Day: January 7, 2022

Cambodian Prime Minister and rotating chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Hun Sen arrived in Myanmar Friday for a two-day visit and met with junta chief Snr. Gen Min Aung Hlaing despite protests over what is seen as his support for the military regime and its repressive policies. 

According to a source within the junta, Hun Sen held an afternoon meeting with Min Aung Hlaing in the capital Naypyidaw accompanied by five Cambodian cabinet ministers, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, two deputy ministers, and a team of delegates. 

While details of the meeting were not immediately clear, the two sides issued a joint statement saying that the leaders had “discussed a number of bilateral and regional issues of common interest and concerns,” and that Min Aung Hlaing had agreed to allow ASEAN Special Envoy to Myanmar Prasat Khun to join ceasefire talks between the military and armed ethnic groups in the country’s border regions. 

The statement emphasized that allowing the special envoy to join talks on “deescalating tension” is an “important step … in the ASEAN five-point consensus,” agreed to by Min Aung Hlaing during an emergency ASEAN meeting on Myanmar’s political crisis held in April. 

It said that Min Aung Hlaing had “pledged full support … in fulfilling his mandate to implement the five-point consensus in accordance with the ASEAN Charter,” but pointed out that its implementation “should be complementary in realization of the five-point roadmap of the State Administration Council,” or junta. 

Min Aung Hlaing initially signaled to ASEAN that he would end the violence in his country and allow the bloc to send an envoy to monitor the situation following the April meeting, but after months of failing to implement any steps to do so, relations between the two sides have spiraled down, with ASEAN choosing not to invite junta delegations to several high-profile meetings, including its annual summit. 

Meanwhile, nearly 8,440 civilians have been arrested and 1,445 killed by junta authorities since the military carried out a Feb. 1 coup, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, mostly during non-violent protests of its rule. 

Attempts by RFA’s Myanmar Service to reach junta spokesman Deputy Information Minister Zaw Min Tun by telephone for more details on the meeting, which the joint statement said also included agreements on providing humanitarian assistance to Myanmar, went unanswered Friday. 

Widespread protests 

The visit – the first by a foreign leader since the coup – came amid widespread protests by activists who said it would do nothing for the people of Myanmar and feared it would confer legitimacy on the junta, despite its failure to implement any of the five-point consensus measures. 

On Wednesday, Hun Sen had dismissed the suggestion that he would be soft on Myanmar and that talks would center around Myanmar’s obligations under the five-point consensus. However, the same day, Chan Aye, Permanent Secretary of the Myanmar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, attended an ASEAN Senior Officials’ Meeting to prepare for a meeting later this month of ASEAN foreign ministers, suggesting that Cambodia is willing to include the junta in high-level deliberations of the bloc. 

On Friday, as talks took place in Naypyidaw, protests were reported in the Sagaing region townships of Shwebo, Yinmabin, Kalay, and Salingyi, as well as in Hpakant in Kachin state. Similar anti-Hun Sen protests were held in Mandalay in the Sagaing townships of Debayin, Kalay and Salingyi and in Tanintharyi region’s Launglon township over the past two days. Security was tight in the capital, after at least three explosions went off in the vicinity of the Cambodian Embassy in Yangon in recent weeks.

Hun Sen’s visit was also met with criticism from Myanmar’s Committee Representing the Pyihtaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), which called the ASEAN Chair to respect the will and prodemocracy efforts of Myanmar people in a statement on Friday.

Undermining ASEAN

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), called Hun Sen’s unanimous decision to meet with Min Aung Hlaing “an affront to the people of Myanmar” and “a slap in the face of the eight other ASEAN member states” who had decided to halt junta political participation in the bloc to pressure Myanmar to live up to its commitments under the April agreement.

“The other eight ASEAN countries should publicly demand an explanation from Hun Sen and make it clear that the majority of ASEAN states favor an approach that requires negotiations with all parties to the Myanmar conflict, not just the generals who launched the coup and led Myanmar into this unmitigated disaster of continuous conflict, violence, and rights abuses,” he said in a statement. 

Other observers similarly pointed out that Hun Sen’s visit would only embolden the junta’s repression of its own people. 

“Both Hun Sen and Min Aung Hlaing are known for committing human rights violations in their respective countries. It is ridiculous that two men who are responsible for rights violations are engaging in talks, reportedly for peace, stability, and inclusivity,” said Bo Hla Tint, the shadow National Unity Government’s (NUG) ambassador to ASEAN.

“This is like meeting of two drug cartel lords who promised to work on drug eradication. We cannot expect anything from their meeting. It’s superficial and their talks will only serve their personal interests.” 

Bo Hla Tint called on Hun Sen to demand the unconditional release of political prisoners in Myanmar if he wants to bring real change to the country.

Hunter Marston, PhD candidate at Australian National University who researches Myanmar, said the visit suggests Hun Sen is trying to reset the ASEAN response to Myanmar’s crisis through his own political vision.

“I think Hun Sen is trying to engage directly with Min Aung Hlaing … to earn trust and try to facilitate talks his way. It is very clear that he sees himself as the problem solver here,” he said.

“I don’t think he really cares much for Myanmar’s democracy. To him I think he will try to win quick political points by bringing about the easiest solution that presents itself which, in all likelihood, will be to cede some ground to military terms.”

Reported by Ye Kaung Myint Maung for RFA’s Myanmar Service and by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane, Ye Kaung Myint Maung, Thane Aung, and Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

The Burmese junta has protested to the International Organization for Migration about a website the U.N. agency set up to preserve the history of the marginalized Rohingya community of Myanmar, saying the site contains false statements.

The site for the Rohingya Cultural Memory Center is an IOM initiative. The military regime’s appointed Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement on Friday, criticized the IOM for creating this website.

“The establishment of such a website is beyond the scope of the IOM’s jurisdiction and expertise, and the Myanmar Permanent Representative Office in Geneva sent a letter of protest to the IOM on 23 December 2021 against the IOM’s inability to approve the false claims of certain groups,” the ministry said in the statement posted on its website and dated Jan. 7, 2022.

“The term ‘Rohingya’ has always been rejected by the Burmese people and is not recognized by the Burmese people. Myanmar has also rejected the false and misleading statements and information contained on the website,” the statement says.

For decades, Burmese administrations have refused to call the stateless minority “Rohingya.” Even today, Myanmar insists on calling them “Bengalis.” 

BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, tried to contact the ministry and the IOM to get more details but did not immediately hear back on Friday.

Myanmar, a country of 54 million people the size of France, recognizes 135 official ethnic groups, with majority Burmese accounting for about 68 percent of the population. The Rohingya ethnicity is not recognized. And both civilian and military governments have kept this status quo.

The Muslim Rohingya have centuries of history in Myanmar, a former British colony that became independent in 1948. But they are denied citizenship and voting rights, prevented from obtaining jobs and formal education, and restricted from traveling freely.

In August 2017 the Burmese military launched a brutal offensive – unleashing a host of atrocities – against the minority community in their home state of Rakhine. As many as 740,000 Rohingya fled across the border to Bangladesh and now live in camps in and around southeastern Cox’s Bazar district.

A year later, IOM conducted a mental health assessment of Rohingya refugees and the findings are what inspired the creation of the Rohingya cultural center.

The assessment found that that 45 percent of those surveyed were living with distress symptoms, such a nightmares, panic attacks, or suicidal thoughts, according to an IOM fact sheet about the cultural center that the IOM shared with BenarNews last August.

“The Rohingya community is at specific risk of mental health issues due to a number of factors, including prior history of systematic dehumanization, persecution and bearing witness to or directly experiencing extreme violence,” the fact sheet said.

The survey also showed that 50 percent of Rohingya refuges surveyed had an “identity crisis” and 73 percent of respondents identified a loss of cultural identity following their forced exodus from Myanmar in 2017.

“It was in light of the findings in Cox’s Bazar, [that] IOM envisioned the concept of a Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC),” the fact sheet said.

“One of the main objectives of the RCMC project is to provide the Rohingya refugees in the camps of Cox’s Bazar with a creative and safe space to share their knowledge, preserve their cultural heritage and reconnect with their individual and collective memory, as a community and as an ethnic group from Myanmar.”

Dildar Begum, a Rohingya chef, holds up rice cakes that she learned to make from her mother and grandmother before they died. [Photo courtesy of the Rohingya Cultural Memory Center]

The center first started as a website and now has a physical location, Shamsuddoza Noyon, an additional commissioner for refugee relief and repatriation in Bangladesh, said on Friday.

“The Rohingya Cultural Memory Center was established at Camp-18 at Ukhia to store the culture and traditions of Rohingya. It would help Rohingya to remember their old memories,” he told BenarNews, referring to a refugee camp in a sub-district of Cox’s Bazar.

The website showcases the art, architecture, food, music, memorabilia, stories and much more of the community. For instance, one article talks about the love songs of the Rohingya.

It says: “For this brave community, who have resisted generations of discrimination and displacement, love is the architecture that holds them together, that strengthens their bonds, and creates windows and doors for greater connection and meaning. Better than most, the Rohingya know that love is what makes life livable.”

According to the Burmese junta’s foreign ministry, the IOM and the Bangladesh embassy in The Hague had also jointly organized an online exhibition titled “Art, Life, Rohingya.” The website says the exhibition ran from Dec. 10 to Dec. 31.

Visitors could click through a 3D virtual gallery, moving through different rooms to view collections such as Rohingya architecture and boat models, needlework, pottery, basketry, musical instruments, and the like, said the cultural center’s website.

The IOM notes in its fact sheet that many experts around the world say that one’s cultural and ethnic identity is central to a person’s identity, to how they see themselves, and how they relate to the world.

“This is especially true for the Rohingya as their identity has historically been questioned by the Myanmar authorities,” the fact sheet says.

Dil Mohammad, a Rohingya leader who lives in the no-man’s land in Bandarban district, on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border lauded the idea of the center.

“This center was established to remind and tell the Rohingya community about their history, culture, traditions and memories by preserving those elements,” he told BenarNews on Friday.

“This is a great initiative.”

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

Military attacks in Myanmar’s Sagaing region killed at least 15 people this week, including four siblings aged 5-26 who died when a missile fired from a helicopter struck their home, sources said.

The two Mi-35 attack helicopters on Jan. 4 launched six rockets and fired machine guns into Gahe village, part of Indaw township in Sagaing, a northwestern region that has been a hotbed of resistance to the military regime that overthrew Myanmar’s elected government nearly a year ago.

The attack on Gahe was the first time the military used heavy weapons against the village, a resident of Gahe village, who did not want to be named for security reasons, told RFA’s Myanmar Service.

“Our village was a peaceful place and they attacked us for no reason,” she said

“We used to go out and watch the planes when they passed by, but now we wouldn’t dare doing anything like that. One of the helicopters shot explosive rockets at us and the other used a machine gun,” she said.

Of the six rockets fired into the village, five exploded. The attack killed four siblings aged 5, 9, 13 and 26, and a 30-year-old woman.

Only the body of the 30-year-old could be buried properly. The bodies of the siblings could not be recovered. They died when one of the rockets exploded in their house and it burned to the ground with them inside, sources said.

Additionally, one of the five people wounded in the attack was a child who fled into the jungle and has not yet received medical treatment, they said.

Sources estimate that 800 people from Gahe and the surrounding villages have been displaced due to fighting between the military and local militias, called People’s Defense Forces (PDF), who oppose the military’s ousting of Myanmar’s democratically elected government almost a year ago.

In addition to the five deaths in Gahe, another 10 people were killed on Thursday in Kalay township, which is located in the western part of Sagaing on the border with India, when they returned to their villages after fighting there had seemingly died down, sources said.

“The people returned to the village believing the situation had cooled down. Then the soldiers came back all of the sudden and shot everyone they saw and at least 10 were killed,” a resident of Kalay told RFA.

Only two of the people killed in the attack have been identified, and the bodies have not yet been recovered. Nearly 10 houses in nearby Ingyun and Hakha Lay villages were also reported to have been set on fire Thursday.

After the attack in Gahe, the military continued conducting operations near the village and were still firing heavy weapons in the surrounding area, another resident of Gahe told RFA on condition of anonymity.

“I think they attacked our village thinking there were PDF members in the village. There are no PDFers here,” she said.

“This kind of thing has happened before in Htigyaing. We heard about 70 people lost their lives there” she said, referring to a township adjacent to Indaw.

Many villagers fled their homes and took refuge in monasteries in Nar Naung and Kyawywar villages, another villager told RFA.

“Some villagers have gone to be with their relatives but most of us are in monasteries because the soldiers came into the village the other day and spent the night there,” she said.

“When we left the village, we heard gunfire and small explosions. We were all scared and went to the monastery to take shelter,” she said.

One day prior to the helicopter attack, PDF members attacked two military vehicles about 10 miles away from Gahe.

RFA tried to contact Maj. Gen Zaw Min Tun, spokesman for the military junta, but he did not respond.

Airstrikes against villages have happened frequently over the past year, an officer with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an ethnic armed group that has been fighting the military since before the coup, mostly in nearby Kachin State, told RFA.

“The armed clash occurred outside the village, not inside the village, but the army just fired back without knowing the target, and the villagers had to suffer,” Col. Naw Bu said.

“The Sagaing region is close to us. Our No. 26 Battalion is in the area. When there are movements in the area, there is some kind of confrontation. So, when that happens, they use airstrikes,” he said.

Naw Bu said that the KIA has not launched attacks in the Sagaing region but has retaliated against military action in Kachin state. The military usually responds with airstrikes, he said.

According to data compiled by RFA based on statements by the shadow National Unity Government (NUG), there were 597 armed clashes in Sagaing region in the five months from June to November 2021, and a total of 274 civilians and 1,137 junta soldiers were killed over the same period.

The number of civilians killed by both sides in Sagaing through early December 2021 totaled at least 414, based on NUG monthly statements and reports from local media.

According to the Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, more than 75,250 people have been displaced by clashes in Sagaing region in the nine months from the coup until the end of October.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

A Uyghur woman abducted from her home in China’s far-western Xinjiang region in the middle of the night more than four years ago was sentenced to 14 years in prison for providing religious instruction to children in her neighborhood and hiding copies of the Quran, sources with knowledge of the situation and local police said.

Hasiyet Ehmet, now 57 and a resident of Manas (in Chinese, Manasi) county in Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, has not been heard from since she was abducted by authorities in May 2017, said the source who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal by Chinese authorities.

Police from the county’s No. 3 police station broke into Hasiyet’s home and put a black hood over her head, refusing her request to put on other clothes and gather her medicine before they took her away, according to the person with knowledge of the situation.

A Manas county court official confirmed that Hasiyet Ehmet had been sentenced to 14 years.

“It was because of teaching kids the Quran and hiding two copies of Quran when authorities were confiscating them, and later getting caught,” the official said. “These were the reasons for her sentences.”

Nine years before her arrest, Hasiyet’s husband was convicted of “separatism” charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2009, the source said.

Hasiyet had stopped teaching children two years before her arrest because of health problems. She also refrained from attending public events, said the source.

Chinese authorities have targeted and arrested numerous Uyghur businessmen, intellectuals, and cultural and religious figures in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for years as part of a campaign to monitor, control, and assimilate members of the minority group purportedly to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities.

Many of them have been among the 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities believed to be held in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has mistreated Muslims living in Xinjiang.

Hasiyet was arrested along with some of her neighbors and held for 15 days after questioning, said the chairman of the local neighborhood committee, a grassroots-level organization in China that monitors residents. Authorities arrested her a second time that September and sentenced her.

Staff at the Manas county police department declined to answer questions about Hasiyet, only telling RFA that there were not many Uyghur police officers or Uyghur residents who lived in the county, which covers nearly 9,200 square kilometers (3,550 square miles).

Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture has a population of more than 1.6 million people, according to China’s latest census data on Xinjiang, issued in June 2021. The information did not break down the population at the county level.

A police officer in Manas did not deny that Hasiyet was in detention but said it was a “state secret” and provided no further details.

Another source with knowledge of the situation told RFA’s Uyghur Service after it first reported on Hasiyet’s case that authorities sentenced the woman to 14 years in prison — seven for teaching the Quran and giving religious lessons to local children and another seven for hiding two copies of the sacred text during a time when police began confiscating religious books from Manas county residents.

Authorities did not try Hasiyet on the charges in court, but instead sent a court verdict letter to her family, the person said. But because Hasiyet’s husband was serving a life sentence in prison, her parents were dead, and the whereabouts of her 13-year-old daughter were unknown, the letter may have been delivered to her husband’s family.

“The verdict statement briefly summarized the reasons for her abduction along with her prison term,” the source wrote to RFA.

Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

In May 2021, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) unveiled new plans to boost flagging birth rates and reverse population aging, raising the official limit on the number of children per couple from two to three.

But the people who do most of the mental, physical and emotional work of child-bearing and childcare — Chinese women — may not step up to solve the government’s population problems as readily as CCP leader Xi Jinping is hoping.

“I can’t have another kid. Raising one child is like putting your money in a shredder,” a service industry employee surnamed Li from the central city of Changsha told RFA. “There’s no way I can have another one.”

Qiu Xiaojia, a millennial from the eastern city of Hangzhou, has been married for three years, and thinks even one child is out of the question.

“We have bought a home now, and the monthly mortgage payments are higher than my monthly salary,” Qiu said. “So where will the money to have kids come from?”

“I can’t even afford one kid, let alone three,” she said.

In the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, Ma Jing says she already works a six-day week at a tech company, and she and her husband have no plans to reproduce any time soon.

“I live from paycheck to paycheck, and still rely heavily on my parents,” Ma said. “The property I live in belongs to them, I drive my mother’s car, and I still can’t save money.”

“This policy may allow me to have three kids, but I won’t be doing that; I haven’t the means.”

Li Dan, an older millennial based in Shanghai, says she could afford it, but she still won’t be having them.

“The main reason for me, an older woman of child-bearing age, has nothing to do with money,” Li said. “The main reason is that I’m a single woman.”

Raising kids in China is a costly business, with parents stretched to find money for even one child’s education. While state-run schools don’t charge tuition until the 10th year of compulsory education, they increasingly demand nominal payments of various kinds, as well as payments for food and extracurricular activities.

Xi has said that “education and guidance should be provided to promote marriage and family values among marriage-age young people,” with the Politburo promising tax and housing incentives in the pipeline for couples wanting to have children.

Other promised support measures include improvements to prenatal and postnatal care, a universal childcare service, and reduced education costs for families.

China’s fertility rate stood at around 1.3 children per woman in 2020, compared with the 2.1 children per woman needed for the population to replace itself.

‘Meaningless policies’

Yet the three-child policy is something of a volte-face, coming as it does just five years after the CCP scrapped the one-child policy, which gave rise to decades of human rights abuses, including forced late-term abortions and sterilizations, as well as widespread monitoring of women’s fertility by officials.

“The policies are pretty meaningless without an idea of how they will be implemented and how much money the government will need to spend,” Wang Zheng, associate professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, told RFA.

“A core problem is that we have yet to see any government documentation reviewing the mistakes of the one-child policy,” Wang said. “Without such a process of reflection, how will they ensure that they don’t make a huge mistake in reproductive public policy?”

There are concerns that, as authoritarian means were used to police women’s reproductive systems and limit births during the one-child policy, they could equally well be used to get them to have more children, according to Georgetown University Asian law researcher Zhao Sile.

“What is worrying about China is that it is not a democratic society, so it may not adjust its policies according to the actual needs of society,” Zhao told RFA. “Instead, it may use authoritarian means [to implement them].”

“The next step will depend on whether the country adopts more compulsory policies on childbirth,” Zhao said. “For example, will they link it to bonuses and promotions?”

“Will they restrict access to contraception and abortion?”

‘Authoritarian, patriarchal system’

At the end of June, the Statistics Bureau in Hunan’s Yueyang city issued a directive calling on officials to encourage couples to give birth, shortening the distance between the second and third child, prompting online criticism that the government regarded women as breeding stock.

“Such measures will only make women more resistant to childbirth,” Zhao said. “China’s authoritarian and patriarchal system is coming into serious conflict with the more individualistic evolution of modern women.”

Qiu, whose employer forced her to sign a commitment not to get pregnant in the next three years, agreed.

“I feel that the barriers that prevent [women] from seeking a better future are getting higher and higher,” she said. “I feel that anxiety every day of my life.”

Official Chinese surveys have shown that nearly 60 percent of Chinese women have encountered questions about their marital status and childbirth intentions during the job application process, while recruitment ads frequently specify a preference for male candidates, or for women who are done having kids.

“In the past few decades, with economic growth, resources have fallen disproportionately in the hands of men,” New York State University professor Dong Yige told RFA.

Along with that comes the stereotypical expectation that women should be good wives and mothers, encouraged and endorsed by Xi Jinping since 2013.

“All of this stuff is once more a part of mainstream discourse on gender,” Wang Zheng said, adding that there will naturally be resistance to this attempt from Chinese women, despite the CCP’s attempts to stamp out the country’s grassroots feminist movement.

“It can’t be done. Feminism has always been a decentralized and democratic movement,” Wang said. “It’s not like a political party or an organization.”

“It springs up like the grass, like endless wildfires,” Wang said. “As long as any woman has any kind of ideological awareness, they will sound like feminists.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Authorities in western China’s Sichuan province are beating and arresting Tibetan monks suspected of informing outside contacts about the destruction of a sacred statue, Tibetan sources say.

The 99-foot tall Buddha which stood in Drago (in Chinese, Luhuo) county in the Kardze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Region was targeted for demolition in December by officials who said the statue had been built too high.

Monks from a local monastery and other Tibetan residents were forced to witness the destruction, an action experts called part of an ongoing campaign to eradicate Tibet’s distinct national culture and religion.

Eleven monks from Drago’s Gaden Namgyal Ling monastery have now been arrested by Chinese authorities on suspicion of sending news and photos of the statue’s destruction — reported exclusively this week by RFA — to contacts outside the region, a Tibetan source in exile said on Friday.

 “As of now, we have learned that Lhamo Yangkyi, Tsering Samdrup and four other Tibetans have been arrested for communicating outside Tibet,” the source said, citing contacts in Drago and speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“And a few days before the demolition of the statue began, Abbot Pelga, his assistant Nyima, and the monks Tashi Dorje and Nyima from the monastery in Drago were taken into custody, with Chinese authorities saying they needed to be taught a lesson.”

“The monks were brutally beaten and not given any food in prison, and one was beaten so brutally that one of his eyes is badly injured,” he said. “And citing what they call the indifferent attitude shown by local Tibetans, the Chinese authorities are forcing some of them to stand outside with no clothes in the freezing cold.”

Also speaking to RFA, a second source in exile said that new restrictions have now been imposed on Tibetans following the statue’s demolition.

“Local Tibetans are not being allowed to hang prayer flags outside their doors. And their fireplaces, which are sometimes used for purification rituals, are being destroyed,” the second source said, also speaking on condition of anonymity to protect his sources.

“The Chinese police are now beating Tibetans on unreasonable excuses such as not having ‘a proper expression’ on their face. Some Tibetans have fainted, and others are being made to stand outside in the cold weather and are then released without explanation,” he said.

The U.S. State Department in a statement voiced “deep concern” at reports of the destruction of the statue’s destruction.

“[We] continue to urge PRC authorities to respect the human rights of Tibetans and the preservation of Tibet’s environment as well as the unique cultural, linguistic, and religious identity of Tibetan traditions,” the State Department said.

“We will work with our partners and allies to press Beijing to cease ongoing abuses against Tibetans and return to direct dialogue with the Dalai Lama or his Tibetan representatives, without preconditions, to resolve differences.”

Sophie Richardson, China director for New York-based Human Rights Watch, added that China’s demolition of the statue and crackdown on Tibetans sharing news of its destruction show that “religious believers cannot rely on legal or constitutional safeguards of their faith.”

China in its current phase of “ultranationalist and statist ideology gives all power to the state, and regards civil society with suspicion and contempt,” Richardson said.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Richard Finney.