Day: November 19, 2021

The North Korean military will severely punish two soldiers for referring to South Korea by an abbreviation of its official name, which is essentially a political statement that recognizes the legitimacy of the government in Seoul, military sources in the North told RFA.

The official name for North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), whereas South Korea is officially the Republic of Korea (ROK). But the “Korea” part of their names are different words — Choson in the North and Hanguk in the South.

While both names have been used by previous governments in the peninsula’s history, in the current political climate the use of one name or the other has become almost a political declaration. North Koreans call the South, “South Choson,” and South Koreans call the North, “North Han.”

In conversation, the two North Korean soldiers referred to South Korea as “Hanguk,” an indiscretion that is likely to bring a harsh reprisal from military leaders, sources said.

“There was an incident in a unit under the 9th Corps, where several soldiers used the term ‘Hanguk’ to refer to the South,” a military source from the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service Nov. 16.

“Two soldiers were ordered to appear for a self-criticism meeting in front of the rest of the unit,” said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

Such meetings are common in North Korea. They can consist of workers, government officials and even neighborhood residents. The participants are expected to snitch on each other for their thought crimes in front of their peers and adjudicators, who usually dole out light punishments for the offenses.

But the punishment for these soldiers will likely be much more severe than is typical, the North Hamgyong source said.

“This is the first time they will punish soldiers for this kind of crime since the enactment of the Law on Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture,” said the source, referring to the new draconian law passed within the last year.

“The authorities are likely going to make an example out of them,” the source said.

The soldiers had used the offending term while on duty as they were discussing South Korea’s rapid development from an impoverished country at the conclusion of the Korean War to one of the world’s leading economies only decades later, according to the source.

“They are facing punishment now because one of the soldiers working with them was secretly an agent for the Defense Security Command and he reported them,” the source said.

In recent years, North Koreans have grown increasingly aware of the differences between the two countries thanks in part to South Korea’s rapidly expanding popular cultural influence, globally referred to as the Korean Wave.

The latest South Korean dramas and K-Pop hits make their way to the North on smuggled flash drives and SD cards. Once there it is ravenously consumed on the sly by trendy young North Koreans, who show off to each other by adopting South Korean slang terms and spellings, and even the distinct dialect of the South Korean capital.

The North Korean government has been actively fighting against what it calls an “infiltration of capitalist culture,” sentencing people to hard labor or even death for possessing or distributing copies of foreign media.

“Within the military, the young soldiers are being swept up in the [South] Korean Wave, and the authorities consider this behavior to be a reactionary act by those lacking faith in the socialist system,” the North Hamgyong source said.

“Three of four years ago, when inter-Korean relations were good, calling the South by its official name, the Republic of Korea, was not such a big deal,” said the source.

“But these days, authorities are quick to jump on people for uttering even a singly problematic word in passing, so everyone, especially officials of the regime, are walking on eggshells trying not to make a mistake by saying the wrong thing,” the source said.

New recruits showing up for their mandatory seven-year stints in the armed forces are screened for ideological infractions even before they arrive for training, according to the source.

“Not only are their belongings searched, they are also interrogated about how many times they have watched South Korean dramas and movies before they even enlist,” the source said.

“If they honestly confess, then they only have to go to educational sessions. But if they did not confess and are caught later, they will be punished.”

When soldiers do something wrong, it is not uncommon for their superiors to also be punished. Different arms of the military in North Hamgyong are blaming each other for the two soldiers’ choice of words, creating a tense situation, another North Hamgyong military source told RFA.

“In relation to the two soldiers of the 9^th Corps that called the South by a problematic term, the head of the operations division of the staff department, who oversees the division command’s censorship committee, once even tried to inspect the computer in the office of the propaganda director at the political department,” the second source said.

“He said he was cracking down on illegal videos. The director protested and a fight almost broke out,” said the second source.

The 9^th Corps is deployed near the border with China and is therefore under more scrutiny because of the relative ease its soldiers can procure media from South Korea, according to the second source.

But despite the repeated crackdowns, South Korean media has had a major effect on how the soldiers see what is supposed to be their sworn enemy.

“The soldiers realize that the South is indeed more advanced than we are. Not only economically, but in every major aspect. Crackdowns and punishments can only do so much to stop them from wanting to know more,” the source said.

Translated by Dukin Han. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Post-coup Myanmar, the disputed South China Sea, and a response to a new United States-led defense pact may be the main issues discussed at next week’s special ASEAN-China Summit to mark 30 years of bilateral relations, political analysts said.

However, China’s reported wish for a breakthrough on a Code of Conduct for parties in the South China Sea likely won’t happen at the Nov. 22 summit, as Southeast Asian claimant-nations deal with Beijing’s escalated actions and militarization in the disputed waterway.

Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and leaders of Association of Southeast Asian Nations member-states are expected to attend the meeting, which the regional bloc and Beijing will host jointly. It will be their second bilateral meeting this year, and the first since ASEAN upgraded its ties with Beijing and Australia.

“AUKUS and Myanmar as well as South China Sea … are among the topics that would be the focus in the ASEAN-China Summit,” James Chin, a Southeast Asia expert at the University of Tasmania, told BenarNews.

“It will be an opportunity for China to try to use AUKUS as leverage against the West.”

Under the new three-nation pact, the United States and the United Kingdom will help Australia get nuclear-powered submarines, in an attempt to counter China’s clout and military expansionism in the Indo-Pacific.

ASEAN-China summits are usually focused on “not-so-sensitive things such as trade and investment,” Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat, a lecturer in international relations at the Islamic University of Indonesia, told BenarNews.

Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman Tanee Sangrat indicated that sensitive issues will not be discussed. 

“The meeting will underline the three decades of the cordial relationship and is to support China’s constructive roles, which promote peace and stability in the region,” Tanee told BenarNews via text message.

But, according to Rakhmat, “recent geopolitical developments mean it’s likely that this year’s ASEAN-China summit will discuss political and security issues.”

AUKUS is one of those big geopolitical developments that Beijing has fulminated against, saying it threatens stability in Southeast Asia.

China would want ASEAN member-states on its side, but the regional bloc’s member-states are divided over AUKUS which does not serve Beijing’s interests, said Henrick Tsjeng, an international studies scholar at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“This means, from Beijing’s perspective, that a part of Southeast Asia could potentially still be used by the U.S. to counter China’s regional influence,” Tsjeng told BenarNews.

On the other hand, a divided ASEAN “could help China by ensuring that ASEAN will never be able to form a cohesive bloc that acts against Beijing’s interests in the region,” he added.

Beijing uses ‘financial inducements’

Over their 30 years of bilateral ties, ASEAN and China have had “a highly asymmetric relationship” and this mainly reflects in issues to do with the disputed South China Sea, said Hunter Marston, an international relations scholar at the Australian National University.

China claims nearly the entire sea, including waters within the exclusive economic zones of four ASEAN members: Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

“Beijing has found it useful to engage ASEAN in order to advance its regional ambitions, particularly by splitting states that disagree over geostrategic disputes like the South China Sea,” Marston told BenarNews.

“Beijing uses both financial inducements and punitive measures to dictate preferred norms of behavior by smaller states. For instance, China has cut off Philippine banana imports amidst maritime disputes … and frozen financial lending to Vietnam due to its oil and gas exploration in disputed waters.”

China’s boats have repeatedly violated the law by intruding into the waters of Southeast Asian claimant-states, analysts have said.

Just on Thursday, Chinese coast guard ships reportedly used water cannons to block a Philippine resupply mission to its military outpost on a reef in the South China Sea, Filipino officials alleged. Manila called the action “illegal.”

China’s ‘words and actions often don’t align’

In the face of such provocation by Beijing, “ASEAN states have far less leverage to speak out or push back against Chinese pressure,” Marston said, referring to Southeast Asian nations’ economies being dependent on China.

The Asian superpower has vigorously promoted infrastructure investment into Southeast Asia through the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative, its $1 trillion-plus program to build a network of railways, ports and bridges across 70 countries.

“Chinese investment in Southeast Asia remained steady between 10 to 30 percent of total BRI [Belt, Road Initiative] investment from 2014 to 2019,” Tsjeng of Nanyang Technological University.

“With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this percentage jumped to 36 percent in 2020 – even though total global BRI investment dropped sharply.”

In addition, ASEAN last year became China’s biggest trade partner, replacing the European Union – bilateral trade reached U.S. $732 billion.

Marston, from the Australian National University, said ASEAN states would benefit from China’s trade and investment even without bilateral diplomacy. But that engagement “has failed to ameliorate China’s coercive behavior,” he said.

That is why China’s wish, according to reports, to speed up negotiations on the Code of Conduct to coincide with the 30th anniversary of ASEAN-Beijing dialogue may not be fulfilled, said Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, a U.S. think-tank.

“China and ASEAN maritime counterclaimants remain too far apart in negotiations for this to realistically stand a chance of happening this year. Or any year for the foreseeable future,” Grossman said on Twitter.

China will say that it wants peace, stability and security in the region, said the University of Indonesia’s Rakhmat.

“[A]lthough when it comes to the South China Sea, [it’s] words and actions often don’t align,” he said.

Junta leader to show up?

Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the junta leader of Myanmar, which is this year’s China-ASEAN dialogue coordinator, will be represented at the leader-level summit on Monday.

In an unprecedented move, the ASEAN Summit last month barred Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, who led the Feb. 1 coup in Myanmar, saying he had reneged on promises made to the bloc on taking steps to restore peace and democracy.

Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines spearheaded the effort to disinvite the Burmese junta chief.

On Thursday, though, Reuters news agency reported that a Chinese envoy was lobbying ASEAN member-states to allow Min Aung Hlaing to attend.

Four regional diplomatic and political sources whom Reuters did not name said Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore did not want the Burmese junta chief at the Monday meeting.

BenarNews could not independently confirm the lobbying effort, although the Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said Indonesia was in favor of banning Min Aung Hlaing from the Monday meeting.

“I have no knowledge of such a proposal [to allow Min Aung Hlaing to attend],” he told BenarNews.

“Indonesia remains consistent.  Indonesia’s position hasn’t changed.”

Hadi Azmi in Kuala Lumpur, Tria Dianti and Ronna Nirmala in Jakarta, and Pimuk Rakkanam in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Originally published in BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

A 20-minute video shot by a bespectacled young man who calls himself Guanguan appears to confirm reports of China’s vast network of concentration camps used to persecute Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

Guanguan says in the video that he traveled previously to China’s far western region in 2019 but went back in 2020 after reading an article from the U.S. news outlet BuzzFeed that indicated the locations of some of the camps there.

“But due to the Chinese government’s restrictions, foreign journalists can hardly gain access to Xinjiang to conduct interviews,” he says on the video, which includes English subtitles and was posted on YouTube in early October. “I thought to myself, foreign journalists can’t go there, but good for me, I can.”

Guanguan says in the documentary’s introduction that the Chinese government has set up many concentration camps in Xinjiang where local ethnic minorities and dissidents are imprisoned without a trial.

China claims the camps are re-education and vocational training schools. The camps are believed to have held about 1.8 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities since 2017. The video has been viewed on YouTube nearly 276,200 times.

The video includes scenes from Kumul (in Chinese, Hami), Mori (Mulei) Kazakh Autonomous County, Fukang, Urumqi (Wulumuqi), the outskirts Korla (Kuerle), and Yunqi. Guanguan says he relied on Mapbox satellite maps from 2017 and China’s Baidu search engine for medium-resolution satellite images.

In Hami in eastern Xinjiang, Guanguan drives by the Hami Compulsory Isolated Drug Rehabilitation Center, which is not marked on the Baidu map. He says he suspects the center is a concentration camp because of bars over the building’s windows and razor wire fencing along the compound walls.

In Mori Kazakh Autonomous County, Guanguan films a detention center flanked by watchtowers and surveillance cameras. He later goes to another location and finds the Mori County Detention Center. Neither building appears on the map.

In Urumqi, he drives down a road with several buildings with watchtowers and high fences topped with barbed wire. A slogan atop one reads, “Reform through labor, cultural reform.”

“This must be the largest cluster of concentration camps in the Urumqi area,” he says.

In the city’s Dabancheng district, Guanguan drives off-road and lies on his belly atop a hill to shoot video of a newly built but apparently unoccupied detention complex.

‘Beyond imagination’

In Korla, Guanguan finds a military complex with surrounding buildings he assumes are barracks and army trucks parked in the courtyard. Behind the complex, he spots other buildings with watchtowers and wire fencing.

“That is where the concentration camps are located,” he says.

In Yunqi, he finds more buildings with watchtowers and barbed-wire fencing.

“The Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs is beyond imagination,” Guanguan says at the end of the video. “One who does not wish to be enslaved cannot bear the sight of others being enslaved. Down with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], may it be dissolved sooner rather than later so as to end its anti-humanity evildoings.”

Both BuzzFeed and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published reports about the camps based on satellite imagery.

“I was really amazed when I saw that video,” Alison Killing, an architect and geospatial analyst who helped BuzzFeed create a satellite image map for reports on the camps in Xinjiang, identifying a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.

“The first thing that should be said is just how brave that guy was to head off to Xinjiang and to go and look for those camps,” she told RFA on Wednesday.

“It’s really useful to have that ground-level imagery that helps us to corroborate what we’re seeing in the satellite images and helps us to confirm that what we thought we were looking at from above really is vast,” Killing said.

Killing, BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan, and Christo Buschek, a programmer and digital security trainer who creates tools for data journalists and human rights defenders, won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting this year for their story series.

Nathan Ruser, a researcher with ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Center, tweeted on Nov. 14 that Guanguan filmed “some of the largest and most infamous” detention facilities in Xinjiang.

“All in all, he provides visual proof and footage of 18 different detention facilities, and one former facility,” he wrote.

Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.