Day: September 23, 2021

Human rights activists on Thursday called on China to release jailed Uyghur academic Ilham Tohti, sentenced seven years ago to life in prison for “separatism,” for his advocacy work in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, while his daughter says his family does not even know his whereabouts.

An economist at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, Tohti pushed for a peaceful solution for Uyghur issues and equal rights for the persecuted group, submitting his proposals to the Chinese government for improving relations between Uyghurs and Han Chinese.

Tohti also ran the Uyghur Online website, formerly at uyghurbiz.net, set up in 2006 as an advisory platform for Uyghur intellectuals to promote voices from within their community.

The website also drew attention to the discrimination facing Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) under Beijing’s rule, as authorities tried to assimilate the ethnic group by restricting religious practices and use of the Uyghur language.

The Chinese government shut down the website several times prior to Tohti’s formal arrest in January 2014, citing the politically sensitive nature of its content. He was convicted by the Urumqi Intermediate Court on Sept. 23 of the same year following a two-day trial.

“It has been seven years since China’s unlawful imprisonment of Professor Ilham Tohti. While the international community has called on China to release him from prison … China has neither released him nor revealed his current whereabouts and health condition,” said Dolkun Isa, president of the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress.

“We call on the United Nations to urge China to release Professor Tohti,” he told RFA. “The European Parliament, which awarded him the 2019 Sakharov Prize, should continue to push for professor Tohti’s freedom.”

The repression of the Uyghurs has gotten progressively worse since then. China has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of detention camps since 2017.

Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers set up to fight extremism among Uyghurs and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has mistreated Muslims living in Xinjiang, but camp survivors and former guards have described widespread abuses in interviews with RFA and others.

Other abuses against members of the 12-million-strong Uyghur population include torture, sexual assaults, forced abortions and the sterilization of detained Uyghur women, and efforts to reduce population growth in the region thorough birth control and population transfer policies.

As international awareness of the situation in XUAR has grown, the United States and the legislatures in several European countries have deemed the treatment of Uyghurs and others in the XUAR as constituting genocide and crimes against humanity.

‘We should speak out’

Tohti’s daughter, Jewher Ilham, said that her family doesn’t know whether authorities have kept her father in the same prison during the past seven years or moved him.

“Since 2017, nobody from our family has been allowed to visit him,” she told RFA.

“We were told that he was in the No. 1 Prison in Urumqi [in Chinese, Wulumuqi] before, but since we were not allowed to visit him, we are not sure if he is in the same prison or not,” Jewher said. “So far nobody has had any contact with my father. Whenever we call the prison, they never pick up the phone.”

Tohti’s daughter also said that authorities also had sentenced one of her cousins to 10 years in the prison.

“The Chinese government should not only allow my family to visit him and visit my cousin, but they should also be released immediately along with all the other innocent Uyghur people who are locked up in the prison and in the camps,” she said.

The Germany-based Ilham Tohti Initiative commemorated the seventh anniversary of Tohti’s sentencing with a plea to governments and international bodies to press for his release.

“[W]e call on the Chinese government to publish official information on [the] whereabouts and conditions of Ilham Tohti, unconditionally release him and his students, and urge the international community, including the U.N. human rights institutions, the governments, the European Union and all human rights NGOs to press for his freedom,” said a statement the group issued Thursday.

During a video conference on Thursday hosted by the Ilham Tohti Initiative, Chinese human rights activist and lawyer Teng Biao said that Tohti was given a harsh sentence of life imprisonment, whereas a Han Chinese dissident who was convicted on “separatism” charges would have received a sentence of two to five years in jail.

“Most Han Chinese people don’t know what’s happening in Xinjiang, and we don’t say anything [about] the genocide,” he said. “So, we should speak out for Ilham Tohti, for the persecuted Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.”

“I really hope the world, especially the Western democracies, can stop their appeasement policy and [not] be an accomplice of the Communist Party leadership,” Teng added.

Enver Can, founding president of the Ilham Tohti Initiative and moderator of the panel, said there is a changing situation in Europe which sees the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) getting too powerful and too dangerous for Western democracies.

“I hope very much … that they build a grand coalition and stand up against the CCP expansion and against the CCP’s violation of human rights, especially against the Uyghurs in this case,” he said.

Tohti, 51, has received more than 10 international human rights awards since his sentencing, including the Martin Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2016 and the Sakharov Award for “Freedom of Thought” in 2019. He also was nominated for the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s Peace Prize in 2020.

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

A U.S. magistrate has ordered Facebook to release records and deleted content which, he said, helped stoke attacks against Rohingya by Myanmar’s military including during a 2017 offensive that unleashed a massive exodus of refugees into Bangladesh.  

Zia M. Faruqui, a federal judge in Washington, ruled in favor of The Gambia, which is seeking “evidence of genocidal intent” for its lawsuit filed against Myanmar at the International Criminal of Justice.

In his ruling on Wednesday, Faruqui declared that the social media powerhouse, by its own admission, was too slow to respond to concerns about how the online platform played a role in Myanmar’s persecution of the stateless Rohingya Muslim minority.

“Facebook has admitted that Myanmar authorities used Facebook as part of a coordinated campaign of hate against the Rohingya. Yet the scope and underlying proof of this conclusion is unknown to The Gambia,” Faruqui wrote in his ruling.

“The investigation records will illuminate how Facebook connected the seemingly unrelated inauthentic accounts to Myanmar government officials. Specifically, these records may show which accounts or pages were operated by the same officials or from the same government locations.”

He noted that in 2018, Facebook began deleting accounts and other content used by Myanmar government agents.

“The Gambia seeks these records for ‘evidence of genocidal intent necessary to support a finding of responsibility for genocide’ of the Rohingya,” Faruqui ruled.

Finishing his 32-page order, Faruqui noted that Facebook took a first step by deleting content that, in his words, “fueled a genocide,” but then did not share the content.

“Facebook can act now,” he said, adding, “Failing to do so here would compound the tragedy that has befallen the Rohingya.”

“Locking away the requested content would be throwing away the opportunity to understand how disinformation begat genocide of the Rohingya and would foreclose a reckoning at the ICJ.”

Paul Reichler, a Washington-based attorney representing the tiny West African nation of The Gambia in the ICJ lawsuit, praised the ruling.

“It enables us to obtain from Facebook the deleted messages,” he told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, on Thursday, noting that the platform was used to deliver information to military units regarding attacks on the Rohingya.

“Facebook was one of the main weapons,” he said. “I am disappointed that Facebook was not willing to produce the messages voluntarily.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request from BenarNews for comment, but Agence France-Presse obtained a statement from the company. 

“We’re reviewing this decision. We remain appalled by the atrocities committed against the Rohingya people in Myanmar and support justice for international crimes,” a Facebook spokesperson said in the statement. 

“We’ve committed to disclose relevant information to authorities, and over the past year we’ve made voluntary, lawful disclosures to the IIMM and will continue to do so as the case against Myanmar proceeds,” it said, referring to the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar.

In January 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Myanmar to protect Rohingya from genocidal acts, in response to the lawsuit filed by The Gambia two months earlier.

The 17-judge panel based in The Hague unanimously supported the imposition of measures to force Myanmar to refrain from destroying evidence of alleged crimes that could be used in future hearings.

One month later, a senior International Criminal Court prosecutor told reporters in Dhaka that those responsible for committing genocide against Rohingya would be prosecuted.

Reichler said he did not know when the Facebook content would be turned over, noting the company has the right to appeal the magistrate judge’s ruling to a higher court.

“I don’t think that would be worth their time,” he said.

The judge issued his ruling days after The Wall Street Journal released an investigative series, The Facebook Files.

The fourth part of the series included reporting that shed light on how the company did not do enough to stop “incitements to violence” while hate speech in Myanmar proliferated in 2018.

Facebook “executives described the Myanmar violence as a wake-up call to the company’s responsibilities in the developing world,” the report said.

In Dhaka, Munshi Faiz Ahmad, former chairman of the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies, said he believed Faruqui’s ruling would assist in efforts to prove allegations against Myanmar officials.

“We have seen a huge amount of anti-Rohingya posts and comments in Facebook when the Myanmar military and the vigilante groups in the country carried out genocide and crimes against humanity,” he told BenarNews.

“But whatever Facebook releases about the anti-Rohingya posts and contents would definitely corroborate the charges brought against Myanmar and the individuals involved in and responsible for the genocide and crimes against humanity at the international courts,” said Ahmad, a former ambassador to China.

$180 million for Rohingya

The ruling came on the same day that Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador to the United Nations, announced that Washington was donating another $180 million to assist Rohingya refuges in Bangladesh, Myanmar and elsewhere.

The funding brings the total committed by the U.S. government to $1.5 billion, of which, $1.2 billion has gone to support 900,000 Rohingya refugees in southeastern Bangladesh, the U.S. State Department said.

That includes the 740,000 Rohingya who crossed the border seeking shelter after Myanmar’s military launched its offensive in Rakhine state in August 2017. The funds also provide support to 472,000 Bangladeshis affected by the influx.

“We commend the people and Government of Bangladesh, who have responded generously to the refugees who have arrived in Bangladesh. However, more assistance is required,” said Ned Price, the department’s spokesman. “We urge other donors to come forward now with additional funds to sustain and increase support for the Rakhine state/Rohingya refugee crisis.”

In addition, the State Department reiterated its support for the citizens of Myanmar.

“In the aftermath of Burma’s Feb. 1 military coup d’état and brutal military crackdown, our commitment to the people of Burma, including Rohingya refugees and internally displaced persons, as well as members of other ethnic and religious minority groups, remains unwavering,” Price said referring to Myanmar by its former name.

The donation follows a U.S. pledge in May of $155 million toward the nearly $1 billion goal set by the UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, to support Rohingya in Bangladesh.

It also came days after the Biden administration announced plans to allow 125,000 refugees to enter the country beginning in the Oct. 1 fiscal year, including 35,000 from the Near East and South Asia. A State Department spokesman said the United States would not discriminate based on country of origin.

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

More than a hundred Lao workers building a China-backed high-speed railway connecting that country with Laos have gone without pay for almost two months, prompting one foreman to cut power to the project to force payment to his men, Lao sources say.

The laborers, who work in two villages in the capital Vientiane for several Chinese subcontractors, had been told they would be paid for their work at the end of each month, but one worker said their pay had been held back.

“We finished all our work, but our Chinese employer wouldn’t pay us,” the worker in Dong Phonhae village in Vientiane’s Hatxayfong district told RFA on Sept. 16. “He said he would pay us later today or maybe tomorrow, but he never did,” he said.

“We haven’t been paid since last month, and we have no money left to buy food. We’re from Luang Prabang province, and we’ve been working here for four months,” he said.

“Our employer promised yesterday that he would pay us today, but today has almost gone and we still haven’t gotten anything,” another Dong Phonhae worker said, with a third worker from the same village saying he has never been paid.

“I’m new here and have been working for more than a month, but I’ve never been paid. And my coworkers haven’t been paid for almost two months.”

“The employer keeps saying, ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,’” he said.

A fourth worker frustrated by the delays said he would quit his job on the rail line as soon as he is paid. “As soon as I receive my money, I’ll go back home to Oudomxay province and won’t come back again,” he said.

Also speaking to RFA, a foreman at the Dong Phonhae village work site said he has about 100 laborers working under his supervision.

“They earn between one million kip (U.S. $100) and two million kip each month, and the company still owes us all together 100 million kip for the work we did in August and the first half of September.”

A different group of workers from Dong Phosy, a second village in the district, said they had also not been paid by their Chinese subcontractor on the Lao-China Railway Project or almost two months, with one worker saying they had completed all the work assigned by their employer but had still not been paid.

“Many of us quit, and some others are still waiting for their money,” the worker told RFA on Sept. 17.

‘He never showed up’

Another worker on the same work site told RFA the same day that their employer after speaking with his business partner had promised the day before to pay them that evening but never showed up. “We waited until 11:00 p.m., and today it’s almost noon but no one has come now, either,” he said.

“Our employer has given no reason so far why he can’t pay his workers their salaries,” another Dong Phosy worker said, adding that some workers at his work site had given up waiting for their money and had now returned home.

“I don’t have any money for travel, myself, so I have to wait for my pay,” he said.

A fourth worker from the same village who had worked at the site for more than a month said his own promised salary was three million kip [$300] per month, but that he had not been paid anything at all.

“Our employer just disappeared,” he said. “My wife and I can’t go anywhere, because we have no money. We will just have to wait to be paid.”

“I’m not expecting any payment from our employer anymore, and I’m going back to my home in Borikhamxay province,” a fifth Dong Phosy worker said. “Labor officials keep asking me for a record of the work I’ve done and proof that I haven’t been paid, but I don’t have anything that I can show them.”

“Most of the other workers here are still waiting, too, and the authorities aren’t helping us,” he said.

A constant dispute

Other workers at Dong Phosy said the Lao workers and their Chinese employer are in constant dispute, with one worker saying their employer sometimes complains to district officials that assigned work is sometimes left undone, saying they won’t pay the men until the jobs are completed.

“The workers sometimes say they can’t finish their work because it’s raining too much,” he said.

“Many Lao workers are not serious about their work,” added a Lao supervisor working for the Chinese subcontractor on the Dong Phosy site.

“They don’t work hard. Some fall asleep on the job, some others are high on meth, and some steal. The employers cut off their wages and sometimes call the police on them,” he said.

The workers must continue their fight for their pay, though, a labor expert said, speaking like other RFA sources on condition of anonymity for reasons of personal security. “They should first keep demanding their payment from the employers, and if that fails, they have the right to sue their employers in court,” he said.

Lao laborers working for Chinese companies need to have a contract clearly stating when and how much a worker will be paid, though, said one former employee of a Chinese company working in Vientiane. “If you don’t have that contract, it’s hard to sue your employer,” he said.

Speaking to RFA, an official at the Lao Labor and Social Welfare Ministry said his ministry has not yet received a complaint from the unpaid workers, and suggested they launch a formal complaint so that the ministry can help them.

Requests for comment from the Chinese companies working in Vientiane went unanswered.

Some are now paid

Around 20 of the unpaid workers in Dong Phonhae have now been paid, one villager said on Sept. 21, adding that he quit as soon as he received the two million kip [$200] that was owed to him. “I’ll look for a new job somewhere else. Here, the payments come too late,” he said.

“Around 20 of us got our pay after we cut off power to the work site.”

“The employer paid our money right away,” another worker said. “But almost all the workers who received their money have now gone home.”

“More than 100 other rail workers employed by other Chinese subcontractors here have not gotten their pay yet and are still waiting,” he said.

Work on the $5.9 billion Lao-China railway link began in December 2016, with the project expected to lower the cost of exports and consumer goods in Laos and boost socioeconomic development in the landlocked nation of nearly 7 million people.

The 260-mile railway connecting Luang Namtha province on the Lao-China border to the capital Vientiane is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative of infrastructure lending and construction to support trade with China, and is now almost 94 percent complete.

China is Laos’ largest foreign investor and aid provider, and its second-largest trade partner after Thailand.

Reported and translated by Max Avary for RFA’s Lao Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

A professor and popular Vietnamese dissident said Thursday that he has received death threats by phone after publishing a series of social media posts criticizing the use of China’s coronavirus vaccines in Vietnam.

Mac Van Trang, known for his critical voice on sociopolitical issues in Vietnam, said he received threatening calls after he posted stories on the Chinese vaccines on his Facebook page, including a letter he wrote to the Ho Chi Minh City leaders, advising them not to accept millions of doses of the Sinopharm vaccine.

“One recent evening, an anonymous man called me on the phone, saying that I shouldn’t keep talking about it and should behave myself; otherwise I would put my life in danger,” Trang told RFA. “He also said that people are dying, and it’s good to have vaccines, and it would be a crime to prevent it. Therefore, I should mind my tongue!”

Vietnam is experiencing a surge in coronavirus cases with the spread of the more contagious Delta variant, and large areas of the country of more than 98 million people have been under lockdown. Only about seven percent of Vietnamese adults have been fully vaccinated.
On Thursday, Vietnam reported a total 728,435 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including nearly 9,500 news ones, and more than 18,000 deaths with 236 new fatalities.

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Health decided to allocate an additional 8 million doses of China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine donated by the Van Thinh Phat Group to 25 cities and provinces, the country’s Tuoi Tre News reported.

But citizens throughout the country have expressed concern, fearing the Sinopharm doses might produce hidden side effects, Ngo Tri Long, former rector of the Ministry of Finance’s Price and Market Research Institute, told RFA in an earlier report.

Trang, 83, was a long-term member of the Communist Party of Vietnam, but he resigned on Oct. 26, 2018, when the party decided to discipline Chu Hao, a well-known intellectual who criticized the government. Trang currently lives in Ho Chi Minh City and posts critiques of sociopolitical issues on his Facebook page.

It was not the first time that he had received such calls, Trang said, adding that threats were made after he spoke out about sensitive incidents in Vietnam, including a deadly land-rights dispute in January 2020. At that time, about 3,000 security officers raided a hamlet in Dong Tam commune to intervene in a long-running dispute over a military airport construction site about 25 miles south of Vietnam’s capital Hanoi.

“In our society, there are many people who have been indoctrinated for a long time that whatever contradicts the [Communist] Party’s policy and guidelines is considered hostile,” he said of the threats he has received.

“From the general secretary, prime minister, and president to others in the government, they always talk about enemies and hostile forces,” Trang said. “This has created a dangerous mindset among party fanatics who exist when the party exists, and who see anyone who criticizes it as a hostile force.”

In addition to the 8 million new shots, Vietnam has received roughly 50 million vaccine doses, including 20 million Sinopharm doses — more than six million of which were donated by China and five million of which were purchased by Ho Chi Minh City, Tuoi Tre News said.

Before the new allocation, 5.5 million Sinopharm vaccine doses had been administered to people in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Quang Ninh province, Hai Phong city, Binh Duong province, and Dong Nai province, the report said.

Vietnam’s President Nguyen Xuan Phuc traveled to Havana last weekend for an official visit, where he met with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and finalized a deal for Vietnam to buy 10 million doses of Cuba’s Abdala vaccine.

Italy has also promised to donate 800,000 doses of the British-Swedish AstraZeneca vaccine to Vietnam, raising Rome’s commitment to Hanoi to over 1.6 million doses through the COVAX program co-led by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; the World Health Organization; and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

In an attempt to burnish its tarnished reputation in Washington, Cambodia’s government has agreed to pay $70,000 a month to a U.S. lobbying firm known for representing some of the world’s most notorious regimes, according to papers lodged with the U.S. Justice Department.

Cambodia’s ambassador to the United States, Chum Sounry, signed a contract on Sept. 15 with Qorvis Communications, according to a filing made two days later and viewable on a website that records the registration of agents who represent foreign governments in the U.S.

In exchange for a $69,300 monthly retainer, Qorvis has agreed to “provide strategic communications and media relations services in support of increasing public awareness along with travel and tourism for the Kingdom of Cambodia.”

Phnom Penh’s international reputation has plummeted in recent years. In response to increasingly autocratic governance and human rights violations, the European Union has stripped Cambodia of its preferential trade status and the U.S. government has imposed sanctions on powerful figures within Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government. In response, Cambodia has gone on a lobbying spending spree, signing contracts with two agencies in 2019 alone.

One of those agencies, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, lobbied State Department employees not to pursue further sanctions against Cambodian officials, according to a source familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Many foreign governments hire lobbying firms to help press their case in the halls of power in Washington. But Dr Sophal Ear, author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia, said that as the latest firm to be signed up, Qorvis “should be ashamed of itself” for taking on the Cambodian government as a client.

“It’s absolutely disheartening to see that $70,000 per month is being spent on public relations to defend human rights abuses, destruction of democracy and un-freedom,” Ear told RFA. “Cambodia is now engaged in the purchase of coal-generated electricity, the clear-cutting of the last of its precious forests, sand-dredging, and so on. All of this should give Qorvis pause, but instead they look only at their balance sheet and profit and loss.”

Qorvis did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this article on Thursday.

The firm was one of the few lobbyists not to drop Saudi Arabia as a client in the wake of the 2018 murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. For roughly a decade Qorvis has represented Equatorial Guinea, which since 1979 has been subject to the deadly rule of its President Teodoro Obiang, whose son was made the subject of a travel ban and asset freeze by the United Kingdom this summer over allegations he embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds.

But filings with the Justice Department show that Qorvis also provides services to the office of the prime minister of Japan and the Republic of Fiji. However, it also serviced the latter while it was in the throes of a military government roughly a decade ago.

It remains to be seen precisely what services Qorvis will perform for Cambodia and for how long. The contract signed with Cambodia earlier this month stipulates that it can be terminated by either party at 30 days’ notice, and that the government may “adjust or otherwise fine tune the Services in accordance with [its] priorities as they may evolve over time.”