Day: January 21, 2022

A court in Xinjiang sentenced five Muslim Uyghur women from one family to lengthy jail terms for “illegal” religious activities, according to a copy of the 2019 verdict recently obtained by RFA.

The women — an elderly mother, her three daughters, and her daughter-in-law — received jail terms of between seven and 20 years, according to the document from the Korla (in Chinese, Kuerle) Municipal People’s Court. Korla is the second-largest city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Halcham Pazil, Melikizat Memet, Patigul Memet, Zemire Memet and Bostan Ibrahim, were convicted of “disturbing public order and inciting ethnic hatred” for “hearing and providing a venue for illegal religious preaching,” according to the document.

The eldest of the five Uyghur women, Halcham Pazil, is 78 years old, and the youngest, Bostan Ibrahim, is 33. Four of the women are housewives and one is a civil servant.

The verdict issued on April 2, 2019, indicates that the charges against them were brought by the Korla Municipal Procuratorate.

The verdict also mentions an imprisoned woman named Kadirye Memet, adding that her case would be dealt with separately.

Halchigul Memet, whom the document says led the women in religious discussions and is now living in exile, said Kadirye is a relative of the other five.

Chief Judge Shirali Memet, Judge Ahmetjan Kurban, Judge Ibadet Yasin and registrar Dilmurat Parhat signed the sentencing document. An official from the Korla Municipal Court declined to answer questions about the case.

“Why do you want to know about our judge? What government department are you calling from?” he asked.

The official told the RFA reporter that an officer from the local police department would contact him, but no one did. Another official confirmed that chief judge and other two judges who had signed the verdict were still working at the same court.

Halchigul Memet, mentioned in the verdict as having led the five women during the religious gatherings, told RFA she was related to the five imprisoned women.

“We were all relatives. I mean they were all direct relatives, and I was like a relative to them and them to me,” she told RFA from Turkey.

The women followed traditional Uyghur customs and frequently visited each other to talk about their children and to practice their religion, Halchigul said.

“We used to go to each household regularly on weekly or biweekly basis,” she said. “We would talk about how to improve our quality of life and help sharpen our religious knowledge.

“We never had any political or anti-government talks,” she said. “We only talked about how to improve our well-being and our family’s well-being and how to be traditionally good Muslims.”

The prosecution and jailing of the five women for holding traditional religious gatherings is proof of the Chinese government’s genocidal policies against Uyghurs, Halchigul said.

She said the other women arrested — Kadirye Memet — was also a member of the family of five women named in the verdict, she said.

Halchigul said that three other members of the same family — Mahmut and Musajan Memet, and Zohragul Hudaberdi, who married into the family — also had been sentenced to prison, bringing the total number of imprisoned relatives to nine.

“The Chinese government cracked down on this kind of simple gathering as a ‘crime’ against the country,” Halchigul said. “They were seven siblings from this family, and all were detained and imprisoned, even the family’s in-laws were imprisoned. It was devastating to the entire family.”

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Cambodian Prime Minister and ASEAN chair Hun Sen, in a phone call with Indonesia’s president on Friday, lashed out at Malaysia’s foreign minister for being “arrogant” by criticizing Phnom Penh’s strategy to deal with Myanmar.

Malaysia’s top diplomat, Saifuddin Abdullah, told reporters last week that Hun Sen should have consulted with other leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations before going to Myanmar on Jan. 7-8 to meet with Burmese junta leader Min Aung Hlaing in an attempt to solve that country’s post-coup crisis.

Hun Sen told President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo that Saifuddin had disrespected the role of the ASEAN chair, which rotates every year among the regional bloc’s 10 members.

Jakarta’s top diplomat should convey this message to Saifuddin, Hun Sen told Jokowi.

“The intended message: Hun Sen asked Malaysian Foreign Minister not to be arrogant with inappropriate statements, and disrespect the ASEAN Chair by using undiplomatic language and [showing] a lack of courtesy,” Hun Sen said on Facebook about the phone call.

Saifuddin’s comments were “not right in the ASEAN context” and Indonesia’s foreign minister should tell Saifuddin to not be “rude,” the Cambodian PM said.

Hun Sen said he went to Myanmar “to plant trees, not to cut down trees.”

“Those who didn’t support him, they only wanted a quick result,” he added.

During a dinner with reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Jan. 13, Saifuddin acknowledged that some in ASEAN felt that Hun Sen “has the liberty to visit Myanmar for what is seen as normal bilateral visit.”

“Malaysia is of the opinion that [Hun Sen] has the right to visit Myanmar as head of government of Cambodia,” Saifuddin said. 

“However we also feel that because he has already assumed the chair of ASEAN, he could have probably consulted if not all, a few other ASEAN leaders and seek their views as what he should do if he were to go to Myanmar,” he added.

When reporters asked whether Hun Sen’s trip to Myanmar had achieved anything, Saifuddin replied “no.”

In fact, even Indonesia had criticized Hun Sen’s trip, stating that he needed to stick to what the regional bloc had agreed to in meetings, including a five-point consensus to put Myanmar on the path to democracy.

“PM Hun Sen did ask for a phone call and the purpose of the call was to convey the results of his recent visit to Myanmar,” Teuku Faizasyah, spokesman for Indonesia’s foreign ministry confirmed to BenarNews on Friday, when asked about Friday’s telephone call between the Cambodian and Indonesian leaders.

Faizasyah did not elaborate.

‘ASEAN fissures’

Commenting on Hun’s Sen’s statements about Saifuddin, Southeast Asia expert Michael Vatikiotis said on Twitter that he saw an ASEAN spat in the making.

“Remarkable and regrettable that Cambodian PM Hun Sen attacks Malaysia FM in a conversation with Indonesian President Jokowi. This is becoming unseemly and needs fixing,” Vatikiotos tweeted.

Another analyst echoed these comments.

“ASEAN fissures getting increasingly uncomfortable over the Myanmar crisis,” Huong Le Thu, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said via Twitter.

Even before Hun Sen went to Myanmar, analysts were warning that Cambodia’s strategy would divide ASEAN, a grouping where countries are bound by geography rather than ideology or political systems.

For instance, of the bloc’s member-states, Brunei is an absolutist monarchy; Laos and Vietnam are Communist-ruled; Cambodia is nominally a democracy but one where the ruling party holds all the parliamentary seats; the Thai government has its roots in a military coup; and Singapore has been dominated by a single party since independence.

So there would be states that would be divided over the wisdom of Hun Sen’s trip, analysts said.

During his visit to Naypyidaw, Hun Sen met with the military coup leader who toppled the elected National League for Democracy government on Feb. 1 last year. The Cambodian PM did not meet with any democracy leaders, and the Burmese junta spokesman said Hun Sen had not asked to meet them either.

Regional analysts and parliamentarians had criticized Hun Sen before and after the trip for not insisting on a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi and other leaders who were thrown in prison. They said his trip – the first by a foreign leader after the coup – would be seen as legitimizing the Burmese junta.

Hun Sen has said that he achieved three successes during his trip to Myanmar, an assertion he repeated to Indonesia’s Jokowi on Friday.

These successes, according to the Cambodian PM, were – a ceasefire between the military armed ethnic groups in the country’s border regions, allowing the ASEAN envoy to join these ceasefire talks, and an agreement with the junta to provide humanitarian assistance to the Burmese people.

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

Lao authorities this month arrested five men accused of stealing electric cable from the Lao-China high-speed railway, the latest in a string of thefts police say were committed by former workers on the rail line who have become addicted to drugs.

The five stole cables valued at $8,000, according to a police officer who spoke to RFA on Wednesday.  They were taken into custody on Jan. 15.

“A lot of electrical cables were stolen, and those who took them were relatively young men,” the officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

The $6 billion railway, which opened in early December, is a centerpiece of China’s Belt and Road Initiative of state-led lending for infrastructure projects to tie countries across Asia to China. It offers land-locked Laos the promise of closer integration with the world’s second largest economy.

Speaking to local media on Wednesday, Lt. Col. Thatsaphong Savanmanychanh — deputy police chief of the Hatxayfong district of the capital Vientiane — said the accused men had stolen the cables from the district’s Dong Phosy railway station between Jan. 6 and 15.

“The men confessed to their crimes, saying they had come from the provinces to work as laborers building the station, but when the station was complete they didn’t go back home. Instead, they stayed at the worker camp near the station.”

The men had stolen cable on nine occasions. They then sold their haul to a store that purchased metal, Thatsaphong said.

“They then used the proceeds to buy meth pills, got high, and played a lot of video games,” Thatsaphong said.

The five men now being held were identified as Vang, 25, from Luang Prabang province; Mi, 38, from Xayaburi province; Malae, 29, from Houaphanh province; Sing, 28, from Houaphanh province; and Phoutthasak, 31, from Hatxayfong in Vientiane.

Residents of Vientiane told RFA that they wanted more security on the rail line and more effective government policies to address unemployment, poverty and crime in the one-party communist state.

“These drug addicts are everywhere in the capital,” one resident said, speaking like RFA’s other sources for this story on condition of anonymity. These people will get high, do nothing during the day and then go out to steal during the night, the source said.

“They are sometimes taken to a rehab center, but a short time later they just come back again.”

Another Vientiane resident called for the recently opened rail line connecting Laos with China to be patrolled around the clock.

“They shouldn’t let down their guard, it’s too dangerous, and something could happen there,” he said.

A third resident called for the government to do more to increase employment in the area.

“These thieves might be homeless and have no food to eat, and most of them are drug addicts,” he said. “If they had jobs, they wouldn’t steal things like that.”

Reported by RFA’s Lao Service. Translated by Max Avary. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Two Ugyhur men accused of bombing a Hindu shrine in Bangkok in 2015 have never been permitted to contact relatives, are not allowed time in a prison yard and are sometimes fed pork despite their Muslim faith, they told RFA-affiliated BenarNews this week.

Dressed in brown prison uniforms and wearing handcuffs and leg restraints, Uyghurs Adem Karadag and Yusufu Mieraili spoke to a BenarNews reporter as they left a scheduling hearing Monday in the Southern Bangkok Criminal Court following their first court appearance in two years.

“We are not allowed to make any phone calls in prison,” Karadag and Mieraili told BenarNews through an interpreter following the three-hour hearing. “Our families have not heard from us or are even aware of our arrests in 2015.” 

The defendants said they have no books to read or paper to write on to send letters.

“Some of the meals contain pork even though we are Muslims,” they said. “The hardest part is that we are not allowed to step outside of the building and do not get to see the sky.”

Karadag and Mieraili have been housed at the military’s Lak Si temporary detention center since their arrests within two weeks of the blast that killed 20 people and injured more than 100 at the Erawan Shrine, a popular tourist site, on Aug. 17, 2015. It has been called the deadliest terror attack in modern Thailand.

A military court began hearing the charges against them in 2016 before the case was moved to a Bangkok civilian criminal court in 2019.

Karadag and Mieraili, who identified themselves as Uyghurs from Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in China, pleaded not guilty before both courts. They could face death sentences if convicted of charges including premeditated killing and possession of explosives.

Chuchart Kanpai, the lawyer representing Karadag, said the defense and prosecution teams agreed that testimony would begin late this year.

“The prosecution requested interviews with 424 witnesses,” Chuchart told BenarNews. “The next questioning of a witness will be on Nov. 1, 2022.”

Mieraili lawyer Jamroen Panonpakakorn said the defendants will seek to question only five to 10 witnesses. The court scheduled sessions for Nov. 1 and 2, Nov. 22 through 25, and Dec. 6 through 9.

Delays

Over the years, the trial has been beset by delays linked to interpreters. A lawyer and an NGO worker assisting the Uyghurs with their defense previously said Karadag could not speak Chinese and would prefer a Uyghur-speaking translator while Mieraili can communicate in English, but not fluently.

On Monday, the Uyghurs met an interpreter proposed by the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok and signed documents accepting the arrangement. The interpreter was selected in August 2021 but was not able to travel to Thailand until this month because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, a Thai NGO, expressed concern about the decision.

“The defendant should have a basic right to choose the interpreter because it has a great impact on the case and it is a matter of life and death,” Chalida told BenarNews.

“We see that the court does not have an understanding of Uyghur and Chinese politics because the court should not employ an interpreter from the Chinese government under these political circumstances. It shows that this process of hiring an interpreter is not sensible.”

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

Myanmar special military tribunal on Friday sentenced a veteran political activist and former lawmaker under the previous democratically elected government to death for activities supporting opponents of the junta that has ruled the country since February, the government said.

Kyaw Min Yu, a prominent leader of the pro-democracy 88 Generation Students Group who fought military rule three decades ago and who is better known by his alias Ko Jimmy, and Phyo Zayar Thaw, a former National League for Democracy legislator and close aid of deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, were found guilty of violating the country’s Counterterrorism Law, said a statement issued by the junta government.

The tribunal convicted Ko Jimmy for contacting the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, National Unity Government (NUG), and People’s Defense Force (PDF), an opposition coalition and militia network formed by politicians ousted in the Feb. 1 coup that the junta has declared terrorist organizations.

In September, the NUG declared a nationwide state of emergency and called for open rebellion against junta rule, prompting an escalation of attacks on military targets by various allied pro-democracy militias and ethnic armed groups.

Ko Jimmy, an outspoken critic of the junta who spent eight months in hiding, was also accused of advising local militia groups in Yangon and ordering PDF groups to attack police, military targets, and government offices, and asking the NUG to buy a 3D printer at an estimated cost of U.S. $1 billion to produce weapons for local PDFs.

Phyo Zayar Thaw was tried on charges of providing financial support and weapons to local PDF members, contacting the opposition groups, and involvement in attacks in Yangon.

Ko Jimmy’s wife, Nilar Thein, told RFA that she will not hire an attorney to appeal what she said was an unfair prosecution.

“Despite that they unfairly prosecuted and sentenced him, Ko Jimmy himself would not cooperate with any charges or trials, so there is no reason for the family to hire a lawyer to defend the unfair prosecution,” she said.

“I am rather doing my own part in order to defeat the military dictatorship,” she added without elaborating.

Min Ko Naing, Myanmar pro-democracy activist and former 88 Generation Students Group leader and a close associate of both Ko Jimmy and Phyo Zayar Thaw, said the people will not give up their fight against the military junta.

“In terms of war, they might have captured a hill or a camp, but they will eventually lose the entire war. We, the people, will win.”

The 88 Generation Students Group led the August 1988 uprising against a previous military regime that had governed Myanmar, then known as Burma, since 1962, running the economy into the ground and creating a pariah state. Their protests led to reforms that eventually ushered in a brief period of democratic rule that ended with this year’s coup.

Arrested in October, Ko Jimmy was imprisoned from 1988 to 2005 for his political activities and again from 2007 to 2012, spending 21 years in prison.

On Wednesday, the junta’s military court sentenced four young men from Yangon’s North Okkalapa, Thingangyun, Bahan, and Hlaing Tharyar townships, to life in prison under the same law for their alleged connections to “the terror groups.”

The areas are among six townships in Yangon that have been under martial law since March 2021.

According to opposition sources and families, 141 people have been sentenced to life in prison by various military tribunals in Yangon during the past year.

Translated by Kyaw Min Htun for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

New units of People’s Liberation Army have been established and existing ones upgraded over the past decade to man outposts in the South China Sea, leaving China’s military better positioned to project power in the region, according to a new report.

The report ‘The People’s Liberation Army in the South China Sea: An Organizational Guide’ released by Recorded Future, a private cybersecurity company, sheds light on the organizational structure of the PLA units on the Paracel and Spratly Islands.

It identifies and analyzes nine specific PLA units, mostly in the Paracel Islands that China calls Xisha, giving details of their duties, facilities and assets.

China claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea and has been engaged in territorial disputes with several neighboring countries.

Military duties

The Chinese military occupies the entire Paracels archipelago and at least seven features in the Spratlys, with the number of troops stationed there estimated at more than 10,000, according to the report.

The PLA units “are responsible for defending China’s outposts in the Spratly Islands and Paracel Islands,” it says, listing duties such as “operating radar installations, ensuring airfield support for aviation forces, training and commanding maritime militia forces, implementing engineering projects, supporting the launch and orbital management of spacecraft, and providing air defense.”

These army units also “actively participate in military-civil fusion programs, including engaging in joint operations and exercises with civilian forces, drafting regulations with civilian authorities, and coordinating the construction and use of physical infrastructure with civilian entities.”

With the main focus on the protection of China’s maritime and territorial claims, the units have received sizable funding and grown rapidly over the past decade.

“In recent years, the PLA has generally played a background role in China’s strategy to consolidate control over the South China Sea, providing a deterrent cover for frontline maritime law enforcement and maritime militia operations,” the report says.

But thanks to the development efforts, it is now much “better situated to defend China’s maritime and territorial claims… project power within and beyond the first island chain, control access to vital sea lines of communication… or engage the United States in a conflict over the status of Taiwan.”

The 33-page report provides up-to-date and comprehensive research on China’s solid military presence on the islands and features in the South China Sea.

Zachary Haver, China defense analyst at Recorded Future and the author of the report, said it took him almost four months of dedicated research using a diverse set of open-source materials to complete the report.

“The biggest difficulty was identifying the PLA units,” he said, “as the Chinese authorities are usually very careful about protecting their identities, especially in sensitive areas like the South China Sea.”

China began fundamentally reorganizing the PLA around 2015, according to Haver, and deployed a significant number of new forces to the South China Sea over the past decade.

“Moving forward, the PLA will likely continue building its capacity to carry out combat operations in the South China Sea, surveil foreign ships and aircraft operating in the region, and perform joint rights defense and rescue operations with China’s maritime law enforcement and maritime militia forces,” the report concludes.