Day: March 18, 2022

Cambodia’s Ministry of Interior Friday accepted a small opposition party’s request to try to prevent political intimidation ahead of June’s local elections, the party said in a statement.

The Candlelight Party, formerly known as the Sam Rainsy Party and the Khmer Nation party, was founded in 1995, and merged with other opposition forces to form the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) in 2012.

But in November 2017, Cambodia’s Supreme Court dissolved the CNRP in a move that allowed Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) to win all 125 seats in Parliament in a July 2018 election.

The Candlelight Party has been growing quickly over the past year and some believe may present a challenge to the CPP.

During Friday’s meeting between Candlelight Party Vice President Thach Setha and Ministry of Interior Secretary of State Sak Setha, the ministry accepted the party’s request to take effective measures to prevent intimidation of its members to preserve the integrity of upcoming elections, the party statement said.

The ministry will also look into the recent arrests of two party activists.

The party also requested the creation of a joint committee — to be made up of the parties registered to participate in elections, the National Election Commission (NEC), and representatives of the government — to resolve election-related disputes.

The ministry refused but said it would ask the NEC to work on election issues more effectively.

“As a result of this meeting, I can see we have similar intentions to prevent intimidation before the election,” Thach Setha told RFA’s Khmer Service. “I wanted to have direct talks to resolve this issue to prevent it from getting worse.”

The Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (Comfrel) welcomed Friday’s meeting. Kang Savang, a Comfrel monitor, told RFA that local authorities have failed to perform their duties with neutrality.

“Some local authorities abuse their power and are not neutral so there must be measures against them,” he said.  

At least three Candlelight Party activists have been arrested, and many more have been prevented from registering to compete as candidates in the upcoming election. To date, the party has registered 1,652 candidates across the country for the June election but has not decided on whether it will participate in the election. 

RFA was unable to reach Ministry of Interior spokesman Khieu Sopheak for comment. But he told the local newspaper the Khmer Times that the ministry is gathering evidence connecting the Candlelight Party with exiled CNRP leader Sam Rainsy.

Sam Rainsy, 72, has lived in France since 2015 and was sentenced in absentia last year to 25 years for what supporters say was a politically motivated charge of attempting to overthrow the government.

The ministry spokesman said political party laws prevent found to have violated Vietnamese law to establish or be involved with parties.

“You can do whatever you want, but don’t break the law. Be careful the party might be dissolved,” he said.

In a Feb. 23 interview with RFA, Sam Rainsy said it was unnecessary for him to call for people to support Candlelight.

“We don’t want them to find any excuse to cause us trouble. We don’t need to talk lot about it,” he said.  

Candlelight’s Vice President Thach Setha has also denied that Sam Rainsy is behind the party. He said that its members are competent enough to run the party without him.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong. 

Vietnamese police have prevented Ukrainians in Hanoi from holding a fundraiser on Saturday to help those affected by Russia’s attacks on the Eastern European nation, organizers said.

Event organizers planned to sell food and souvernirs and hold an art auction to raise money to send to Ukrainians affected by the war. They also arranged a musical performance to entertain visitors.

But authorities informed them on Friday that the event to be held at the Chula Fashion House in Nhat Tan ward, Tay Ho district, was cancelled because of “police intervention,” they said, providing no other details. The district is known for hosting small fashion shows and art exhibitions.

A Ukrainian who gave her name as Julia told RFA via text message that many people in her community are disappointed by the abrupt cancellation.

“We are very sad now as we have spent time and effort to prepare for the event,” she said. “It was expected to be a one-day event that many have been waiting for to learn more about our culture. We had prepared an exhibition, music, foods, as well as souvenirs. We did all these things in order to raise funds for people in need in our home country.”

Nguyen Duc Thi Hien, chief of staff of Nhat Tan Ward People’s Committee, said she did not know about the event and its cancellation, and referred RFA to “higher-level people.”

RFA could not reach Nhat Tan Police Chief Do Hong Quang for comment.

“We understand that we are not living in our own country,” Julia said. “Vietnam has its own laws and its own view on the situation in Ukraine. We cannot do anything to change this fact. We only hope that we will receive more support from local people and expatriates living here.”

Prior to the event cancellation, Human Rights Watch condemned Hanoi police and security forces for detaining many local residents to stop them from participating in a charity bazaar held by the Ukrainian Embassy on March 5.

Unlike many other nations, Vietnam has adhered to Moscow’s line of calling the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.”

On Friday, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said that there have been at least 2,149 civilian casualties in Ukraine, with 816 killed and 1,333 injured. OHCHR said it believes the actual figures are considerably higher because information from some locations where hostilities are intense have been delayed, and many reports are pending corroboration.

Vietnam is among 35 countries that on March 2 abstained from voting on a U.N. General Assembly’s resolution demanding that Russia immediately end its invasion and unconditionally withdraw its military forces. The measure passed 141-35 with a dozen member states not voting.

On Thursday, Bùi Thanh Son, Vietnam’s minister of Foreign Affairs, told his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, that the country supported international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to people in Ukraine. He also said that Vietnam would
resume exchanges and cooperation with Ukraine after peace and stability had been restored, according to Vietnamese media reports.

Son said Vietnam believes international disputes and disagreements should be resolved through peaceful measures in compliance with U.N. policies and international law, especially with regard to respect for the independence, sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states.

Son also spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday to urge the parties involved in the armed conflict to exercise restraint and work to find a long-term solution that takes into account the interests of both sides, other Vietnamese media reports said.

The Vietnamese foreign minister suggested that Moscow continue to organize humanitarian corridors and take measures to ensure the safety of civilians, including Vietnamese who live in Ukraine, as they evacuate war zones.

About 7,000 Vietnamese citizens live in Ukraine, according to Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry.

The former Soviet Union served as benefactor and ally to communist Vietnam after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it no longer subsidized poor developing countries like Vietnam, which had racked up billions of dollars in outstanding debt to Soviet Russia.

Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Laos is set to sign agreements with Thailand to sell electricity from three dams being built on the Mekong River, despite opposition to the projects’ construction voiced by villagers and NGOs, according to Lao and Thai sources.

The agreements between the two countries name the Luang Prabang Dam, Pak Beng Dam and Pak Lay Dam, all in northern Laos, as the power sources, sources say.

“All of these projects are moving forward,” an official of the Lao Ministry of Energy and Mines told RFA on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “The dam developers are ready to begin construction of those dams as soon as the power purchase agreements are signed.”

The agreements between Laos and Thailand are scheduled to be signed in May this year, according to a March 15 report in the Bangkok Post.

Developers of the Pak Beng Dam are now making changes to the dam’s design, however, and the Lao government has not yet finished a Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA) required for the Luang Prabang Dam by UNESCO, RFA’s ministry source said.

Developers will provide missing or incomplete documents if work on any project is delayed, the official said. “And the Thai side will then decide when and which dam will enter their market.”

Speaking to RFA this week, Lao villagers and NGO representatives in Thailand reiterated their opposition to the proposed dams, pointing to negative effects on the region’s ecosystem and the planned displacement of thousands of villagers living downstream.

“People here are opposed to the dams, especially the large dams, said one villager living in Oudomxay province’s Pak Beng district near the site of the planned Pak Beng Dam. “They don’t want the dams because they are the ones who will be affected.

“However, here in Laos they just discuss their opposition among themselves and not with the authorities,” the villager said, speaking like RFA’s other sources in Laos on condition of anonymity.

“There will be too many damaging impacts,” agreed a villager living near the Luang Prabang Dam site in Luang Prabang province’s Chomphet district. “Most villagers here don’t want this dam to be built, because the Mekong River is the main source of food for their families. If this dam is built, all our fish will disappear.”

Hannarong Yaowalerd, chairman of the Foundation for Sustainable Water Management in Thailand, said that Thailand should wait for more studies to be completed before signing deals allowing the proposed dams to begin operations.

“The Pak Beng Dam needs to be technically improved,” he said. “And as for the Luang Prabang Dam, the most concerning issue now is the impact it may have on Luang Prabang Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We don’t need to sign the agreements now.”

The Thai government is now pushing for the agreements to be signed because it wants to satisfy the interests of the dams’ developers, Yaowalerd said.

‘Not listening to concerns’

A representative of the Love Chiang Khong Group, a Thai NGO in Chiang Rai province bordering Laos, meanwhile said the Thai government is refusing to listen to the concerns of Thai people likely to be affected by the dams.

“They don’t care about cultural, historical or heritage sites. They also won’t care about damage to the ecosystem,” he said, also declining to be named. “The Mekong River is common property. Everyone depends on it.

“The government’s Procedure for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA) is only ceremonial and meaningless,” he added.

According to the website of the Mekong River Commission (MRC), a multi-nation group monitoring water flows and other conditions on the river, the Luang Prabang Dam built in Luang Prabang’s Chomphet district by Thailand’s Xayaburi Power Company and PetroVietnam Power, will cost $3 billion and displace 2,285 villagers.

Construction of ports, a workers’ camp, power lines and water supply for the project are now complete, “and all heavy equipment has been brought in and an access road now 80 percent finished,” a Chomphet district official told RFA on Friday.

The Pak Beng Dam, built by China Datang Overseas Investment, will cost $2.4 billion and affect 5,726 villagers, according to the MRC. An access road to the dam’s work site is now also in place, an official of Pak Beng district in Oudomxay province said.

And the Pak Lay Dam, built in Xayaburi province by Gulf Energy Development and a Chinese state enterprise, Power China Resources Ltd., will cost $2.13 billion and affect 4,800 villagers in the province. “A road, power line, water supply and workers’ camp are now 80 percent complete, and some heavy equipment is now in place,” a district official said.

Laos has staked its future on power generation in a controversial bid to become the “Battery of Southeast Asia,” exporting electricity from more than 50 large and small-scale dams on the Mekong River and its tributaries.

Though the Lao government sees power generation as a way to boost the country’s economy, the projects have faced criticism because of their environmental impact, displacement of villagers and questionable arrangements.

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

Yaxue Cao, editor-in-chief of the U.S.-based website China Change, has been tracking human rights issues in China for years. With the help of human rights attorneys in China, dissident artist Ai Weiwei, professor and film-maker Ai Xiaoming and overseas-based rights activist, she recently released an hour-long film about the crucial role played by Chinese lawyers in defending people’s basic rights. The documentary, titled “The Defenders — 20 Years of Human Rights Lawyers in China,” offers rarely-seen footage of top rights attorneys including Li Heping, Jiang Tianyong and Pu Zhiqiang to an overseas audience. Cao spoke to RFA’s Mandarin Service about the project:

RFA: How long did the film take to make?

Yaxue Cao: There were only two of us [making the documentary]. I wrote the script and collected and selected the material, while video editor cut it all together and added subtitles. Production started last year, and it took us three months in all.

RFA: This documentary spans a long period of time. How did you find all of the footage and the interviewees?

Yaxue Cao: The main point about this film is that it is based on existing footage. Half of the footage we use comes from interviews carried out for China Change, while we also collected a lot of footage, still photos and audio from news organizations and other films, including [two] made by Ai Xiaoming and Ai Weiwei’s long interview with lawyers Li Heping and Jiang Tianyong in 2011. There were also some images of lawyer Pu Zhiqiang in [another] documentary. The fact that they were willing to share this material with us was a huge help.

RFA: According to my calculations, at least 33 lawyers appear in this film in some form. What kind of people are they?

Yaxue Cao: Well first of all, there should be more than 300,000 lawyers in China, but even at the peak [of legal representation], when human rights lawyers were most active, there were only about 300 of them. But people have quit or stopped speaking out under successive rounds of repression, while others do the work but don’t want to be referred to as a human rights attorney. For example, more than 20 lawyers defended [pro-democracy agribusiness mogul] Sun Dawu, but none of them were in contact with us, or with the Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. Nonetheless, to me, they were still human rights lawyers.

The main thing that makes human rights lawyers special is their bravery. They make up just one in every thousand lawyers [in China], maybe not even that much nowadays. These one-in-a-thousand lawyers dare to take on these cases and go to court to uphold justice according to the law, yet they are risking their livelihoods and putting themselves in personal danger, through arrest or being beaten up, to do so.

The other thing is that some people criticize them, saying they are unskilled lawyers, which is a term commonly used by the authorities. But I think they’re the most skilled lawyers of all. A lawyer who can defend their client in a country that lacks rule of law, with a number of other things against them as well, has reached a very high level, both morally and legally.

‘Chilling effect’

RFA: How has the situation of Chinese human rights lawyers changed in the past 20 years?

Yaxue Cao: The suppression started as soon as they started working. For example, at the beginning of my film, I mentioned the disappearance of Gao Zhisheng, who has been “disappeared” for three out of the last five years. We don’t know whether he is alive or dead. Then we have Li Heping, who was kidnapped and beaten up, then the [jailing of] Xu Zhiyong of the New Citizens Movement. He’s not a practicing lawyer, but he played an important role in the development of human rights lawyers [as a profession].

In 2008, a group of human rights lawyers who had defended Tibetans, defended families in Sichuan, or fought for direct elections to the Beijing Lawyers’ Association had their licenses revoked back in 2009 and 2010.

Kidnapping, torture, detention, and revocation of licenses has been used against human rights lawyers all along, but the turning point was the mass arrests of July 2015. Before that, it was more a question of focused and individual attacks. But in the years since the 2015 crackdown, they have been wiping out the whole profession.

This group consists both of the lawyers who were arrested during the July 2015 crackdown, and the lawyers who defended them. In all, more than 40 lawyers have had their licenses suspended or removed since 2017. The authorities want to eliminate them altogether.

There are other things that also create a chilling effect, like banning media interviews, forcing people to switch their lawyer in favor of a government attorney, and the use of non-disclosure agreements. So a lot of lawyers, while they may be working human rights cases, daren’t talk about them. There are far fewer new human rights lawyers joining their ranks now, which is the result of continual suppression ever since July 2015.

RFA: That makes records like this film all the more important.

Yaxue Cao: Yes, it does. During the production process, as the person who wrote the screenplay, I felt somewhat numb and dull about the whole thing, but just imagine how someone who isn’t really familiar with the topic, with what human rights lawyers in China do, who they are, would feel. I think it would be quite shocking.

There were many layers to this film while I was writing the script. Some lawyers liked to talk about defending clients in court; others talked more about their ideas. Jiang Tianyong talked about suffering extreme abuse in detention, and the despair he felt then. But he also said the situation was totally unacceptable. And the way to break that pattern is to make sure more people know about it.

That’s why we made this film … so more people will get to know these lawyers, to hear about what they said or did, and want to support them, at least morally.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

U.S. President Joe Biden will urge Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping not to aid Russia in its war in Ukraine during a scheduled phone call on Friday, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

The call comes after a number of news reports citing U.S. officials as saying that Russia has asked China for assistance, including supplies of military food rations.

“[The conversation] will make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression, and we will not hesitate to impose costs,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday.

On Thursday, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian defended China’s stance on Ukraine as “upright, fair and objective, and beyond reproach.”

“The countries that should really be feeling uncomfortable are those that think they have won the Cold War and can dominate the rest of the world … those countries that continued to promote NATO’s eastward expansion despite concerns of other countries … those countries that start wars everywhere but call other countries warmongers,” he told a regular news briefing in Beijing.

Zhao, a proponent of China’s more outspoken brand of “wolf warrior” diplomacy, went on to ridicule international sanctions against Russia.

“I heard that Russian cats, Russian dogs, and Russian trees will be sanctioned,” he said. “I also heard that Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has been banned. Tchaikovsky … has been dead for more than 100 years. What can he be guilty of?”

State news agency Xinhua said Xi would “exchange views with U.S. President Joe Biden on China-U.S. relations and issues of mutual concern” on Friday evening Beijing time.

Xinhua meanwhile cited “experts” from France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, India, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Iran, Namibia, Egypt and Pakistan as supporting China’s position on the Ukraine war.

China has declined to refer to the war as an invasion, says it supports peace talks and a diplomatic solution, and rejects media reports suggesting it may assist the Russians.

The Xinhua article quoted Liazid Benhami, vice-chairman of the Paris-France-China Friendship Association — which is under the aegis of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s United Front Work Department — as saying that CCP leader Xi Jinping has demonstrated China’s responsible role as a major power, and believes that China will play an active role alongside the international community on the situation in Ukraine.

Sun Kai, a former reporter with a Beijing-based newspaper, said he had never heard of any of the “experts” cited by Xinhua.

“These people are not particularly famous,” Sun told RFA. “They will always look for people who are pro-China, and if they can’t find any, they sometimes make up institutions and names that nobody has ever heard of before.”

“It’s fake,” he said.

State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to speculate on China’s response to U.S. concerns during a press briefing on March 16, but said Washington remained keen to keep open the channels of communication with Beijing.

“This is probably the most consequential bilateral relationship on the face of the Earth,” Price said. “It is incumbent upon us as a responsible country to see to it that the competition that characterizes our relationship doesn’t veer into the realm of conflict.”

But he said Beijing had been notably absent from the international chorus of condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We’ve yet to see … that sort of unambiguous statement from [China],” Price said, warning that any effort to compensate Russia for financial losses under international sanctions would “cost” China.

Hours ahead of the presidential call, the Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong sailed through the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan’s defense ministry said on Friday.

Taiwan has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), nor formed part of the People’s Republic of China, but Beijing hasn’t ruled out invading the democratic country by force to achieve what it terms “unification.”

The carrier appeared around 30 nautical miles to the southwest of Taiwan’s Kinmen Island at around 10:30 a.m. and was photographed by a passenger on a Taiwanese civilian flight, the defense ministry said.

Taiwan defense spokesman Shih Shun-wen confirmed the report, adding that the island’s military had a full grasp on the activities of Chinese aircraft and vessels in the Taiwan Strait and would safeguard national security.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.