Day: February 11, 2022

Holding up charred remnants of destroyed homes, defiant villagers targeted in arson attacks by pro-junta forces in northwestern Myanmar staged a protest Friday against the “fascist army” that is leaving a widening trail of destruction in their rural township.

Protesters came from four villages in Pale township, Sagaing region, where more than 1,100 houses have been burned to the ground in the past two weeks, according to residents – part of a scorched earth campaign in apparent retaliation for attacks by anti-junta People’s Defense Force militia on junta forces. RFA has verified the destruction of each of those four villages through commercial satellite imagery.

“Only the village can be burned down, not the spirit!” scores of villagers chanted, as they marched down a narrow dirt track, responding to the cues of a protest leader. “We will not be military slaves. We will revolt!”

As is often the case with demonstrations in war-hit Myanmar, footage of the protest surfaced on social media, via a Facebook page that once carried news about entertainment in the township, but now posts content from anti-junta activists.

The protesters, making the three-finger salute adopted by opponents of the military, carried two red and gold peacock flags of the National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. Her civilian government was toppled in a military coup one year ago that has plunged Myanmar into a deepening civil conflict – including in this corner of Sagaing, which has become a hub of anti-junta resistance. One protester carried a banner reading: “Cut out the roots of the Fascist Army!”

“The villagers want to show that their spirit has not been diminished by the arson attacks,” said one Pale resident contacted by RFA. The resident, who declined to be named for safety reasons, said hundreds of people joined the demonstration near one of the burned villages, but declined to give the exact location in case there was further retribution.

“It was aimed to let the public and international community know that the victim villagers are very strong-willed and undefeated even though they were killed, arrested, displaced and their homes and villages were burned down and their lives destroyed,” the resident said. 

The arson campaign, which has forced thousands to flee, has extended to Sagaing’s Mingin township to the north, where another 270 houses were destroyed in fires set by Myanmar troops and pro-junta militia on Thursday in two neighboring villages, local residents said. Four villagers were killed at a nearby village, they said. 

Another 130 houses were destroyed in Mingin township on Feb. 2, meaning that at least 1,500 houses have been razed in Pale and Mingin since Jan. 31. In the Feb. 2 attack, Bin village lost about 100 homes. Aerial photos of the settlement show a gold-colored Buddhist stupa surrounded by ashen remains of destroyed homes.

In Thursday’s attack, residents say more than 100 houses were destroyed in Mauktet village, and more than 170 houses in Moktha village, which lies just half-a-mile to the north. 

That followed a Wednesday night clash between local PDF militia and military troops stationed in Salal Kin village, near Moktha.

A local resident said that around 5 a.m. on Thursday, 80 military troops and pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia, which are stationed in Pan Set, Taung Phyu and Salal Kin villages in Mingin township, raided Mauktet village and set fire to houses without a warning and without firing a shot.

“Only brick houses are left in the village. All other houses got burned down,” said the resident, who like all the other sources in this article sought anonymity for safety reasons.

The same afternoon, pro-junta forces assaulted Moktha village. Residents had no time to pack up their belongings as they fled. 

“At around 3 p.m. yesterday, the military troops started the assault,” a villager in Moktha said on Friday. “All the local villagers have fled into the jungle. Nobody has returned yet ….We’ve got nothing but the clothes on our backs. There’s nothing left at home as it all got burned down.”

An aid group volunteer helping the villagers said their plight remains especially precarious as the pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia are still active in the area and making it difficult to deliver supplies.

“We are trying to help them as much as we can. We have to use middle men to help the people from Moktha and Mauktet villages. We cannot go there by ourselves. It is not safe to travel because Pyu Saw Htee militia are active in these areas,” the volunteer said.

More than 10,000 people from Moktha, Mauktet, Nga Nan Dar and Kyun Taw villages in Mingin have reportedly fled their homes. Four people who were assigned as watchmen at Nga Nan Dar village were killed when troops arrived there, local residents said, and another villager was killed and his wife was missing.

RFA reported on Wednesday that at least 38 civilians, including women and children, had been killed by the military in four townships in Sagaing region in a span of 10 days since late January, according to residents and PDF members.

The research group Data for Myanmar, which documents the impact of the armed conflict, said that as of Feb. 4, the junta forces had burned down at least 3,379 homes in 126 villages and towns in nine regions and states in the year since the military seized power in the Feb. 1, 2021, coup.  

The junta’s spokesman has not responded to repeated calls from RFA seeking comment about the village burnings in Sagaing. Customarily, the military denies setting fire to villages and blames anti-junta militia instead.

Reported by Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Matthew Pennington

Prominent Vietnamese environmentalist Nguy Thi Khanh is the latest activist in the country to be arrested on tax evasion charges, state media reported this week.

Khanh, who is the first Vietnamese ever to win the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018, was arrested last month in her home in Hanoi. State media did not confirm her detention until Feb. 9. Authorities searched her office and home and confiscated documents and several devices.

Khanh won the Goldman for her work with the Green Innovation and Development Center, an organization she founded which promotes sustainable development in the Southeast Asian country.

Her advocacy for green energy sometimes puts her crosswise to the Vietnamese government, which wants to increase the production of coal, the burning of which is a major contributor to climate change.

Two other activists were sentenced last month tax-related charges.

Dang Dinh Bach, leader of the Law and Policy of Sustainable Development Research Center, was sentenced to five years for tax evasion, while journalist Mai Phan Loi, who heads the Center for Media in Educating Community, received four years for tax fraud. Both were arrested in June 2021.

The Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights said in a statement that the arrests of Bach and Loi were intended to prevent the creation of the Vietnam Domestic Advisory Group, which would have enabled activists to be independent civil society representatives in accordance with the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA).

A Uyghur who served as a torchbearer in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and was a loyal Chinese government official is serving a 14-year jail sentence for watching counter-revolutionary videos, caught in a crackdown on the ethnic minority, officials in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi said.

Adil Abdurehim, a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a former employee of the Culture and Sports Bureau of Saybagh district in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) has been in prison for five years, said a local police officer.

The confirmation of his detention came following China’s deployment of Uyghur cross-country skier Dilnigar Ilhamjan, (Dinigeer Yilamujiang) as the final torchbearer along with Zhao Jiwen, a skier from China’s dominant Han majority, at the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics on Feb. 4.

Her surprise appearance sparked social media discussions on the fate of Uyghur torchbearers at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, wondering if the 20-year-old Dilnigar might later face some of the repressive measures that the Chinese government has inflicted upon Uyghurs.

Abduweli Ayup, a Norway-based Uyghur activist and linguist who documents missing and imprisoned Uyghurs in Xinjiang, had tweeted that Adil was one of the 2008 Olympic torchbearers. He carried the torch in Saybagh district.

He told RFA that Chinese officials selected him for the same reason they chose Dilnigar — “to whitewash the atrocities Uyghurs are facing” in China’s far-western Xinjiang region.

“In 2008 when Beijing hosted the Olympics, he was a torchbearer,” he said, “We saw him on TV.”

Adil attended Chinese schools in Xinjiang and studied in Russia in the 1990s, Abduweli said. Later that decade, he began working in Urumqi’s Saybagh district. Adil’s father also was a loyal civil servant of the Chinese in the Kashgar prefecture government.

Abduweli said he learned in 2019 that Adil had been arrested as the Chinese government began stepping up repression of Uyghurs in 2017. He said Adil had been an active Chinese government official in the Culture and Sports Bureau in Urumqi and had been favored by Chinese authorities.

“I heard in 2019 that Adil was arrested and confirmed it in 2020 with a credible source,” he told RFA.

Abduweli also said that Adil is related to him. When the researcher previously made inquiries about his brother, Erkin Ayup, and niece, Mihray Erkin, who had been detained, he hoped that Adil would be able to find out news about them because of his government position. But instead, Abduweli learned that Adil himself had been detained.

Adil’s name was also on the Chinese government’s leaked “Shanghai List” of the names of some 10,000 “suspected terrorists,” most of whom are ethnic Uyghurs, including hundreds of minors and the elderly, Abduweli said.

Analysts believe the list, a copy of which was obtained by RFA, was compiled in 2018 at the latest. It contains entries for Uyghurs from all walks of life and provides rare insight into how Beijing characterizes threats it has used to lock up Uyghurs.

China is believed to have held 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities 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.

To confirm Adil’s detention, RFA contacted the Saybagh district office of the Urumqi Municipal Culture and Sports Bureau. Initially, one employee said Adil Abdurehim did not work there. But another employee later confirmed that Adil had worked there.

“Yes, there used to be someone [by that name] in one of our bureaus,” the second employee said.

An official from neighboring Tenghritagh district Culture and Tourism Bureau, formerly called the Culture and Sports Bureau, in Urumqi also confirmed that Adil had been taken away by authorities, but he refused to answer additional questions.

Later, the police officer at the Urumqi security bureau also confirmed that Adil was in detention, having already served five years of a 14-year sentence for watching counter-revolutionary videos. Such charges applied to those who view or possess religious or foreign content.

Kamaltürk Yalqun, the son of Yalqun Rozi, a well-known Uyghur editor detained in 2016, was one of the students selected to carry the Olympic flame before the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

In an interview with the Associated Press last week, Kamaltürk, now an activist living in the United States, called for a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Games over China’s maltreatment of the Uyghurs.

“It seems to me that our sense of global citizenship and sportsmanship is not moving forward with these Olympic Games anymore,” he was quoted as saying.

Kamaltürk, whose father is serving a 15-year sentence for attempting to subvert the Chinese state, later told RFA that he would not stop fighting for Uyghurs’ rights and dignity.

“I will not stop my fight for my father and for my people until justice has been served,” he said.

More than a dozen nations, including the U.S., imposed a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics, which begin on Feb. 4 and run to Feb 20.

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

Authorities in North Korea are supplying officials at the powerful prosecutor’s office with yearly rations of coveted rice at a time when the country cannot even supply most people with corn, sources in the country told RFA.

Though rice is a basic staple in other East Asian countries, it has become a luxury in North Korea, which suffers from food shortages made worse by the coronavirus pandemic. Steamed rice at a North Korean dinner table is a status symbol, and daily meals of rice separate the haves from the have nots.

Ordinary people are aware that prosecutors are provided with a year’s supply of glutinous and white rice, and they are becoming resentful, an official in the city of Chongjin in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA Wednesday.

“On the 3^rd, I heard about it from my wife. She was at a college friend’s birthday party… and her friend’s husband is a chief prosecutor at the provincial prosecutor’s office. He bragged to them about it,” said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

“The ordinary residents do not receive any food rations at all. Officials of the provincial party committee or the provincial people’s committee, which are the most powerful organizations in the province, receive the national food ration. But even they don’t get rice like the prosecutor’s office,” he said.

The official said he was aware that the prosecutor’s office was powerful, but he never knew just how much privilege they enjoyed.

“The prosecutor’s office belongs to the local distribution system and receives food from the local food administration office… The fact that the prosecutor’s office was able to receive an entire year’s worth of rations all at once, and all of it was rice, proves how privileged and powerful they are,” the source said.

“The provincial food administration bureau workers who allocate food to each region and unit would have had a hard time filling the request of the prosecutor’s office… Since the prosecutor’s office took all the rice, the bureau did not have enough to put it in rations for workers in steel mills and coal mines, and they received their rations in corn instead,” said the source.

“I am not sure if the city prosecutors and district prosecutors also received preferential rations like the provincial prosecutors did, but either way it is an outrage because ordinary people are having a difficult time without receiving any rations at all,” he said.

Since prosecutors interpret the law, they wield the most power, an official in the city of Hyesan, about 140 miles to the west of Chongjin, told RFA Thursday.

“We all know that prosecutors live better than officials at other agencies,” said the second source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

“If the prosecutor’s office carries out a general inspection or investigation… people start trembling. What the prosecutor’s office wants, they can get,” he said.

The Chongjin official said the prosecutor’s office is an exclusive group staffed by only 50 people, compared to the party committee and the people’s committee, which have hundreds.

“There are many things that the prosecutors get for free. Though their numbers are small, they are at the highest level,” he said.

“Since corruption and bribery is so common, prosecutors who can inspect, investigate, and prosecute can increase their wealth by just doing their job. I know several prosecutors, but none of their wives need to work for a living,” the second source said.

Women are typically the primary breadwinners in North Korean society, as the men must work at government-assigned jobs and earn a salary too low to live on. Most families must start businesses of their own and only the women have time to run them.

“So, my friend, who has connections, was moved to the prosecutor’s office from the city party organization department. People at the party organization scoffed at him and showed sarcastic responses about him becoming a prosecutor, but they actually seemed envious,” the Chongjin official said.

“The largest and most beautiful buildings in any city are not the People’s Committee buildings, or those of various government organs, but the buildings of law enforcement. The tyranny and corruption of prosecutors, state security officers, and police officers in this county are severe, so the people’s resentment against them is very high.”

Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Authorities in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan have rescued a three-year-old girl who was taken from a public toilet in Xinping county, amid growing public awareness of trafficking and abduction of girls and women, often for marriage.

An officer who answered the phone at the Xinping county police department confirmed to RFA that the girl had been found, but declined to comment further on the case.

A source inside the unofficial people-tracing community, which has sprung up across China in the absence of effective action by the government, said the girl was lucky to have been found by police, and had likely benefited from the public outcry over a woman kept chained up by her husband in Feng county, in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

Authorities in Jiangsu are investigating the husband of the woman found chained in a freezing outbuilding after giving birth to eight of his children for “illegal imprisonment,” according to an official announcement.

Dong ***min, husband of Yang ***xia, is currently under investigation for “illegal imprisonment,” while two other people surnamed Sang and Shi are being investigated for abduction and trafficking offenses, the Xuzhou municipal committee of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the city government said in a joint statement on the case.

The committee had earlier identified Yang as a woman known by the nickname Xiao Meihua from Fugong county in the southwestern province of Yunnan, although most of the official announcements in the case have met with renewed public anger at official inaction over rampant trafficking and skepticism that the authorities are constructing a narrative to limit damage to their own reputations.

Few now doubt that Yang — who has been diagnosed with and treated for schizophrenia since a viral video exposing her living conditions sparked mass condemnation on Chinese social media — is a victim of human trafficking.

A writer based in Nanjing, Jiangsu’s provincial capital, who gave only the penname Jiang Chun, said the case has gripped the nation, exploding as it did into public consciousness during the Lunar New Year festival, a time for honoring and celebrating family life.

“Most social media users want this investigated in full, because it’s not enough just to save Yang,” Jiang said. “There are government officials who should be held accountable too, with all kinds of issues involved, including excess births [during the one-child policy era], illegal marriage registration [as Yang’s mental capacity was in doubt], and fraud.”

Online comments on the case this week have included growing anger at official negligence that allowed a woman with a severe mental illness to be taken to another province and married to a man without stringent identity checks and tests of her mental capacity.

Wave of public anger

Many believe that rampant trafficking, especially in women and girls for marriage, could never happen without official collusion, and accused the government of acting like a criminal organization.

Previous announcements from the CCP committee in Feng county, where Yang was living at the time the video went viral, found that she had been married to Dong ***min in 1998 after being brought  home by Dong’s father, who found her begging on the streets.

But amid a growing wave of public anger over trafficking, the investigation changed its tune in later announcements, tracing Yang to Yunnan, saying she was likely abducted by Sang and others, implying she was sold to Dong.

“There was also an issue with the conduct of officials at the marriage registration bureau, because Yang wouldn’t … have been eligible for marriage, given her psychiatric problems,” Jiang said.

“There is also the fact that she gave birth to eight children at a time when we weren’t even allowed to have two yet; so this should have been the responsibility of the local family planning bureau,” he said.

Investigative journalist Deng Fei reported last week that hundreds of local officials have been drafted in to investigate trafficking in Feng county after anecdotal reports that the region is notorious for trafficking in women and girls.

Lu Jinghua, a Chinese dissident living in the United States, said the public outcry in the case appeared to be getting some results.

“It’s great that so many urban residents and intellectuals are speaking out about this, despite the fact that these issues don’t affect them personally,” Lu said.

A resident of Qinglong township in the southwestern province of Sichuan, who gave only the surname Zhang, said her mother Wang Jun has been missing for several months, but police wouldn’t accept a missing persons report from her.

“The police didn’t want to know … they wouldn’t open a case at the police station,” Zhang said. “We went there several times and asked if they could use the SkyNet surveillance system [to find her] but they just looked at surveillance cameras in Qinglong township, and there was nothing to see.”

Slave labor

Unofficial websites offering family tracing services have sprung up to fill the void left by police inaction.

A person familiar with the issue said many of those who go missing have disabilities of some kind.

“There are quite a lot in any county [who go missing],” the person said. “I used to work in a non-profit, which used to search for kidnapping and abduction victims, and I helped to track down three missing persons.”

“It was very difficult to find them, and I just got lucky, because someone just happened to see my posts in group chats, and gave me a lead,” he said. “One was the case of a grandmother watching a child, who disappeared after going up the mountain to play, and the grandfather killed himself.”

He said traffickers often target vulnerable adults or children with a view to using them as slave labor.

“I have a cousin who was kidnapped and trafficked twice, and forced to work as a slave, which made him insane,” he said. “There was a disabled person who worked in a shop in Taipingsi village in Hubei, who bought his wife from Guizhou. I saw several videos [to substantiate this] … but they still haven’t been caught.”

“The police in this country don’t care about this, and they do nothing.”

The ministry of public security in Beijing had made no response to a request for comment at the time of writing.

An official at the Yunnan provincial bureau of civil affairs refused to comment on the trafficking of women and missing persons cases when contacted by RFA on Wednesday, saying the information was a “state secret.”

“You ask about missing persons, but we only have figures for minors, and we don’t give out that information,” the official said.

According to a 2020 report by the Chinese Civil Society Research Institute, a think tank under the civil affairs ministry, around one million people were missing in China during that year, with a peak in 2016 of 3.94 million.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Politicians in the U.S. are calling for an investigation into claims of torture against a man jailed after someone posted a photo of ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping’s daughter to a website he ran.

“Former website administrator Niu Tengyu “was reportedly severely tortured and sentenced to 14 years in prison during a crackdown on people related to the websites [VulgarWiki] #EsuWiki and ZhinaWiki, which published information of relatives of #XiJinping,” the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) said via its Twitter account, naming Niu under the hashtag #OlympicPrisoner.

“Credible torture claims must be investigated,” it said.

Niu, was jailed in the southern province of Guangdong after someone posted a photo of Xi Mingze to meme site ZhinaWiki, an act that was later blamed by police on Niu’s VulgarWiki.

He is currently serving his sentence at Yangjiang Prison.

Niu’s attorneys Bao Longjun and Wang Yu filed an official complaint over torture Niu suffered while in police detention in October 2019 that resulted in injury to his right hand.

Bao told RFA’s Cantonese Service in March 2020 that Niu had also been stripped, suspended from the ceiling, and his genitals burned with a lighter.

Niu’s mother Coco welcomed the CECC’s focus on her son’s case.

“This shows the international community cares about my son’s case,” she said. “I will continue to appeal as far as I can according to the law.”

“I once again call on CCP general secretary Xi Jinping to urge the relevant departments to correct this wrongful conviction, release my son and maintain China’s international image regarding the rule of law,” she said.

‘Indelible psychological shadow’

The father of another young man detained in the same case, Zhang Qinrui, told RFA that his son had also been severely mistreated by the authorities.

“My son was transferred to the Foshan Detention Center for anonymous detention, where he was given a code, and not allowed to meet with a lawyer,” Zhang’s father said. “He wasn’t allowed to communicate with anyone, and his glasses were taken away, leaving him very short-sighted.”

“He was prevented from wearing warm clothing in winter, prevented by his cell-mates from eating, and the detention center did nothing when he reported it,” he said. “This went on for more than three months and has left an indelible psychological shadow on him that will last the rest of his life.”

“Do our kids have any human rights?” he said.

Zhang’s father said he believed all of the young people in the case were framed, and demanded immediate acquittal of all charges.

“When the Maoming police came to our home to arrest my son, they said this case had been designated by the ministry of public security [in Beijing] and that my child was a traitor who had smeared the image of our national leader on the internet,” Zhang’s father said. “There was no paperwork when they took him away.”

“After the dust settled a bit, I discovered that actually nothing of the kind had happened. It was obvious persecution,” he said. “Zhang Qinrui did not participate in any illegal activity.”

“They wanted him to take the fall for Song Wanglin, who has a strong CCP background,” he said, adding that top CCP officials had dictated to the court how the case should be handled from the outset.

Another young person connected to Vulgar Wiki, Gu Yangyang, was apparently released, also because he had high-ranking connections in Shanghai, Niu’s mother has said in earlier interviews.

Zhang, who is now 24, was handed a five-year jail term for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” and “violating citizens’ right to privacy,” and designated a member of a “criminal gang.”

23 detainees mistreated

Niu was sentenced on Dec. 30, 2020 by the Maonan District People’s Court in Guangdong’s Maoming city, which found him guilty of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” “violating others’ privacy” and “running an illegal business.”

Reports at the time indicated that 23 young people detained around the same time in connection with the Vulgar Wiki case had also been tortured and mistreated in detention.

Sources told RFA that the parents of the other young detainees were told there was no record of them at the detention center when they went to put money into their prison spending accounts.

The records were restored following a protest by parents outside the Guangdong Detention Center.

A ZhinaWiki editor, who gave only the pseudonym Mr. L, said he was the person who posted personal information relating to the Xi family.

“Throughout this investigation, all of the official records of the case, including the verdict, all admit that ZhinaWiki was responsible for posting [details about Xi’s family], but they still refuse to admit that this has been a miscarriage of justice,” he said.

“We will continue to expose the secret dealings between Gu Yangyang, Song Wanglin, the Guangdong police and the state security police in Beijing, as well as other instances of police corruption and perversion of the course of justice.”

The Maoming People’s Court rejected Niu’s appeal behind closed doors on April 23, 2021.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.