA said it was unclear what kind of treatment would constitute “glorifying” crime, and took aim at a new “upwards referrals” process outlined in the document that actively encourages journalists to ask their editors’ and managers’ permission when reporting on “sensitive” topics.

The Hong Kong government and ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) media have repeatedly characterized the protests and civil disobedience actions of 2019 as “rioting,” with protest-era slogans decreed to be “secessionist” and a threat to China’s national security.

The CCP’s imposition of a draconian national security law on Hong Kong from July 1, 2020 criminalizes speech deemed to “incite hatred” against the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, and has ushered in a citywide crackdown on all forms of public dissent, peaceful protest, and political opposition, with dozens of former opposition lawmakers charged with “subversion” under the law for taking part in a democratic primary.

The HKJA said media organizations rely on a frank exchange of views between reporters and TV crews and their editors, because the former are closer to the action.

“Anyone with a little media experience should be able to understand that it is often counterproductive to issue one-way, top-down instructions … because it turns news organizations into production lines for churning out scripts,” the HKJA said in a statement in response to the new guidelines.

“Internal communications of media organizations focus more on discussions than commands,” it said. “The HKJA is concerned that RTHK management mistakenly believes that by issuing guidelines on content production, supplemented by a ‘referral’ mechanism, communication problems can be resolved or programs can be guaranteed to be error-free,” it said.

“The HKJA sincerely hopes that the RTHK management [will] sincerely and respectfully work with their employees, who have professional experience in journalism, to maintain program quality,” it said.

Under a restructuring imposed by the government in March 2021, an editorial board has been empowered to vet all program content and to issue top-down directives to journalists regarding coverage.

The guidelines encourage producers to “submit program plans to the board for review at the early stages of planning, enabling it to be more proactive in guiding the production process.”

“Individual production units should proactively make use of the ‘upward referral’ system for consulting RTHK management on important and contentious issues,” the guidelines say.

Failure to rigorously implement the guidelines may result in disciplinary action.

‘Building national identity’

Under the new guidelines, RTHK is expected to build “national identity” through its content and “take into consideration that Hong Kong is part of [China].”

It is also barred from referring to democratic Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the CCP nor formed part of the People’s Republic of China, as a country, or a country-like entity, in keeping with Beijing’s territorial claim on the island.

The station must also help the government promote, and communicate about, the national security law.

“All program makers should be vigilant to the portrayal, depiction, or treatment of any act or activity which may constitute or is likely to cause the occurrence of an offense endangering national security,” the guidelines state, warning producers against content that could be seen to encourage, incite, promote, glorify, endorse, or sympathize with acts endangering national security.

The warnings would likely mean that, should street protests and police violence occur in Hong Kong, they couldn’t be covered from the front line with interviews with protesters, only from the point of view of the government.

“News coverage in the run-up to a demonstration or public order event requires careful handling so that we would not be seen as promoting it,” the guidelines warn. “Reporting teams should also pay attention to police instructions and keep a distance from the center of a clash.”

Advisor to the Director of Broadcasting Kitty Choi said the guidelines aren’t trying to catch people out.

“They are telling them what guidelines they need to follow, and what mistakes to avoid,” Choi said, adding that the the bulk of the text of the document hadn’t changed since the last edition.

But HKJA chairman Ronson Chan said the person who wrote the new guidelines probably didn’t have any journalistic experience.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.