Day: March 7, 2022

Authorities in Phnom Penh arrested another 180 striking employees of the NagaWorld Casino Monday as the fight against the Hong-Kong based company enters a third month.

Thousands of workers walked off their jobs in mid-December, demanding higher wages and the reinstatement of several jailed union leaders and 365 workers they say were unjustly fired from the hotel and casino, which is owned by a Hong Kong-based company believed to have connections to family members of Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Cambodian authorities have called the strike “illegal” and alleged that it is supported by foreign donors as a plot to topple the government. But a series of arrests in recent weeks have been attributed to alleged violations of pandemic health regulations in Cambodia’s capital. Activists said the charges were trumped up to break up the strike.

On Monday, dozens of security officers forced the 180 strikers onto buses and transported them to a quarantine center in the city’s suburbs for processing. The workers maintain that they have been following quarantine rules.

“The authorities accuse us relentlessly. I ask where is the will to find a solution for the people who have been exploited by foreign companies? Where is the justice for the Cambodian people?” Miech Srey Oun, a worker who has now been arrested twice, told RFA’s Khmer Service.

“The company tried to turn our dispute with the company over to the authorities, even though we, the workers, had a dispute with the employers only, not with the authorities,” she said.

Miech Srey Oun said that a bus released the workers into the hot sun. The strikers were not given food and water, she said.

Chinn Usaphea, another striking casino employee, told RFA that the strike is a last resort. She and her coworkers exhausted all other options in hope of resolving their dispute with NagaWorld. She is now calling on Hun Sen to step in and solve the dispute.

“As citizen, I would like to ask the Samdech father Hun Sen to look at his children in NagaWorld, because we need to be stable in the workplace and to have unions in the workplace,” she said. 

“He should tell the relevant ministries to stand neutral to encourage the NagaWorld employers to come out and deal with their grieving staff to end this long-standing dispute,” she said.

RFA could not reach Phnom Penh City Hall spokesman Met Meas Pheakdey and Ministry of Labor spokesman Heng Sour for comment.

The authorities should release the detained union representatives and let them solve the issue with NagaWorld, Ny Sokha, president of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, told RFA.

Once the union leaders are free, they can negotiate and the strikers would have no reason to demonstrate, he said.

He noted that the government, which has called for talks to end the war in Ukraine, could handle this much smaller dispute.

“This is such a small thing compared to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. So, I think the government is not so incompetent that it cannot solve the NagaWorld issue,” he said.  “But this depends on the will of the government to solve the problem. That requires will of the government to uphold justice for the workers, who need help from the government.”

On March 4, two NagaWorld strikers were placed under judicial surveillance in connection with allegations that they had prevented other NagaWorld workers from taking COVID-19 tests, which the two workers denied. 

As one of the largest casinos in Phnom Penh, NagaWorld had a total of over 8,000 workers before the strike. The number has been reduced to slightly over 6,000 after the cutbacks that caused the strike.

Translated by Sok Ry Sum. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

South Korea’s presidential race, which culminates in a national vote this Wednesday, is giving many North Koreans living in China a first look at an election in which citizens actually get to decide the outcome, sources in China told RFA.

North Korea does have elections for various government positions, but only one pre-approved candidate is on the ballot. Coverage of the South Korean presidential campaign is almost completely nonexistent in isolated North Korea. But news of the race can be easily found on the internet in China, where tens of thousands of North Koreans live and work.

The fact that Wednesday will be South Korea’s 20^th presidential election is not lost on the North Koreans who are able to tune in, as their homeland has only had the three hereditary rulers of the Kim Dynasty since both Koreas were founded in 1948.

Sources told RFA that North Koreans in China are glued to coverage of the South Korean presidential campaign, intrigued that candidates are able to freely criticize each other, the sitting president and past presidents as they vie to convince their countrymen that they would be the best choice to lead the country. The South democratized rapidly after emerging from military rule in the late 1980s.

“Yesterday, I had a meal with a friend in Dandong who is a North Korean trade official. When I brought up the topic of the 20^th presidential election in South Korea, I was surprised that he said he was watching the campaign on the internet in his spare time,” a Chinese citizen of Korean descent from Dandong, across the Yalu River from North Korea, told RFA’s Korean Service March 3.

“My friend said it was surprising to see so many presidential candidates in South Korea,” said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

There are 14 registered candidates in South Korea’s presidential election this year, but only two — Lee Jae-myeong of the ruling Democratic Party and Yoon Suk-yeol of the main opposition People Power Party — have a realistic chance of winning.

The trade official told his friend that he was flabbergasted that each presidential candidate can give speeches in public to argue their cause.

“My friend confessed his honest feelings to me, saying this kind of thing would be totally unimaginable in North Korea,” said the Dandong resident.

“He said he is really taken aback by the fact that nobody tries to stop the presidential candidates who claim that the country is in need of serious changes or political reforms. He criticized how North Korea’s political system is a hereditary dictatorship, saying that the election of North Korea’s supreme leader should be done as it is in South Korea,” said the Dandong resident.

North Koreans in China also have more free time these days to pay attention to the South Korean presidential race. Trade between North Korea and China has not fully resumed after a two-year hiatus due to the coronavirus. Many traders from North Korea have been able to tune into to news of the campaign in the morning, a source in Jilin Province, east of Dandong’s surrounding Liaoning province, told RFA.

“I heard from a North Korean counterpart that the internet news they watch every morning is all about the 20^th presidential election in South Korea,” said the second source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

“Today I invited a North Korean trading partner to my house for a drink. He immediately started talking about the election. I was surprised when he said that North Korea will only become a prosperous country if they can escape their current political system, in which only the Mount Baekdu hereditary bloodline retains power,” he said.

The so-called “Baekdu line” refers to all descendants of national founder Kim Il Sung. The name refers to the mountain on the Sino-Korean border that is sacred in Korean culture as the birthplace of the mythical figure Dangun, the first Korean according to legend.

The Kim family is tied to the mountain through modern day myths that Kim Jong Il, the father and predecessor of current leader Kim Jong Un, was also born there, in a secret military camp, during the time that his father Kim Il Sung was fighting guerilla campaigns against the occupying Japanese.

Though stories of the Kim family’s divinity may only be myths, it has maintained tight control over the country for three generations.

“Among the North Koreans I am close to, it is unimaginable for them to think that they can elect the leader by a democratic voting process,” a third source, from Donggang, a city near Dandong, told RFA.

“In the parliamentary election of the Supreme People’s Assembly, where all matters of the country are discussed and decided, only candidates who have good songbun and who will be blindly loyal to the authorities are pre-selected,” the third source said, referring to official loyalty records that the North Korean government keeps on every citizen and their families.

“The residents are told to vote for the pre-determined candidate unconditionally. Some criticize that they are voting for scarecrows who cannot voice any concerns or competing ideas.”

Translated by Claire Lee and Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Indonesian authorities are investigating the possible role of a people smuggling ring in the weekend arrival of 114 Rohingya in the Aceh region after 25 days at sea, a police spokesman said Monday.

Villagers in coastal Bireuen regency saw the group of 58 men, 21 women and 35 children disembark from a rickety wooden boat and helped them find shelter in the early hours of Sunday, police and officials said.

The Rohingya were later moved to a neighborhood mosque, where they were given food and underwent medical checkups and tests.

“We are investigating [possible people smuggling] and are still collecting information from witnesses and evidence,” said Senior Commissioner Winardy, a spokesman for Aceh police.

The group was the second to arrive in this area since Dec. 27 when local fishermen rescued 120 Rohingya, including 51 children, off North Aceh after their boat’s engine failed.

The Bireuen administration has provided food for this latest group of Rohingya, while locals set up a kitchen at the mosque where the Rohingya were staying, said a local community leader, Muslim A. Majid. He said the Rohingya were spotted by locals who were looking for crabs near the beach.

“When we found them, they had got off the boat and were sitting in the quiet part of the beach,” he told BenarNews.

Winardy, the police spokesman, said the Rohingya spent more than three weeks at sea with little food.

“We found that 74 of them had UNHCR cards, and 30 people had [COVID-19] vaccine cards,” he said, referring to the United Nations refugee agency.

A spokeswoman for UNHCR, Mitra Suryono, said it was not immediately clear where the Rohingya were traveling from or where they were headed.

“Right now, our focus is their health. They have undergone COVID tests and will have a period of quarantine,” she said.

As with previous arrivals, “there were some who already had cards issued by the UNHCR in Bangladesh, because they had previously fled there and were registered as refugees there,” she said.

Since Burmese security forces launched a brutal crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine state against the Rohingya in 2017, refugees have paid traffickers to transport them to Thailand and Malaysia. The Rohingya hope to find work away from Myanmar or crowded refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

Since the 2017 crackdown, about 740,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar settled in camps in and around Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, now home to about 1 million of the refugees. Over the years, groups of Rohingya have packed into boats and sailed off in search of asylum in other countries, but have often been refused entry.

A young refugee in the batch of new arrivals said he had left his mother behind at a refugee camp in Bangladesh and followed his uncle to start a new life, preferably in a majority-Muslim country such as Indonesia or Malaysia.

“We left Bangladesh because the Rohingya situation at the camp is not good, it’s getting very bad at the moment,” 11-year-old Omar Faruk told an AFP journalist on Sunday in English, adding that his group had been at sea for 25 days.

“We left Bangladesh to this country to make a beautiful future … I have no father, only one uncle and my mum is still in Bangladesh,” he said. “I came here because I want to improve my education.”

Muzakkar A. Gani, the chief of Bireuen regency, said he hoped that the Rohingya would be transferred to the city of Lhokseumawe in North Aceh regency under the supervision of the International Organization for Migration and UNHCR.

“The temporary shelter in Bireuen is not secure enough and there are concerns that the refugees will flee,” Muzakar told reporters.

At least 36 of the 120 Rohingya who arrived in December have fled their Lhokseumawe camp, prompting concerns that a human trafficking ring had smuggled them out of Indonesia, Muzakar said.

“I don’t have evidence yet, but this appears to be systematic, so there is a strong suspicion that other parties are involved,” Muzakar said.

Local officials said they did not know exactly where the Rohingya had gone to, but suspect they had been taken to Malaysia, their original destination.

As of October, at least 665 Rohingya have ended up stranded in Indonesia on their way to third countries including Malaysia and Australia, according to UNHCR.

Indonesia is not a party to the U.N.’s 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. It prohibits refugees from obtaining jobs and attending formal schools.

China has “full confidence in the prospect of finalizing the Code of Conduct” in the South China Sea, Beijing’s top diplomat said Monday, even as China’s military conducted maritime exercises that a Vietnamese analyst said could complicate the negotiations.

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi did not give a timeframe for completing the code, or COC, which has been under discussion for years by China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. The code is intended to reduce the risk of conflict in the South China Sea, where China’s expansive claims overlap with those of several ASEAN nations.

Wang said during a press conference on the sidelines of the fifth session of the 13th National People’s Congress that “advancing COC consultation serves the shared interest” of China and the countries in Southeast Asia.

 “As the consultation enters a crucial stage,” Wang said that both China and other regional countries need to “firmly thwart disturbances.”

“Some countries outside of the region are not happy to see the conclusion of the COC … because that would deny them the ground to meddle in the South China Sea for selfish gain,” Wang said via an interpreter.

The foreign minister went on to accuse Washington of “hegemony,” saying that the real goal of the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy is to establish another version of NATO.

“The Asia-Pacific is a promising land for cooperation and development, not a chessboard for geopolitical contest,” Wang said.

The U.S. policy and efforts to strengthen military ties with Japan, Australia and India in the so-called Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) are a “disaster that disrupts regional peace and stability,” he said.

Leaders of the four Quad member states held a snap meeting last Thursday to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war and its possible impact on the Indo-Pacific.

Charles Eden, Australia chair and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, D.C., said the Quad meeting “highlighted not only their concern over what is happening in Ukraine but also their resolve that such blatant violations of the territorial integrity and sovereign independence not take place in the Indo-Pacific region.”

There have been some “inconsistencies” in the four countries’ approach towards Russia, Eden noted, with India abstaining from condemning Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

But “the Quad meeting highlighted the continuing alignment of the members on the importance of the Indo-Pacific,” Eden said, adding, that it also showed “their intent to pushback more forcefully against China’s increased aggression.”

Military exercise

As Wang was speaking to journalists in Beijing, China was conducting a 12-day military exercise in the Gulf of Tonkin, just 60 nautical miles (110 kilometers) from Vietnam’s ancient capital of Hue.

China’s Hainan Maritime Safety Administration issued late on Friday a navigation warning banning ships from entering an area that overlaps Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The military drills run from March 4 to 15.

The Vietnamese government has protested, asking China to “respect Vietnam’s EEZ and continental shelf, stop and not to repeat any act that complicates the situation.”

Such unilateral actions would make the COC negotiation harder, analysts suggested.

“This lengthy military exercise will really impede the COC process,” said Viet Hoang, a well-known Vietnamese scholar on South China Sea.

“By this, China seems to also send warning signals not only to Vietnam but other ASEAN countries ahead of the special summit of the U.S. and ASEAN later this month,” he said.

President Joe Biden will host ASEAN leaders in Washington, D.C., on March 28-29. The U.S. sees the region as critical to its efforts to push back against China’s rising power.

China claims historical rights to almost 90 percent of the South China Sea, an area roughly demarcated by its so-called “nine-dash line.” Other claimants have rejected those claims and a 2016 international arbitration tribunal ruled that those claims had no legal basis.

China’s diplomats are believed to be making efforts to speed up negotiations with ASEAN on the COC. But there are major stumbling blocks in the way, such as the nine-dash line and the exclusion of interests and rights that outside parties — other than China and ASEAN — have in the South China Sea in accordance with the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

South China Sea claimants include ASEAN members Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The other members of the bloc are Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore and Thailand. While Indonesia does not regard itself as party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia’s EEZ.

China and ASEAN agreed on a Declaration of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea in 2003, but progress on a COC has been slow going, even after a draft agreement was released in 2018.

A Uyghur professor and translator has been serving a 10-year sentence in a prison in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region for separatism and promoting Western culture, a former Uyghur classmate of the man and a village official confirmed to RFA this month, more than four years after his detention.

Nurmemet Omer Uchqun, a literature teacher at the School of Philology at Xinjiang Normal University, was sentenced for “marginalizing national culture” and “attempting to split the country,” through his writings and translations, said Husenjan, his former classmate who now lives in Norway.

Uchqun had been detained by police in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) in 2017 and later handed over to authorities in Hotan (Hetian) prefecture and transferred to Keriye Prison in Keriye (Yutian) county, after he had been sentenced to 10 years, said Husenjan, who got the information from sources inside China.

“My source in China told me in early 2019 that Nurmemet Omer Uchqun was ‘sick and being checked at the hospital,’ which means that he was arrested and being investigated,” Husenjan said.

“Recently, through [another] source, I learned that Nurmemet was sentenced to 10 years,” he said. “I heard that in 2017 he was interrogated by police about his writing and translation work.”

Uchqun–noted for his work in literature, translation, research and computer science–was reportedly abducted in early 2018.

He wrote a collection of articles titled “Open Your Eyes, Find Yourself Men” and translated books such as The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People into the Uyghur language.

His collection of articles was the basis for his arrest on separatism charges, while his translations of Western books and another collection of articles he wrote titled “If You Discover, the Dust Can Become Gold” were basis for the charges of promoting Western culture and marginalizing national culture, meaning Chinese culture.

RFA confirmed two years ago that Uchqun had been arrested but was unable to verify if he had been sentenced.

Relevant officials in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, have repeatedly refused to provide information on the detained scholar.

When RFA recently contacted Xinjiang Normal University to find out more information about Uchqun, officials refrained from answering questions.

Husenjan suggested that since Uchqun was originally from Yarbagh township in Qaraqash (Moyu) county, Hotan prefecture, we should contact relevant authorities there.

When contacted by RFA, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of the village where Uchqun’s parents live confirmed that the scholar had been sentenced to 10 years in prison and was serving his term in Keriye Prison.

“He [was sentenced] to 10 years [and is serving] in Keriye Prison,” the party secretary said.

Uchqun graduated from the Literature Department of Xinjiang University in 2009 and joined Xinjiang Normal University the same year, according to information obtained online. From 2011 to 2015, he studied for a doctoral degree at Shanghai Huadong Normal University and later was reemployed by Xinjiang Normal University.

Uchqun also had been a guest editor of the Communist Party-controlled magazine Xinjiang Civilization, which selected works by the region’s most influential writers on Uyghur culture, history, politics, and social development for publication.

RFA previously reported that the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Qurban Mamut, was abducted in 2017.

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

More than 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are believed to have been 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 in the region.

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

More than 100 Vietnamese villagers demanding title to their land were attacked and beaten on Saturday by assailants wearing civilian clothes while police looked on and refused to intervene, according to local sources.

The attack in Dien Ban town in central Vietnam’s Quang Nam province came after petitioners set up tents and raised banners in front of the town’s People’s Committee headquarters, asking for their right to land for which they paid five years ago, sources said.

Roads leading to Dien Ban had already been blocked to prevent access to the town center when protesters arrived, a petitioner named Nguyen Thi Thanh Tam told RFA on Monday.

“However, a large number of us managed to push our way through and reached the place where we raised our banners and set up mats and blankets, planning to stay there till today.”

A group of around 30 men wearing face masks, helmets and civilian clothes then arrived and attacked the group, beating petitioners including children and elderly women, Tam said.

“They even sprayed us with fire extinguishers and took away our tents, illegally detaining protesters and taking them to a nearby police station,” she added.

Traffic police present at the scene did nothing to prevent the assault, Tam said, noting that the unidentified attackers appeared to be working in coordination with local authorities to attack and disperse the protest.

“After all, the roads to the town center had been cordoned off, so how could they get to where we were?” she asked.

Thugs associated with the police have frequently been used by Vietnamese authorities in the past to break up land-rights protests or attack political dissidents or members of unsanctioned religious groups, sources say.

Saturday’s protest was the latest attempt by petitioners to secure title to land lots purchased from the Bach Dat An Stock Company, which accepted villagers’ payments for the land but have yet to acknowledge ownership, sources say.

A March 5 report by state-owned newspaper Lao Dong (Labor) said that petitioners had set up tents and raised banners in front of the People’s Committee headquarters, but had taken down the tents themselves and dispersed quietly on their own.

No mention of the assault on protesters was made in the article, which quoted the committee’s deputy chairman.

Calls seeking comment from Dien Ban Town Party Chief Dan Huu Lien and Village Chairman Tran Uc were not picked up this week.

Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by An Nguyen. Written in English by Richard Finney.