Day: January 12, 2022

Two Uyghur brothers detained in a Xinjiang internment camp for four years before being released in August 2021 were rearrested just a week later and are now being forced to work in factories, local officials and a Uyghur in exile who has knowledge of the situation said.

The brothers from Lop (in Chinese, Luopu) county in Hotan (Hetian) prefecture were held in a camp in the county’s Sampul village, said the Uyghur source, who is also from Lop.

Authorities arrested Eziz Abdulla, a farmer living in the village’s Aydinkol hamlet, along with his two sons, Abduqahar Eziz and Ablikim Eziz, for “illegal gatherings” while they were watering their crops in a field in 2017, the source said.

“At that time, from January to March of 2017, not only the father and sons, but also 20 percent of the other residents of the village were taken to the ‘re-education’ camps for illegal religious activities and illegal gatherings, and spreading harmful information,” the Uyghur in exile said.

China’s network of re-education camps is believed to have held up to 1.8 million members of the mostly Muslim minority group and other Turkic minorities since 2017. Many detainees are forced to work in factories in Xinjiang or elsewhere in China. Government officials say the camps are vocational training centers to purportedly prevent religious extremism and terrorism in the region.

Four months after Eziz Abdulla’s arrest, his wife, Tursungul Mettomur, received a verdict letter stating that her husband had been sentenced to 13 years in prison. Many other residents of the neighborhood received similar prison sentences, without legal due process, the Uyghur in exile said.

A year later, Tursungul learned that her two sons, one in his 30s and the other in his mid-20s, were in a training center, the Uyghur source said.

The woman was able to communicate with her sons via videoconferencing and eagerly counted the days until their release. She had found a woman for her younger son to marry and agreed with the fiancé’s parents on future wedding arrangements.

In August 2021, local police told Tursungul that her two sons were going to be released, the Uyghur source said. But just a week after they were freed, police apprehended both sons again, without explanation. The younger one was arrested while he and his mother were planning his wedding with his future in-laws.

The police told Tursungul where her two sons would be taken but advised her not to disclose information on their whereabouts, the Uyghur source said. Officers also warned her that if she disobeyed their order, her husband would serve a longer prison sentence than the one he had received.

As a result, Tursungul did not tell anyone, including the future in-laws, where her sons had been taken, the Uyghur source said. With the two sons gone again, Tursungul, her older son’s wife, and two grandchildren continued their family life without any male presence in their home, the Uyghur source said.

A women’s affairs director in Sampul initially told RFA that all so-called “trainees” in the village had been released.

But after an RFA reporter mentioned the names of detainees, including Abduqahar and Ablikim Eziz, the local official said they were in the training center in Lop or in prison in Ghulja (Yining), a city in far northern Xinjiang near Kazakhstan. She was unable to provide further information about the two disappeared brothers.

A police officer in Sampul village confirmed the information RFA had received about the two brothers and said they had been sent to Lop and Kashgar, which is also in Xinjiang, to perform forced labor.

“The two sons were released from training, and now they are working by government arrangement in factories in Lop and Kashgar,” he said.

The police officer also confirmed that their father, Eziz Abdulla, had been sentenced to 13 years in prison four months after his arrest and was serving a sentence in Tumshuq, a city in the western part of Xinjiang.

The release and then rearrest of Uyghurs is not uncommon in Xinjiang. In earlier RFA reports, Uyghurs released from the re-education camps were only home for a couple of days before they were apprehended again and taken to forced labor sites.

In one instance, authorities sent three youths who had completed training in Imamlirim village in Uchturpan (Wushi) county in Aksu (Akesu) prefecture to a factory after they had been home for only one night. They were told that they would not be allowed to return except for festivals.

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

Nearly 40 percent of Bangladesh’s petroleum imports for the next six months will come from suppliers in China, officials said Wednesday, confirming a U.S. $1 billion deal by Dhaka to buy oil from several countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

A cabinet committee on government purchases, headed by Finance Minister A.H.M. Mustafa Kamal, approved the proposal to buy 1.5 million metric tons of petroleum including diesel, gasoline and aviation fuel for the period covering January through June, officials said.

“Bangladesh is a fuel importing country. We import both refined diesel, jet fuel, gasoline and crude petroleum,” A.B.M. Azad, chairman of the Bangladesh Petroleum Corp. (BPC), told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

Included are deals with China’s UNIPEC ($266 million) and with PetroChina ($113 million). UNIPEC is to supply 400,000 metric tons of refined diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, while PetroChina is to supply 170,000 metric tons of the same refined fuels.

Md. Shamsul Arefin, an additional secretary at the cabinet division, confirmed to BenarNews that the committee had approved the proposals to import refined fuels from companies and suppliers in the People’s Republic of China and four other countries.

In the other countries, PTTT of Thailand, ENOC of the United Arab Emirates, BSP of Indonesia and PTLCL of Malaysia have been contracted to supply fuels to Bangladesh valued at $621 million, according to a copy of the proposal from the Bangladesh Petroleum Corp. obtained by BenarNews.

Azad said Bangladesh also buys crude oil from Saudi Arabia and the UAE to be processed at the Eastern Refinery in Chittagong.

“But this refinery cannot meet our annual demand,” Azad said, noting that the nation could refine about 1.3 million metric tons of crude oil – well below the annual demand of at least 6.2 metric tons.

“So we have to import refined fuel from different countries,” Azad said.

Bangladesh, he said, has government-to-government contracts with China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the UAE to purchase refined fuels.

“In line with the contract, we floated an international tender and the Chinese companies were the lowest bidders,” Azad said. “The Chinese companies have been supplying us with fuel in line with the terms and conditions, but it does not mean that we will stop importing fuels from the Middle Eastern countries.”

Azad said Bangladesh had reached a similar deal with companies in China and the four other countries in 2020.

He expects demand to grow in the coming months.

“The economy has turned around from the fallout of COVID-19. So, the demand for fuels will certainly increase in the coming months,” Azad said.

Concerns

Dr. Mustafizur Rahman, a distinguished fellow at the Center for Policy Dialogue, an economic think-tank, called on Dhaka to consider price concerns in dealing with Beijing.

“China is not an oil producing country. They import oil from different petroleum producing countries and sell it to other countries after refining,” he told BenarNews.

“I think Bangladesh should import fuels directly from the petroleum producing countries. If we buy from the producing countries, the price would be lower than China’s,” he said.

“I hope the government will consider the price issue,” he said.

Bangladesh is almost totally dependent on imports for fuels such as diesel, gasoline, aviation fuel, kerosene and other petroleum derivatives.

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

Cambodia on Wednesday postponed the first ASEAN meeting under its 2022 chairmanship, the government said, amid reports of differences among the bloc’s members over Prime Minister Hun Sen’s visit to Myanmar last week where he did not meet democracy leaders.

An in-person foreign ministers’ retreat, scheduled for next week in Siem Reap, was postponed indefinitely because some top diplomats from member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations had said they would find it difficult to travel, said Khieu Kanharith, the host country’s information minister.

“The ASEAN Foreign Ministers Retreat (AMM Retreat) initially scheduled on Jan 18-19, 2022 in Siem Reap province has been postponed,” he said in a statement on Facebook, without announcing a fresh date for the meeting.

The reason for the postponement is that “many ASEAN foreign have difficulties traveling to attend the meeting,” he added.

The postponement effectively delays the official endorsement of Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn as ASEAN’s new special envoy for Myanmar.

Radio Free Asia (RFA), with which BenarNews is affiliated, tried to contact Cambodian government spokesman Phay Siphan and Foreign Ministry spokesman Koy Koung but did not immediately hear back from them on Wednesday.

Divisions within ASEAN over Hun Sen’s trip to Naypyidaw and a potential invitation to the Myanmar junta’s foreign minister to attend the ASEAN diplomats’ retreat might be why some diplomats chose not to attend next week’s meeting, analysts said.

ASEAN states who cited travel difficulties were likely being polite instead of saying outright that they didn’t want to go to Siem Reap, according to Sophal Ear, a Cambodia expert at Arizona State University in the U.S.

“This is not officially a boycott, but [some members-states’ foreign ministers] came-up with some excuses as to why they cannot join the meeting.  … The chickens are coming home to roost, it’s karma for Cambodia’s ‘Cowboy Diplomacy,’” Ear, an associate dean and professor at the university’s Thunderbird School of Management in Phoenix, told RFA.

“When you do things others don’t want you to do, they don’t come to your party and have excuses … Be ready for a long list of reasons for why someone cannot show up,” he added.

Another Southeast Asia analyst, Hunter Marston, said Cambodia’s chairmanship had got off to a “rocky start.”

“Seems internal divisions over the chair’s invitation to the Myanmar military-appointed Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin have created an impasse,” Marston, a doctoral student at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, said on Twitter.

‘A non-political representative’

Hun Sen, the leader of Cambodia, which this year took over the revolving annual chairmanship of ASEAN, had said before going to Myanmar last week that he wanted the Burmese junta to be represented at the bloc’s meetings.

Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had categorically said that if Burmese coup leader Min Aung Hlaing did not implement an earlier agreed upon five-point road map to democracy, then Myanmar should only be represented by a non-political individual at ASEAN meetings.

A Malaysian foreign ministry spokesman, meanwhile, told BenarNews on Monday that Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah would attend the Siem Reap meeting only virtually.

Critics said that Cambodia had undermined the regional bloc through Hun Sun’s meeting with the Burmese junta leader Min Aung Hlaing after he was disinvited from the ASEAN summit in late 2021 for reneging on his promises to implement the bloc’s five-point consensus. Back then, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore had backed shutting out the coup leader from the regional bloc’s top summit.

By visiting Myanmar and meeting with Min Aung Hlaing, Hun Sen legitimized Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, pro-democracy activists in Myanmar said.

The military leader who toppled the elected Burmese government last February had promised, among other things, to end violence and give an ASEAN special envoy access to all parties in the Myanmar political crisis. He did none of those things.

Min Aung Hlaing refused to allow an ASEAN special envoy access to democracy leaders last year.

Meanwhile, more than 1,400 mostly pro-democracy protesters have been killed by security forces since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup. And a day after Hun Sen left Myanmar, National League for Democracy Leader Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to four more years in prison over what many said were frivolous charges.

Hun Sen would have divided the regional bloc because of what some describe as his cowboy diplomacy with Myanmar, causing more authoritarian member-states to be at odds with liberal democratic ones, analysts had said.

‘China appreciates Myanmar’s readiness’

In other developments, Japan on Tuesday “welcomed Cambodia’s active engagement as ASEAN Chair on the situation in Myanmar, and both ministers shared the view to coordinate closely,” the Japanese foreign ministry said in a statement.

Additionally, Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn said that ASEAN member-state Thailand’s top diplomat had sent a “congratulatory message” saying “he strongly supported the outcomes of the Cambodia-Myanmar joint press release,” local media reported.

On Monday, China, Myanmar’s close ally, spoke in favor of Hun Sen and Cambodia, as well as Myanmar.

“China appreciates Myanmar’s readiness to create favorable conditions for ASEAN’s special envoy to fulfill his duty, and works toward effective alignment between Myanmar’s five-point roadmap and ASEAN’s five-point consensus,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, told reporters.

The two roadmaps have nothing in common.

“China will fully support Cambodia, the rotating chair of ASEAN, in playing an active role and making [an] important contribution to properly managing the differences among parties of Myanmar.” 

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, with additional reporting by RFA’s Khmer Service.

The US Treasury Department on Wednesday announced sanctions on five North Korean nationals living abroad for allegedly helping to supply the country’s ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction programs.

The move follows Tuesday’s launch by Pyongyang of a hypersonic missile, the second launch in less than a week and one of six tests carried out by North Korea since last year in defiance of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The new sanctions target North Korea’s “continued use of overseas representatives to illegally procure goods for weapons,” Brian E. Nelson, under secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a statement Wednesday.

“The DPRK’s latest missile launches are further evidence that it continues to advance prohibited programs despite the international community’s calls for diplomacy and denuclearization,” Nelson said.

Named in the sanctions announced on Wednesday were Russia-based North Korean national Choe Myong Hyon and four North Koreans living in China: Sim Kwang Sok, Kim Song Hun, Kang Chol Hak, and Pyon Kwang Chol.

“As a result of today’s action, all property and interests in property of the individuals and entities that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons must be blocked and reported to OFAC,” the Treasury Department said, referring to the department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Foreign financial institutions or individuals facilitating or engaging in prohibited transactions with the designated individuals may themselves face U.S. action, the Treasury Department said.

Desperate for relief from international sanctions over its nuclear and weapons programs, Pyongyang has been stepping up pressure on Washington and South Korea over denuclearization talks that have stalled since the failed Hanoi Summit between leaders of the U.S. and North Korea in February 2019.

North Korea’s fragile economy has been laid low by border closures and the suspension of trade with China since January 2020 to prevent the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Pyongyang also faces strict trade sanctions imposed by the U.S. as well as the U.N. Security Council over its multiple nuclear and missile tests.

Sanctions’ effectiveness questioned

Speaking to RFA, Bruce W. Bennett — an adjunct international/defense researcher at the RAND Corporation — said that North Korea is clearly receiving support for its missile and weapons programs from outside the country.

“And part of the way it gets that assistance is by having some of its people operating overseas and acquiring technology from companies that are more interested in profit than in national loyalty and following the rules,” Bennett said.

“And so as a result, the course of action the U.S. has to take is to sanction those individuals, and to try to reduce the potential of that kind of thing continuing.”

The question now is how successful these sanctions are likely to be, Bennett said.

“And that’s very difficult to predict,” he said. “It’s a little hard to try to get this kind of activity under control.”

Ken Gause, a North Korea expert at the Center for Naval Analyses, agreed. “There’s nothing really you can do to hold [North Korea] accountable. We put up about as much pressure as we can,” he said.

“China’s not playing ball, Russia’s not playing ball. As long as they’re not playing ball any sanctions are really going to fall flat.”

“But if you were going to want to actually try something that may get you a different answer than just lobbing on more pressure, it’s to do something very different, which is to figure out a way that you can entice North Korea into freezing their program,” Gause said.

“And that means some sort of carrots, not just sanctions.”

Written by Richard Finney with additional reporting by Hye Jun Seo of RFA’s Korean Service.

Two Tibetan monks arrested by authorities in western China’s Sichuan province are incommunicado five months after being taken into custody, with family members increasingly worried about their well-being, RFA has learned.

Tenzin Norbu and Wangchen Nyima, who are brothers, were arrested on Aug. 15, 2021, and are being held in a prison in Tawu (in Chinese, Daofu) county in the Kardze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, a Tibetan living in exile in New York said.

“It has been five months since their arrests, but the reasons for their arrests and their current situation are still unknown,” RFA’s source said, citing contacts in the region and speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The two monks are nephews of Tulku Choekyi Nyima, abbot of Nenang Monastery in Sichuan’s Drago (Luhuo) county, where Chinese authorities at another monastery recently demolished two large statues revered by Tibetan Buddhists. Tibetans who objected to the demolition were arrested and beaten.

“The situation in Drago county is very sensitive at the moment,” RFA’s source said, adding that sources in the region had at first held back from reporting the two monks’ arrest for fear of exposing them to further trouble from authorities.

“But the family members of the two arrested monks are still not allowed to meet with them and have received no information about their well-being at all,” he said.

Wangchen Nyima, a well-known advocate for Tibetans’ education and health, had been arrested once before, a second source in exile told RFA in a written message. “This was in 2015, when the Chinese government forcibly shut down schools in his monastery. His brother Orgyan Choedrak was also arrested then,” he said.

“On Aug. 18, three days after their arrest, the assembly hall of their monastery caught fire, and Khenpo Thubten — a graduate of Sichuan’s Larung Gar Buddhist Academy — died in the blaze. A monk named Bukyo was also burned in the fire and died on his way to the hospital next day,” he said.

Local Tibetans believe that the fire at Nenang, which lies on the road connecting Tawu and Drago, was started by Chinese authorities, he said.

Monks’ quarters destroyed

Following the demolition of the statues in Drago — one a 99-foot-tall statue of the Buddha and the other a three-story statue of Maitreya, the Buddha of a future age — Chinese authorities have begun to destroy monks’ quarters at the county’s Gaden Namgyal Ling monastery, RFA’s source in New York said.

“The authorities are saying that these dwellings were removed to make way for roads allowing firefighting vehicles to pass easily in case of emergencies,” the source said. “One phase of the demolition is already under way, with the other phase set to begin soon.”

The orders for destruction have already targeted places and objects of “serious religious significance” to Tibetans, the source said.

A large Chinese military compound built in 2012 in Nyikhok, around 4 kilometers away from the large Buddha statue destroyed in Drago, is meanwhile being used as a labor camp for Tibetans, RFA’s source said.

“Around 12 Tibetans are being held there at the moment, including Khenpo Pagha, a monk named Nyima, and a few Tibetan women,” he said.

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

Japan has been conducting its own “freedom of navigation operations” in the South China Sea “to warn China” but in a cautious manner, Japan’s largest newspaper reported.

The Yomiuri Shimbun quoted unnamed government sources as saying that Japanese naval ships “sailed through waters near the artificial islands and reefs claimed by China in the South China Sea” on at least two occasions, in March and August last year.

“The Maritime Self-Defense Force (Japanese Navy) operations started in March 2021 under the administration of then-Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga,” it said. Suga stood down in October.

A senior Defense Ministry official told the paper that the operations were “meant to warn China, which is distorting international law, to protect freedom of navigation, and the law and order of the sea.”

However, despite being similar to the freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) conducted by the U.S. Navy, the Japanese ships were only sailing in the international waters and did not enter China’s territorial waters, the Yomiuri reported, adding that these operations were conducted “on such occasions as traveling to or from joint drills with other navies, or deployment to the Middle East.”

“Territorial waters” are the sea areas that lie within 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) from a country’s coast and China demands that foreign warships ask for permission for so-called “innocent passage.”

Japan is a treaty ally of the U.S., which retains more than 50,000 troops on Japanese soil. But Mark Valencia, adjunct senior scholar at China’s National Institute for South China Sea Studies (NISCSS), said: “These are not FONOPs à la the U.S.”

“They do not challenge China’s territorial sea regime nor its sovereignty claims to low-tide features like Mischief Reef like the U.S. FONOPs do,” he said.

“They are an exercise of freedom of the high seas that is not opposed by China.”

Mischief Reef is one of the South China Sea features that China has developed into artificial islands in recent years despite protests from some other claimants including the Philippines and Vietnam.

Beijing also claims territorial waters around those artificial islands though these claims have no basis in international law.

Commitment to an open sea

Australian Rear Adm. (retd) James Goldrick, a prominent maritime affairs analyst, said many U.S. FONOPs in the South China Sea were about warship passage rights without prior notification within self-claimed territorial waters, not only by China but also Vietnam and the Philippines.

But the Japanese effort was “about freedom of naval/maritime operations rather than freedom of navigation” or supporting the U.S. FONOPs, he said.

“The South China Sea is not and should not become a closed sea,” Goldrick said.

Alessio Palatano, Professor at King’s College London and an expert in Japanese naval history and strategy, said recent operations show “Japan has been exercising its compliance to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea in a way that previously it was very careful to avoid.”

“This is a step up which brings Japanese behavior much closer to other major maritime powers. Britain and France regularly sail in ways in which at times challenge excessive forms of maritime claims,” Palatano told RFA.

“It’s clear political signaling that shows that Japan is becoming proficient in using its naval capabilities to create a wide-ranging set of signaling options in communicating its political disagreements with Chinese behavior.”

“So long as the Japanese continue on such a nuanced approach, this is very welcome,” he said.

Meanwhile Valencia from the Chinese state think tank NISCSS warned that even though the Japanese operations did not raise alarm, “if they actually did challenge China’s territorial sea regime or sovereignty claims by entering its claimed territorial waters or violating the innocent passage regime, then China might well retaliate.”