Day: March 12, 2022

Myanmar’s military rulers this week stripped 16 shadow government members and political activists of their citizenship, saying those working in hiding to oppose junta rule had “left the country forever” to commit unlawful actions against the state.

Announced on March 4 and 7, the revocations invoked Section 16 of Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law in a move described as illegal by victims, lawyers and human rights activists who said the country’s military, which overthrew civilian rule in a Feb. 1, 2021 coup, had no authority to issue the order.

Named in the junta’s move were 10 members of the shadow National Unity Government (NUG) set up in safe areas of the country to oppose military rule, including Zaw Wai Soe, Ye Mon, Lwin Ko Latt, Khin Ma Ma Nyo, Aung Myo Min and Zin Mar Aung.

Also listed in the announcement were six prominent political activists including Min Ko Naing, Myo Yan Naung Thein, Maung Maung Aye, Ei Pencilo and popular singer Saung Oo Hlaing.

Responding to the junta’s order, NUG members named in the move said that Myanmar’s military leaders have no jurisdiction to make rulings based on national law.

“We have called the Military Council a terrorist organization ever since the beginning of the coup,” NUG Home and Immigration Minister Lwin Ho Latt told RFA, referring to the junta’s ruling State Administration Council.

“This group has no right to apply the 1982 Citizenship Law. It is not the legitimate government of the country, so I don’t think this move will affect us at all,” he added.

NUG Minister of Commerce and Industry Khin Ma Ma Myo agreed. “They are an illegal government that unseated a legitimate government and now kills and tortures people,” he said. “They are the opposite of what a democracy and true federal government should be.

“Actually, we as the country’s elected representatives should be the ones enforcing the law against them. The people already know who should be accepted as citizens and who should rule this country,” he said.

NUG members have not taken citizenship in any other country, a move that would violate Section 16 of the 1982 Citizenship Law, and the junta’s revocation of members’ citizenship will have no effect on NUG outreach to other countries through diplomatic channels, he added.

“We have not left Myanmar to this day. We are still working within the country’s borders,” said Ei Thinzar Maung, NUG Deputy Minister for Women, Youth and Children. “We are still alive and carrying out the revolution, so the military’s announcement has no effect on us at all. I don’t think we need to react to it.”

Reached for comment, junta Deputy Information Minister Zaw Min Tun said that by revoking political opposition figures’ citizenship, military authorities had acted according to the law.

“Article 16 says that if you leave the country permanently and violate existing laws, the government has the right to cancel your citizenship,” he said. “It was within the government’s authority to do this. We took this move because [the persons named in the order] have violated Article 16.”

‘Nothing to do with the law’

A veteran high court lawyer said however that revoking the citizenship of NUG government members and political activists was not in line with provisions of the law.

“A person loses their citizenship only when they take up citizenship in another country. It can’t be lost for any other reason,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“One can be sentenced to death for treason or for betraying the country, but even then one’s citizenship can’t be revoked,” he said.

The junta’s move against the NUG members and activists is simply an attempt to destroy the military’s political opposition and has nothing at all to do with the law, he said.

“The junta is just trying to find ways to remove their opposition,” agreed Aung Myo Min, the NUG Human Rights Minister. “This is a violation of human rights.”

Houses, other property seized

Junta authorities have meanwhile stepped up their confiscation of property owned by opposition figures, with nearly 100 houses belonging to National League for Democracy (NLD) members seized within the last 13 months, 60 of them taken since the beginning of 2022, NLD sources say.

Authorities have also sealed off property belonging to members of other opposition groups, including the Democracy Party for New Society (DPNS) and the Chin National League for Democracy (CNLD), sources say.

“They regard anyone opposing them as their enemy, said DPNS joint secretary Hnn Hnin Hmwe. “They have been making arbitrary arrests, killing people, looting and burning houses, raping women, confiscating homes and destroying public property to spread fear among the people,” she said.

Homes belonging to Civil Disobedience Movement police captain Tin Mun Tun, film director Ko Pauk, actress Chit Thu Wai, pop singer Chan Chan and prominent social media activists have also been cordoned off by junta authorities, sources say.

Singer Chan Chan said in a posting on social media that others resisting military rule in Myanmar have lost more than their homes, however.

“There are many who have already lost their lives or limbs. Their sacrifices are much greater,” she said. “I am only losing my property, which I may be able to replace later on. I expected long ago that this could happen, and I’m determined to strive on now until evil is defeated by good.”

Other persons suspected of anti-coup activity and summoned to appear in court have had their homes confiscated when they failed to turn up, said Kyaw Lin, chairman of the Insein Township Election Commission in Yangon.

“They told me on the phone to come to court, but I didn’t go, and they said they would send another summons along with a warrant. They said that if they have to call a third time, they will take away my house,” he said.

Family members of persons sought by the police have also seen their houses seized, and shops and other buildings have been confiscated, with five houses in the Taze township of northern Myanmar’s Sagaing region closed because of their owners’ connection to anti-junta militia groups.

 A barbecue shop in Mandalay’s Aungmyaythazan district and social welfare association in the Maha Aungmyay township were also closed in February, sources said.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Richard Finney.

A Lao human rights activist who was living in Thailand under threat of deportation to his communist homeland has arrived in Canada where he will seek asylum with the support of the United Nations refugee agency and human rights groups.

Khoukham Keomanivong, a U.N.-recognized refugee, was convicted on Jan. 31 in a closed-door Thai trial of overstaying his visa and had been held pending deportation to Laos, where he faced arrest for his advocacy work he says he has refrained from for more than two years.

He was later released on bail and was finally allowed to leave Thailand on Thursday for Canada with the assistance of rights groups and the UNHCR. Khoukham arrived in Vancouver on Friday after transiting in South Korea and was undergoing quarantine procedures for COVID-19.

Prior to his departure from Bangkok’s Suvarnnabhumi Airport, Khoukham had vowed to “continue fighting for my life in Canada.”

“I am not safe in Thailand, therefore I have to step forward,” he told RFA’s Lao Service in a text message before boarding his plane.

A founding member of the rights group Free Laos, set up by Lao workers and residents in Thailand to promote human rights and democracy in their home country, Khoukham said last month that he had ended his political activities long before his arrest as one of the conditions of his recognition by the U.N. as a refugee. He said at the time that he would be willing to travel to a third country, although he preferred to stay in Thailand.

Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, a democracy activist in Thailand, told RFA that he was relieved his friend was able to travel to Canada because “he earlier had fallen into crisis status and was almost sent back to Laos.

“Earlier there were some Lao people in Thailand who were sent back to Laos so he was terrified and could not sleep,” said Netiwit, who went to see Khoukham off at the airport.

“His life has been a struggle. He had been fighting for more than a month, even while fighting for the freedom of the Lao people.”

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, welcomed the news of Khoukham’s departure.

“I’m happy that he was allowed to go but unfortunately he never should have been detained in the first place when he had done nothing wrong,” he said. “He’s not a criminal, he’s only a man who fights for human rights, and he did not deserve to be arrested and jailed.”

Robertson added that Lao human rights and democracy activists living in Thailand are increasingly unwilling to gather because they fear being sent back to Laos.

Tough on critics

Laos deals severely with dissidents who call for democracy and respect for human rights in the one-party communist state, and Lao dissidents living abroad have been harshly punished after returning or being forced back to Laos.

Thailand has hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war, natural disasters and human rights violations in neighboring countries.

Human rights groups, however, criticize Thailand’s authoritarian government for recent cases in which it returned refugees and asylum-seekers to China, where they face torture, persecution and other rights abuses.

Last November, Thai authorities arrested and deported to Cambodia two activists from the banned political opposition after Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered the arrest of one of them over a poem criticizing the strongman ruler on Facebook.

In early 2019, Vietnamese blogger Truong Duy Nhat was arrested by Thai Royal Police and handed over to Vietnamese police, who took him across the border into Laos, and from there back to Vietnam.

Nhat, who had been a weekly contributor to RFA’s Vietnamese Service, was sentenced in 2020 to ten years in jail for “abusing his position and authority” in a decade-old land fraud case.

Reported and translated by RFA’s Lao Service. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

At least 23 people are dead and 80 are missing 11 days after a landslide at a jade mine in Myanmar’s Kachin state, but junta officials and the mine’s operators have yet to confirm the casualties and are seeking to keep the incident under wraps, aid workers and residents said Friday.

The landslide occurred on Feb. 28 in Hpakant township’s Mat Lin Gyaung village at a quarry that is jointly run by private firms Myanmar National Co. and Shan Yoma Co., according to sources. Jade mining has been illegal in Hpakant since 2019, but many companies defy the ban, and operations have increased in the area since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

On March 3, the military announced that no one had been killed in the incident, but two days later aid workers and family members of miners told RFA’s Myanmar Service that authorities had recovered the bodies of 23 people and buried them at the nearby Mat Lin Gyaung Cemetery.

An official with a Hpakant-based aid group, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Friday that the companies and security forces had so far blocked search and rescue teams from entering the area because they want to cover up the severity of the landslide and because the operation is illegal.

“Among those [who remain] missing are scavengers, drivers, supervisors, company staff – altogether there are about 80 people,” he said.

“[Authorities] have blocked the road to stop aid workers from entering the area. No cars are allowed and were turned back. Landslides occur frequently here. Stopping rescue teams and aid workers is hard to understand. In other words, it’s a kind of a news blackout.”

The aid worker said that the 23 bodies recovered from the quarry should have been sent to Hpakant Hospital for autopsies but were instead instantly buried by authorities. He said that after 11 days, those still missing are assumed dead.

Meanwhile, Myanmar National Co. and Shan Yoma Co. have yet to release the exact number of dead and missing.

The aunt of a young scavenger who went missing at the quarry said the companies had not officially notified any families regarding the deaths or the accident. She said that relatives only learned of the landslide from others in the community and were left to investigate on their own.

“I won’t be able to see my boy if I don’t go now. We’ll have to try to find his body on our own, but we won’t give up,” she said.

“[The authorities] don’t want to search anymore and so they will say no [if asked for help]. In fact, only about a third of the parents may have heard their kids were killed or injured in the accident because the companies didn’t tell them … If we waited for them to notify us, we would have never known the truth.”

While the woman did not provide details about her nephew, citing security concerns, she told RFA that all 23 of those confirmed dead in the landslide were under the age of 30.

Dangerous conditions

She said that upon entering the site after learning of her nephew’s death it was clear to her that conditions at the mine were unnecessarily dangerous.

“The pile of waste soil is too high. We saw it only when we went there after the landslide … If we had known this before the landslide, we’d have stopped my nephew from working with this company,” she said.

“When the waste soil is piled too high, it collapses under pressure. At the bottom of the pile is where they have the ‘vein’ and it has produced a lot of raw jade, we heard. I don’t know if they didn’t understand the dangers or if they ignored them because of greed.”

The woman’s nephew, who graduated high school recently, had only been working at the mine for three months and was earning around 300,000 kyats (U.S. $170) a month.

She said several Hpakant-based aid groups arrived at the site shortly after the accident on Feb. 28, but company officials did not to let them carry out rescue work.

Attempts by RFA to reach officials from Myanmar National Co. and Shan Yoma Co. went unanswered on Friday. Junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun was also unavailable for comment.

An environmental activist in Hpakant said the operation is being covered up was because the companies do not want to pay compensation to the families of the victims. He urged the junta to hold them accountable.

“They obviously do not want to pay compensation, because the bodies of the dead workers were dug up and all of them were buried at Mat Lin Gyaung Cemetery,” he said.

“To put it simply, they must be worried the incident would become public if relief groups were involved in the rescue work … In the meantime, as this is a transitional period, no one is going to act. This is also a time of opportunity for [the companies to evade the law because of the political turmoil … [and] weak rule of law.”

RFA also spoke on Friday with Kachin Independence Army (KIA) spokesman Col. Naw Bu, whose ethnic armed group has taken control of some of the jade quarries in Hpakant, but he said he was unaware of the details.

Popular mining area

Aung Hein Min, a former lawmaker with the deposed National League for Democracy (NLD) in Hpakant, said that about 90 percent of all jade in Myanmar was being produced illegally by the end of 2020, as jade mining licenses had not been renewed under the NLD after it won the country’s election in November that year.

He said the site of the Feb. 28 accident used to produce precious minerals and has seen several landslides and deaths since the coup.

“YTT Hill, as it is known in the area, is a good site to find good quality jade. It contains a very good vein. The stones are of good quality and big chunks weighing tons have been found,” he said, noting that the second largest jade every mined came from the site.

Aung Hein Min said illegal mining is no widespread around YTT Hill, and safety measures are particularly lax.

“In the past, there were groups to oversee quarrying work and rising waste mounds,” he said.

“Now that’s history. There are no such groups. Everyone tries to dig as much as they can and its a free-for-all. So, the likelihood of landslides is increasing day by day.”

Residents say mining rights in Hpakant, which were revoked in 2019 under the NLD government, were reactivated in 2021 after companies began paying taxes to the junta and the KIA.

Two landslides occurred in Hpakant in December last year due to unregulated mining, leaving a total of around 80 scavengers missing. And in May 2020, a landslide in Hpakant’s Hway-kha-Hmaw area killed hundreds of inexperienced miners and scavengers.

In July last year, a report published by international NGO Global Witness said that Myanmar’s military and those in its highest ranks were able to enrich themselves by looking the other way during the NLD’s ban, and that the junta has post-coup threatened to “further open the floodgates of military corruption in the jade industry.”

Control over the multibillion-dollar jade trade was a major cause of conflict in Myanmar between the military and rebel armed ethnic groups and, in the years leading up to the coup, the military increased its stake in the jade trade at a time when the civilian-led government was trying to impose reforms on it, according to the report.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

A Uyghur educator has been serving a seven-year sentence in a prison in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region for violating Chinese policy and instructing his students in the Uyghur language, a former student and a police officer confirmed to RFA this month, more than six years after his detention.

Adil Tursun, a chemistry teacher and faculty director at Kashgar Kona Sheher (in Chinese, Shufu) County No. 1 High School was arrested in 2016 and sentenced in 2018 to seven years in Xinshou Prison in Shanghai after already having served two years of detention, said Abduweli Ayup, a former student who is now a Uyghur activist and linguist based in Norway.

Abduweil, who also documents missing and imprisoned Uyghurs in Xinjiang, said he found out about Adil’s imprisonment on a leaked Chinese government list of some 10,000 “suspected terrorists” published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in April 2021. More than 7,600 of the people included on the document were ethnic Uyghurs, while the rest were mostly Kazakh and Kyrgyz, fellow Turkic Muslims.

Though Adil, now in his early 50s, previously had been recognized as one of the “nation’s outstanding teachers” by the Chinese government, he was arrested by authorities for the “crime” of speaking in the Uyghur language to his students when they did not his instruction in Chinese, Abduweli said.

“Adil Tursun was a very professional and responsible teacher,” Abduweli said.

“He was a very skilled and famous teacher. He was a member of textbook writing groups,” he added.

Adil, who was from Bulaqsu village in Kona Sheher’s Toqquzaq township and graduated from Hotan Pedagogical College, did not hide his dissatisfaction with the Chinese government policy of abolishing the Uyghur language in schools in order to implement what they call a “bilingual education” policy.

In the early 2000s, Xinjiang education officials introduced the bilingual education policy, requiring Mandarin to be used as the primary language of instruction in schools, with the Uyghur language and literature taught as subjects. The policy was slowly implemented and mainly in urban ethnic minority schools that employed educators who were fluent in Mandarin.

Authorities said the measure would improve standard Mandarin language skills among ethnic minority students so they would be more competitive in the workplace, while Uyghurs saw it as forced cultural assimilation aimed at diluting their Turkic heritage.

Two decades after the policy took effect, not only instruction in the Uyghur language but also the use of standard Uyghur-language textbooks have been banned in nearly all schools, including kindergartens and in rural schoolhouses, though some students still cannot understand instruction or materials in Mandarin.

When RFA called Kona Sheher county police to find out about Adil’s sentence, they declined to answer questions but did not deny that the teacher had been jailed.

A police officer in Kashgar prefecture, where the county is located, however, said Adil had been arrested because of “a previous mistake,” and that the mistake was “speaking in the Uyghur language to his students.”

The officer also said that Adil had been arrested two years before he was sentenced in 2018, but he did not provide additional information.

“After his mistake was investigated, he was arrested. It was a previous mistake of his — to speak in Uyghur to his students while bilingual education was being implemented,” said the officer.

Local police had detained Adil once before in 2015 after his transgression of teaching chemistry lessons in the Uyghur language first came to the attention of Chinese education authorities in Kona Sheher county, according to Abduweli. Police investigated him for the same reason in 2016, but this time, they arrested him.

“He was handed over to the national security branch of the police department and was sentenced to prison two years after his arrest,” the officer said.

RFA previously reported on large-scale arrests of Uyghurs in Kona Sheher county that began prior to 2017, with many people being detained and sentenced to prison, amid a wider crackdown on the minority group in Xinjiang.

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

PASAY CITY– The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), through the Office of Consular Affairs (OCA), filed a police blotter report and requested an investigation into the activities of Canferz Payment and Ticketing Center and Valesco-SMS Inc. for the alleged peddling of passport appointment slots through Facebook.

Canferz Payment and Ticketing Center allegedly offered passport appointment slots on Facebook and booked them under the account of Valesco-SMS Inc., a POEA-and DFA-accredited licensed recruitment agency (LRA).

The appointment slots offered to LRAs are intended for first-time OFW applicants only, in consideration of their special needs and in line with the Government’s special accommodation extended to OFWs.

Upon investigation, the Department discovered that the privilege extended to DFA-accredited LRAs was apparently abused as a means to illegally sell passport appointment slots to non-eligible applicants.

The DFA revoked the accreditation and access of Valesco-SMS Inc. to the DFA OFW Portal and filed a police complaint, affixing the police blotter of one of its alleged victims.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin, Jr. subsequently ordered that the OFW Portal be taken down while assuring active OFWs’ accommodation in the DFA’s Passport Courtesy Lane facility as walk-in applicants starting 14 March 2022.

The Department reiterates that the appointment slots in the online passport appointment system is a free service offered by the Department.

The DFA continuously warns the public against advertisements on social media offering passport appointment assistance for a fee and reiterates that it does not use any social media network to offer or confirm passport application appointments nor has it authorized any company or individual to offer and accept passport appointment scheduling on the Department’s behalf.

Source: Department of Foreign Affairs