Day: November 3, 2021

Government troops in Myanmar are using civilians as human shields in clashes with anti-junta militias in Kayah state, according to family members of detainees and human rights groups, who said such tactics are increasingly used against residents of areas that have demonstrated support for the military’s opponents.

A photo of a group of men being led along a road, blindfolded and with their hands tied, recently went viral on social media in Myanmar.

According to the Karenni Human Rights Group, the photo shows 19 residents of Ka-the village in Shan state’s Pekhon township who were abducted by the military on Oct. 28 “to be used as human shields” in neighboring Kayah state.

“The photo was taken by a soldier and posted on social media,” Banyar, the group’s director, told RFA’s Myanmar Service on Wednesday.

“During an operation, they arrested people they found in the villages and took them away with them. It’s clear that the military is using civilians as human shields, as they are in constant fear of being ambushed.”

Banyar said that the military has an encampment on a hill west of nearby Shwe Pyay Aye village from where soldiers have been “firing heavy weapons almost daily” and suggested that the men might have been taken there.

“As far as we know, there were only 19 villagers [abducted],” he said.

Residents of Pekhon township told RFA that the military and Karenni armed groups have repeatedly clashed in the area since Oct. 26. They said more than 400 inhabitants of Ka-the had since fled the village and that the 19 men in the photo had been among “only a few elderly people behind.”

One resident whose family member had gone missing told RFA she only learned he had been abducted when she recognized him in the photo. She said his whereabouts remain unknown.

“When we left [Ka-the village], he remained with my grandmother—my husband’s grandmother,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

“She is more than 90 years old and could not go anywhere. We found out he was taken away only after we saw the picture.”

A member of the Karenni National Defense Force militia told RFA that junta troops from the military’s 66^th, 77^th, and 88^th divisions are conducting operations against Karenni armed groups, including the Karenni Army and the local branch of the People’s Defense Force (PDF). The units that abducted the villagers were from the 88^th Brigade, the person said.

A PDF fighter who declined to be named said members of his group attempted to intercept a convoy that included the 19 detainees on Oct. 28 but were forced to abandon the operation when they saw that the men had been placed in the lead to act as human shields.

“They forced the men to lead so that if we attacked, they would be hit,” the fighter said. “Our ethnic armed groups are in the area, but we could not attack them and so the villagers are still being held.”

Multiple occurrences

Banyar of the Karenni Human Rights Group said that the abduction of the 19 men marks the fourth time villagers were detained and used as human shields in Kayah state.

Some were released “on bail” by the military but “dare not talk about what had happened to them,” he said.

The detainees were also subjected to human rights abuses, such as “beatings” and “starvation,” while in captivity, according to their family members.

When asked about reports of civilians being used as human shields by the military, junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zam Min Tun told RFA that “media outlets and so-called PDFs have made fake claims in various ways.”

He suggested that PDF groups and ethnic armed organizations are the ones using unlawful tactics by carrying out attacks on security forces in the area and “using nearby monasteries and schools for cover.”

“When there are deaths in the military, they say they killed them, but when they suffer casualties, they say the victims were villagers,” Zaw Min Tun said.

According to the Karenni Human Rights Group, a total of 88 civilians have been killed by the military in Kayah state since the military seized power from Myanmar’s democratically elected National League for Democracy government in a Feb. 1 coup.

Nine months after the takeover, security forces have killed 1,233 civilians and arrested at least 7,012 nationwide, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners—mostly during crackdowns on anti-junta protests.

Evidence for international court

Human rights activist Nikky Diamond told RFA that local organizations need to gather evidence of the junta’s war crimes for international arbitration.

“Those who commit war crimes can be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court,” he said of The Hague-based tribunal.

“Human rights groups should learn how to gather valid evidence of human rights violations for domestic courts and international tribunals.”

The ICC is the only international criminal tribunal that can prosecute individuals convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. In order for the ICC to prosecute human rights abuses by a military or government, the country must be a signatory to the Rome Statute.

The Rome Statute, which established the ICC, was signed on July 1, 2002, and currently has 123 member states. Forty-two countries, including Myanmar, have yet to sign the treaty.

Sources say that when the military conducts an operation in an area where it believes residents are supporting the PDF, its troops typically burn down villages and arrest the people who live there.

Human rights groups say rights abuses such as arresting locals and using them as human shields regularly take place throughout Myanmar.

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

Civil society organizations called on Cambodian authorities on Tuesday to do more to protect journalists amid an ongoing government crackdown on freedom of expression under the autocratic rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Nine CSOs, including the International Federation of Journalists and the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association (CamboJA), expressed deep concern over what they said is the government’s failure to bring people who have committed crimes against journalists in the Southeast Asian nation to justice.

“We urge the Cambodian authorities to take immediate action to ensure that effective, independent, and transparent investigations into such crimes are conducted and that justice is served,” said the statement.

The groups released their statement to mark the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, which the United Nations created to draw attention to the risks journalists face around the globe. Between 2006 and 2020, 1,400 journalists worldwide were killed for reporting the news, according to a U.N. report.

At least 17 journalists have been killed in Cambodia since 1994, with nearly all being targeted because of their work, according to the statement. Some of the perpetrators have yet to be brought to justice.

Ostensibly, Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy with a charter proclaiming it a liberal, multiparty democracy. But the government of Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have weakened political opponents, civil society groups, and the independent media in a bid to remain in power. Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranked Cambodia 144 out of 180 countries in its 2021 World Press Freedom Index.

Media professionals, including former Radio Free Asia journalists Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin, faced false charges in the run-up to the country’s 2018 general election as part of a government crackdown. Independent news outlets and radio stations were banned, while journalists at other news outlets were purged.

Hun Sen’s government has used the coronavirus pandemic to adopt new restrictions on the dissemination of information and the right to peaceful assembly and association.
“Worryingly, the persecution of and crimes against journalists seem to be on the rise,” said the statement from the nine groups.

More than 80 journalists have been targeted in the last 10 months: 31 were arrested, 20 were physically assaulted, and 16 were threatened, according to CamboJA. Eight other journalists faced judicial harassment, five others were detained for questioning, and one female journalist experienced sexual harassment while doing her job.

“When journalists are targeted for conducting their legitimate reporting activities, freedom of expression is undermined and replaced by the fear that the public will no longer have access to information and that those in power will not be held accountable for their wrongdoings,” the statement said. “In addition, when the government fails to properly investigate and punish crimes against journalists, it sends the message that such crimes are allowed.”

The CSOs urged Cambodian authorities to ensure that effective, independent and transparent investigations into crimes are conducted and that perpetrators are brought to justice.

While journalists are less likely to be killed these days than in the past, the number of bogus lawsuits and physical assaults against reporters seems to be on the rise, said Nop Vy, executive director of CamboJA.
“What I’ve noticed is the persecution of journalists through detentions and arrests,” he said.

Nop Vy cited the case of a court in Koh Kong province giving a two-year jail sentence to a journalist for his coverage of a land dispute following the filing of a lawsuit by Minister of Defense Tea Banh.

Nop Vy urged aggrieved parties to use the country’s Press Law to address complaints against journalists rather than prosecuting them under Cambodia’s criminal code.

The press law “guarantees that journalists won’t be prosecuted under the penal code,” he said.

Chak Sopheap, executive director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said Wednesday that the ongoing harassment of journalists limits their ability to expose corruption and to hold government officials accountable.

“The culture of impunity has affected the way that journalists do their jobs,” she said. “The journalists will be afraid to reveal the truth.”

The government had yet to issue a response to the statement by the CSOs.

In a statement on International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, Information Ministry spokesman Meas Sophorn said claims about impunity for crimes against journalists were untrue and that Cambodia had never had crimes against journalists.

“We find journalists in Cambodia taking on their job responsibly and improving day by day to ensure they provide accurate and correct information to the public with no political trends,” he was quoted by the Khmer Times as saying.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Authorities in northwestern China’s Qinghai province are blocking Tibetan children from taking classes outside their schools over winter holidays in a move aimed at further weakening t connection to their native language, Tibetan sources say.

News of the ban was sent out in October in a notice to all districts and cities in the province, historically a part of northeastern Tibet’s region of Amdo, a Tibetan living in the province told RFA in a written message.

“No individual or organization is allowed to hold informal classes or workshops to teach the Tibetan language during the winter holidays when the schools are closed,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Teachers across the province have already been summoned to meetings held to inform them of the ban, the source said, adding that anyone caught violating the government’s order will face “serious legal consequences and punishment.”

“This is an attempt to wipe out the Tibetan language,” the source said.

“Subjects like math and science are already being taught in Chinese in all the elementary schools, and except for formal classes in the Tibetan language itself, all other subjects will gradually be taught in Chinese too,” he said.

Though informal classes and workshops held to teach Tibetan have been helpful to Tibetan students in the past, “all these facilities and opportunities have now been officially banned from this year forward, which is a huge concern,” the source said.

“The government ban on these informal Tibetan language classes violates the basic rights of Tibetans,” said a researcher named Nyiwoe at the Dharamsala, India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, speaking to RFA.

“Bans like this are aimed at eventually wiping out [the languages and culture] of all ethnic minorities in the country,” Nyiwoe said.

Chinese authorities in Qinghai have already banned monasteries from teaching language classes to young Tibetans during their holidays from school, and authorities in Qinghai and in neighboring Sichuan have also closed down Tibetan private schools offering instruction in Tibetan, sources say.

The move has forced students to go instead to government-run schools where they will be taught entirely in Chinese.

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 in the future.

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

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

Tennis star Peng Shuai has accused Zhang Gaoli, a former senior ruling Chinese Communist Party leader, of pressuring her into a sexual relationship in social media posts that were quickly removed by censors in a country where officials have tried to keep the #metoo movement in check. The former tennis doubles No. 1 detailed the affair, the humiliation she suffered from Zhang’s wife, and her social isolation caused by being made to keep the affair secret.

Police in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi are threatening the wife of a detained land-rights activist with arrest if he refuses to plead guilty to charges against him when he goes to trial, the man’s lawyer said on Wednesday.

Trinh Ba Phuong, who was arrested in June 2020 on a charge of “spreading propaganda against the state,” is being held at the Hanoi Police Detention Center No. 1 and has been waiting for his case to come to court for more than 16 months.

A session of Phuong’s trial scheduled for Wednesday was postponed after prosecutors in the case were put into quarantine after coming in contact with people testing positive for COVID-19, and no new trial date has been set.

He faces a possible prison term of from 10 to 20 years upon conviction.

Phuong is being told his wife will be arrested if he fails to confess to the charges made against him, his lawyer Dang Dinh Manh told RFA following a meeting in jail with Phuong on Tuesday.

“Investigators had previously brought in a smart phone and shown Phuong a Facebook posting by his wife Do Thi Thu in which she described the police as ‘thugs’ and called them inhumane,” Manh said, adding that police told Phuong that these were grounds for Thu’s arrest.

“And they told Phuong that if he did not confess to his crimes, they would take her into custody,” Manh said, adding, “This is what Phuong told me yesterday.”

Phuong has so far exercised his right not to answer questions during his pre-trial investigation and has made no confession, his lawyer said. Because of this, police investigators forced him to undergo mental health assessments at the National Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 in Hanoi’s Thuong Tin District in March 2021.

Attempts to force a confession by threatening a family member’s arrest are a form of coercion not permitted under the law, Manh said.

“These can be seen as a way of forcing the arrestee to make statements [against their will],” he said.

‘I only wrote the truth’

Thu herself had already been summoned by police for questioning about her Facebook posts late last year, Thu told RFA in an interview.

“They told me that it was forbidden to speak badly about the regime on Facebook, but I told them that I only wrote the truth,” she said.

“In spite of their threats, I think that our family’s spirit is very resilient and strong. My husband will never be afraid, and I’ll never give in either, even if they arrest me. Like my husband, I’ll be steadfast and strong until the end.”

A well-known land rights activist in Hanoi, Phuong was arrested on June 24, 2020 together with his younger brother and mother after they spoke out on social media about the Jan. 9, 2020 clash in Dong Tam commune is which 3,000 police stormed protesters’ homes at a construction site outside the capital, killing a village elder.

They had also offered information to foreign embassies and other international figures to try to raise awareness of the incident.

While all land is ultimately held by the state, land confiscations have become a flashpoint as residents accuse the government of pushing small landholders aside in favor of lucrative real estate projects, and of paying too little in compensation to farming families displaced by development.

Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Richard Finney.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has begun air defense drills in some parts of the country, in a move commentators said was a bid to step up pressure on the democratic island of Taiwan, which the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi Jinping has threatened to annex.

Authorities in the eastern provinces of Jiangsu, Shandong, and Anhui recently handed out distributed air defense emergency kits to residents and posted public information videos about what to do in the event of an air raid.

And a PLA document circulating online signed by authorities in Suzhou’s Wujiang district detailed “air defense unit training” with photos of participants in camouflage uniforms, bearing militia logos.

The move comes after the PLA escalated incursions into Taiwan’s southwestern air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in recent months, in a move Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen has called a threat to national security.

In one video posted by the Changsha Evening News’ Weibo account, a public-address system blares: “All our troops are now under the highest level of combat readiness.”

The video reports on air raid drills across Hunan province, the latest of dozens in recent weeks, while some Weibo users posted photos of military vehicles on the streets.

Meanwhile, the Hefei municipal government in Anhui posted photos and captions of emergency kits being handed to local residents, with a similar program reported in Nanjing.

The Weibo account belonging to Air Force World magazine reported on Wednesday that a Yun-8 military transport aircraft flew into “what Taiwan claims is its ADIZ” on Nov. 2.

Chinese current affairs commentator Wei Xin said officials are mobilizing at all levels to demonstrate that they are complying with Xi Jinping’s ideology.

“These actions have a political background, because the National People’s Congress revised the law on war mobilization recently, so the atmosphere is similar to that of Japan in 1938,” Wei said.

“Also, the sixth plenum of the 19th Party Congress will be held soon, and this is creating an atmosphere around [China’s ambitions towards] Taiwan and the future leadership succession,” he said.

“We are now seeing the kind of popular support linked to the idea of so-called military unification of Taiwan, similar to what we saw in Germany and Japan in the early 1930s,” Wei said.

Political posturing

Political commentator Bi Xin said the moves are a form of political posturing aimed at Taiwan.

“If there was going to be a war, basically we’d be under martial law,” Bi said. “This is to give public morale a boost, and show we haven’t given up on [annexing] Taiwan.”

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s Apple Daily newspaper reported that 40 Taiwanese marines are undergoing joint training with their U.S. counterparts in Guam for a month.

Taiwan military expert Cheng Chi-wen said Guam is a key garrison training base for U.S. forces in the Western Pacific, and that the authorities have become much more willing to talk about such exchanges in recent months.

“In the past, it was more about doing these things but not talking about them,” Cheng told RFA. “But more of it is coming out in the media owing to the stepping up of exchanges between the United States and Taiwan recently.”

Going on for years

Taiwan military commentator Chi Lo-yi agreed that such training has been going on for many years.

But he said Taiwan’s marines may not be deployed in the same way as U.S. Marines, who are generally used for offensive operations. They are more likely to be needed to retake Taiwan’s own outlying islands, particularly Dongsha.

“We may assume that the communist forces will invade our outer islands,” Chi told RFA. “Then, if we want to retake them, we will need the Marines, because regular troops won’t be of much help.”

“The outer islands would have to be retaken by the Marines, although I daren’t speculate about whether this is the point of this [training].”

Taiwan recently dispatched more patrol and rescue vessels to Dongsha, where many of the Chinese military incursions have been concentrated.

“Why Dongsha?” Chi said. “Because so many military aircraft have been overflying the southwest part of Taiwan’s ADIZ recently, along the Bashi Channel to Dongsha.”

“Naturally this points up Dongsha as significant, which is unusual, which is why we need to strengthen maritime patrols around Dongsha,” he said. “In particular, we will need to boost our special intelligence capabilities and military reconnaissance radar equipment.”

“We should also have an air defense facility stationed there, to act as more of a deterrent.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.