Day: April 1, 2022

Chinese authorities in Xinjiang are restricting the number of Muslims allowed to observe the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, drawing heavy criticism from rights groups that see the government directive as the latest effort to diminish Uyghur culture in the region.

For years, officials in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have prohibited Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims from fully observing Ramadan including by banning civil servants, students and teachers from fasting.

Some neighborhood committees in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) and some village officials in Kashgar (Kashi) and Hotan (Hetian) prefectures have received notices that only 10-50 Muslims will be allowed to fast during Ramadan, which runs from April 1 to May 1, and that those who do so must register with authorities, according local administrators and police in Xinjiang.

“Ramadan measures are being taken,” said a village policeman in Kashgar’s Tokkuzak (Toukezhake) township. “The purpose is to allay the fears of [Uyghurs] who are afraid to fast, in addition to security, because there should not be any misconception about the [Chinese Communist] Party’s religious policy. The party never said to abolish religion, but to Sinicize it.”

A village administrator who oversees 10 families in Ghulja (Yining) county in Ili Kazakh (Yili Hasake) Autonomous Prefecture, said registration was already under way in his community and that the elderly and adults with no school-age children are allowed to fast.

“This system is designed to avoid religion to have negative effects on children’s minds,” he said. “There is a lot of propaganda about it right now. A cadre from the village is registering people who meet the criteria for fasting.”

Another administrator who oversees 10 families in the city of Atush (Atushi) in Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture said he received a notice about the fasting restriction from local authorities.

“Of the 10 families that I am in charge, two — Tahir and Ahmet — were identified as ones that can fast,” he said. “Both are elderly and have no children at home.”

A Uyghur employee at a hotel contacted by RFA on Wednesday said he could not say anything about Ramadan and hung up the phone.

Painting ‘a sham picture’

In past years, authorities have warned Uyghur residents that they could be punished for fasting, including by being sent to one of the XUAR’s vast network of internment camps, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities since April 2017. Authorities also have forced retirees to pledge ahead of Ramadan that they won’t fast or pray to set an example for the wider community and to assume responsibility for ensuring others also refrain.

“It is pathetic and tragic to see China’s notice that only certain people can fast,” said Turghunjan Alawudun, director of the Committee for Religious Affairs at the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) in Germany. “The Muslim world would laugh at China’s actions and be astonished by the setting of a quota for those who can fast.”

The Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project issued a statement on Thursday showing solidarity with Uyghurs in Xinjiang who cannot hold iftar, the meal eaten by Muslims at sundown to break the daily fast during Ramadan, or pray “without risking being labeled a religious extremist.”

“There will be no Ramadan for Uyghurs in the homeland this year — or any year — until China’s campaign of genocide is brought to an end,” the statement said.

The Campaign for Uyghurs, also based in Washington, also noted that Uyghurs in Xinjiang are once again being forbidden to worship and celebrate religious holidays.

“To add insult to this injustice, the CCP selectively deploys Islam to paint a sham picture,” the group said in a statement issued Thursday.

WUC president Dolkun Isa said China has turned Ramadan into “a month of hellish suffering of genocide for the Uyghur people” and called on Muslim leaders worldwide to condemn the rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang.

“It’s your religious and moral duty to call on China to stop this ongoing genocide,” he said. “History will not treat you kindly if you continue to allow this genocide to continue under your watch.”

The U.S. and parliaments in some Western countries have declared China’s actions against the Uyghurs and other Turkic people a genocide and crimes against humanity, though China has denied accusations of abuse.

Translated by Mamatjan Juma and Alim Seytoff of RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Cambodian authorities Friday denied media reports that Thai citizens are being held against their will in Cambodia by criminal gangs, but Malaysian police said human trafficking syndicates were running rampant across the entire Southeast Asian region.

Chhoun Narin, police chief of the Sihanoukville Police Department, told RFA’s Khmer Service that more than 100 Thais have crossed over the border between the two countries to illegally take jobs in casinos located in Sihanoukville province.

“We hear fake stories about detentions and torture,” he said. “There are no illegal detentions.”

The denial contradicts reports in the Bangkok Post and other Southeast Asian outlets that there are between 2,800 and 3,000 Thais working illegally in Cambodia who have been tricked by gangs to take positions as scammers, according to Thai police estimates.

Despite the denial, Chhoun Narin said the police will cooperate with Thai officials in repatriating Thai citizens. But he declined to comment on whether Cambodia will charge Thais found to be in the country illegally.

RFA was unable to reach National Police spokesman Chhay Kim Khouen for comment on Friday.

After the Cambodian government opened up the company following COVID-19 restrictions, reports of criminal activities in Sihanoukville province flooded the offices of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, Cheap Sotheary, the group’s Sihanoukville province coordinator, told RFA.

She urged Cambodian authorities to work with their Thai counterparts to resolve complaints about kidnapping and detentions in Cambodia.

“There should be an investigation to see how many separate incidents there are. If Thai delegates come, there should be a cooperation to avoid any misunderstanding,” she said.

Police in Malaysia, meanwhile, have information indicating a human trafficking syndicate has trapped Malays as forced labor in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, reported.

Since 2021, the Anti-trafficking  unit of Malaysia’s Federal Criminal Investigation Department received six police reports of involving 26 victims — 24 men and two women—in need of rescue from crime syndicates.

The police believe that there are still many people in similar situations but have not lodged reports with authorities. 

Police say that the victims were duped by job advertisements offering relatively high salaries doing social media work as customer service officers in other countries. 

Interested job seekers were encouraged to contact agents via WeChat, WhatsApp or Facebook who then would arrange travel costs for the unsuspecting victims. Once they arrived at the destination, the syndicate would confiscate or destroy travel documents and mobile devices, leaving the migrants with no way to call for help or escape on their own.

The victims then would be sent to specific locations such as Preah Sihanouk in Cambodia, Mae Sot in Thailand, Vientiane in Laos and Kayin State in Myanmar and forced to work in scams involving online gambling, fake investments and Bitcoin mining.

They would not be allowed to return home if they did not reach the company’s sales targets or they could pay between U.S. $7,125 and $11,875 for their release.

The Royal Malaysian Police is working with Interpol and Aseanapol to seek help in tracking and rescuing Malaysian victims. 

RFA reported last month that dozens of Thais and hundreds of Lao citizens were duped into working in casinos in Laos’ Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. If these victims failed to meet sales quotas, they were told they would be sold to employers at different companies, including for positions in the sex trade.

Multiple groups of Thais escaped last month back to Thailand or were rescued and repatriated.

Translated by RFA’s Khmer Service and BenarNews. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Kyaw Myint, an 83-year-old musician from Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city and culture center, fears that among the country’s many losses to from the military coup and covid-19 pandemic will be the pattala, a teak-and-bamboo xylophone that he has played his whole life.

Caught between the pandemic and the political turmoil following the February 2021 military coup, pattala artists have lost their jobs, with many forced to take up casual labor.
“We aging artists are facing a lot of hardship. For a long time, the theatrical troupes have not had a chance to give any performances,” he said, echoing a lament heard from musicians around the world as gigs dried up during pandemic lockdowns.

“Some of them have become vendors in the market because they cannot play their music anymore. Some even have become rickshaw drivers and some are selling vegetables,” Kyaw Myint told RFA’s Myanmar Service.

Kyaw Myint studied with a who’s who of top Burmese classical musicians, including Saw Mya Aye Kyi, Ba Lay, and Ohn Maung and made a living playing the pattala for his entire adult life.

But as musicians worldwide have been increasingly able to return to performing as the pandemic eases in many countries, the violence, political unrest and outright warfare that has engulfed Myanmar since the military overthrew the country’s elected government have brought nighttime curfews and the suspension of theatrical performances.

The political conflict has also undercut the efforts by the poorest country in Southeast Asia to roll out vaccines and other measures to combat the pandemic.

The pattala, developed more than 500 years ago for use in court music and chamber ensembles, has a teak resonating chamber shaped like a rowboat, over which 24 bamboo slats are suspended. It is played with padded hardwood mallets and tuned along lines similar the diatonic scale. Southeast Asian neighbors Thailand and Cambodia have similar versions of the ancient instrument.

San San Nwe, a 67-year-old retired schoolteacher, is not a musician, but her traditional craft has also been collateral damage from the violence and turmoil. She learned the craft the art of making pattala mallets from her father, Saing Sayar Gyi Sein Tun Kyi, carrying on his tradition for almost 50 years.

“In the past, while I worked as a schoolteacher, I would do this job if we had orders. But now we hardly have any orders,” she said.

Nyunt Win Tun, 57,  San San Nwe’s brother, hopes pattala performances will return when peace returns to the multi-ethnic country of 54 million people.

“We can only hope that these activities will return to normal when there is peace and tranquility. When normalcy returns, we will be able to do our work happily again. It’s been over two and a half years now. Things are not going well at all,” he told RFA.

Even before the coup which has claimed thousands of lives and led to the jailing of hundreds of beloved writers, actors and musicians, traditional folk instruments like the hardwood-and-bamboo pattala were swimming against the tide of modern technology.

Electronic pianos and organs that can play a variety of sounds are getting more and more popular while traditional instruments like the pattala are now becoming less and less popular among younger Burmese people.

Kyaw Mint says there are now very few people in Myanmar who can play the pattala as it should be played, he said.

And more ominously for the ancient tradition, there are thought to be only about a dozen people left who make pattalas in Myanmar.

“There are a lot of reasons that the traditional music industry is disappearing,” said Kyaw Myint..

I’m trying to keep it alive. But I am saddened that there are very few young people who want to inherit this rare old tradition.”

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Edited by Paul Eckert.

Cambodia’s National Election Committee (NEC) has removed more than 100 candidates from the opposition Candlelight Party from the list of those running in the country’s commune elections on June 5, the party’s vice president said Friday.

The party, which has threatened to boycott the vote because of political harassment of its members and activists by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), has accused the NEC of abusing election law.

Candlelight Party vice president Thach Setha said NEC president Prach Chan on Thursday removed all candidates in Phnom Penh and Pursat and Kampong Cham provinces from the candidate list, and accused election authorities of not complying with the law by failing to call witnesses to be questioned amid complaints filed by CPP against the Candelight Party.

“He didn’t make any mistake. It is a violation of the election law,” Thach Setha said.

Party officials say they have been falsely accused of using fake names for candidates and putting forward some candidates for election without their permission. CCP complains have accused Candlelight Party candidates of being illiterate and submitting documents without thumbprints or signatures.

The NEC decision has left the CPP candidate without main competitors in the capital, Phnom Penh. The NEC also removed the name of the son of Eng Chhai Eang, vice president of the former opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) from the candidate list, Thach Setha said.

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 CNRP in 2012.

In November 2017, Cambodia’s Supreme Court dissolved the CNRP in a move that allowed the CPP to win all 125 seats in parliament in a July 2018 election.

Election authorities based their binding decision on evidence and hearings after finding irregularities on the candidate lists, while some candidates during the hearing asked the NEC to remove their names from the lists, said NEC spokesman Hang Puthea.

“Upon receiving the complaints, we held public hearings,” he said.

Sam Kuntheamy, executive director of the Neutral and Impartial Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (NICFEC), said the NEC failed to present evidence and witnesses during the hearings.

He also said the decision by the NEC — a theoretically independent agency that supervises the country’s elections, but is believed to be influenced by the CCP — to remove opposition candidates was an attempt to find weak points to prevent the Candlelight Party as the main threat to the CCP from participating in the elections.

“The party that has popularity draws attention,” he said. “I want [the NEC] to comply with the law.”

Meanwhile, Phnom Penh authorities arrested four Candlelight Party activists but later released three and sent one to Prey Sar Prison.

Yok Neang, former leader of the CNRP’s Women Movement who recently joined the Candlelight Party, was arrested Friday and sent to the jail, her son, Ouch Vannarith, told RFA.

She was speaking with other political opposition activists when police arrested them and has been charged with treason over a failed attempt by exiled CNRP leader Sam Rainsy in November 2019 to return to Cambodia to lead nonviolent protests against Hun Sen.

At least two other Candlelight Party activists are being detained in Pursat province.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Canada has agreed to give refuge to 11 family members of a Rohingya rights activist who was gunned down at a refugee camp in Bangladesh last September, officials in Dhaka and a human rights group said Friday.

Nasima Khatun, the widow of Muhib Ullah, their nine children and the husband of one of their daughters departed the South Asian country on a flight from Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka on Thursday night, human rights advocate Nur Khan Liton confirmed to BenarNews.

“They are scheduled to arrive in Canada by Saturday,” Liton said.

“They left with the aim of having a safe life.”

On Friday, Bangladesh foreign ministry official Miah Md. Mainul Kabir credited the Canadian government for accepting Ullah’s survivors.

“The government of Bangladesh gave more importance to the Canadian government’s interest in this regard than the application of Muhib Ullah’s family,” he told BenarNews.

“As a shelter-providing country, Canada has done everything needed,” Mainul Kabir said, adding that Canada was the only country offering to shelter the family.

Thursday’s flight was out of the ordinary, he said, because groups that large normally are sent to another country in phases.

‘Serious fear for their security’

In October, an immigration and refugee affairs analyst said it was not unusual for Bangladesh to send Rohingya to a third country in the past. More than 900 Rohingya were sent to countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden in 2009 and 2010, said Asif Munir, a former official of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

This transfer is different because Ullah’s family left the country over a “serious fear for their security,” said Liton, general secretary of Ain-O-Salish Kendra (ASK), a local human rights organization.

The IOM, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, and Canadian High Commission had arranged the family’s exit from Bangladesh, he said.

Gunmen killed Ullah, chairman of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH), in his office at the Kutupalong refugee camp in southeastern Cox’s Bazar district on Sept. 29, 2021. 

Last month, Bangladeshi police said four of 15 people arrested over alleged ties to the killing had confessed to their roles in it and that those in custody said they belonged to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Rohingya insurgent group.

“UNHCR does not comment on individual cases,” Mostafa Mohammad Sazzad Hossain, an official at the U.N. agency’s office in Dhaka, told BenarNews.

In addition, IOM and Canadian officials did not immediately respond to separate requests for comment.

Before leaving the country, the family asked Bangladesh officials to reopen the recently closed Myanmar curriculum school established by Ullah, Liton said.

About 1 million Rohingya, including 740,000 who fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state following a military crackdown in 2017, have settled in refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar, close to the border with Rakhine.

In his role as ARSPH chairman, Ullah had represented the stateless Rohingya community before the United Nations and at the White House in Washington, where he expressed concerns about his fellow refugees to then-President Donald Trump in 2019.

Two weeks after Ullah was killed, Bangladesh authorities cited security concerns when they moved his family to an undisclosed location. Police also moved the families of 10 other ARSPH leaders.

At the time, Md. Rashid Ullah, ARSPH spokesman and Ullah’s nephew, told BenarNews that those families wanted to leave Bangladesh over their own safety concerns.

Millions of dollars for Rohingya

Ullah’s family left Bangladesh days after American Ambassador Peter Haas announced on March 29 that the United States was providing U.S. $152 million (13 billion taka) in new humanitarian assistance for the Rohingya and their host communities in Bangladesh.

Haas made the announcement after his first visit to Cox’s Bazar earlier in the week, according to a news release from the U.S. Embassy.

“This brings the total we’ve provided since August 2017 to $1.7 billion (145.5 billion taka),” Haas said in the news release.

“Of this new funding, $125 million (10.7 billion taka) is for programs inside Bangladesh – for Rohingya refugees and affected Bangladeshi communities,” it said.

In Fiscal Year 2021 alone, the U.S. government reported spending nearly $302 million (25.9 billion taka) in support of humanitarian assistance programs for Rohingya sheltering in Bangladesh.

Also this week, UNHCR launched a 2022 Joint Response Plan to raise more than $881 million (75.7 billion taka) to assist Rohingya. The funding is to support more than 918,000 Rohingya and about 540,000 Bangladeshis in neighboring communities, a UNHCR press release said.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news service.

Russian and Chinese disinformation about Ukraine, which is ideologically linked to ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda on Taiwan, is breaking through into online discourse on the democratic island, a fact-checking organization based there has said.

According to Taiwan’s Information Operations Research Group (IORG), which seeks to “counter authoritarian expansion with scientific research and grassroots organization,” tens of millions of social media posts, articles, videos and comments have deluged the Chinese-language internet since Russian troops began massing on the Ukrainian border in November 2021.

Among the CCP narratives, which are often straight echoes of the Kremlin’s own, are the idea that the relationship between Russia and Ukraine is similar to that of an ex-husband and wife, that the war was made inevitable by NATO’s eastward expansions, and that the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion is responsible both for mass murder in Ukraine, and for violently supporting Hong Kong independence.

Far-right Ukrainians were spotted at the Hong Kong protest movement of 2019, which also won vocal support from ultra-conservative politicians in the U.S., and were outed on social media by protesters at the time, the majority of whom didn’t welcome their presence in Hong Kong.

Other Chinese-language, pro-Russian takes on the Russian invasion include the idea that Ukraine is to Russia what Texas is to the United States, that Ukraine has engaged in a “de-Russification” program that disregards the rights of Russians in the country, and the slogan “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow.”

These narratives have been recurring in both simplified Chinese from China and traditional Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong across Facebook, LINE and Weibo, and represent a large-scale information offensive, IORG codirector Yu Chih-hao told The Reporter.

One of the sources for the neo-Nazi claim was traced by IORG and RFA’s partner, The Reporter, to a Nov. 13 post in simplified Chinese posted to the Chinese International Facebook page. The post cited state media Russia Today (RT). A similar article appeared on the Russian news agency Sputnik, which has 11.62 million followers on China’s Weibo platform.

By Nov. 15, 2021, the nationalist Global Times was accusing the Ukrainian government of “flirting” with nationalist militants and fascist groups, with the narrative spreading like wildfire through content farms and Facebook pages in the month that followed.

Hong Kong, too

In Hong Kong, the CCP-backed Wen Wei Po took up the theme, reporting: “Ukrainian neo-Nazis have extended their black hand to other countries and regions, including participating in the [2019 protest movement] in Hong Kong two years ago,” claiming that they were working with “Hong Kong separatists.”

Calls for independence for Hong Kong surfaced relatively late during the protest movement, which began as a mass movement opposing extradition to mainland China, and broadened to include calls for fully democratic elections and official accountability.

They were later outlawed under a draconian national security law imposed on Hong Kong by the CCP from July 1, 2020.

There were also parallels between Russia’s claim on Ukraine, using neo-fascism as an excuse, and the CCP’s threat of military invasion of Taiwan, given the Taiwan authorities’ vocal support for the Hong Kong protests movement.

According to You, this oversimplification and and exaggeration of the power and influence of the Azov battalion is deliberate, because it is preparing the ground for a future invasion of Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the CCP, nor formed part of the People’s Republic of China.

The saying “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow,” is also all over the Taiwanese internet, and is designed to give an air of inevitability both to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to a putative Chinese invasion of Taiwan, IORG said.

Summer Chen, editor-in-chief of the Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC), said the war has once more highlighted Taiwan’s vulnerability to information warfare.

She cited a Sputnik News Agency report on Feb. 26 claiming that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had fled Kyiv, which appeared on a number of mainstream Taiwanese media sites. While the article was based on “unconfirmed reports,” the headlines about Zelenskyy’s “escape” from Kyiv gave the impression of legitimacy.

Chen said Taiwanese media are particularly vulnerable to manipulation on Ukraine, as they lack their own sources of information on the ground, and rely too easily on Russian media for news of the war.

Lu Sibin, a researcher at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said the same content is also widely circulating in Chinese state media.

“This is a phenomenon that hasn’t happened before,” Lu told RFA. “Not many people are aware of the extent to which Russian media content is being reused and disseminated in Chinese.”

“Everyone thinks it’s only there to improve the performance targets of Russian officials.”

Language facilitates fake news flow

A survey of Chinese reports on Ukraine published during the past four month, carried out by IORG and The Reporter, found at least 400 articles that directly cited Russian state media as the main source of information.

The majority covered Zelenskyy’s now-debunked “flight from Kyiv,” the erroneous claim that Russia now controls Ukrainian airspace, and disinformation that the U.S. secretly helped Ukraine develop biochemical weapons at a network of laboratories.

The ready availability of such content in Chinese makes it that much easier for these items of fake news to penetrate websites in democratic Taiwan, You said.

Senior journalists in Taiwan who spoke anonymously to The Reporter and RFA said they are typically expected to write up international news reports under extreme time pressure, and rely on quoting agency reports while attributing them to their source, with no time or resources to perform an independent fact-check on each one.

According to the Taiwan Journalists’ Association, only a handful of the island’s mainstream news media applied for international press accreditation to cover the war from Eastern Europe. Most other outlets rely purely on compiling copy from various wire services to provide their readers with news of the war.

“What Taiwan needs to do is to learn from the Ukrainians how to strengthen their ability to interpret information through daily reading and dialogue, and practise pushing back against disinformation operations,” You said.

“This is very important, if we are to strengthen democracy’s defenses,” he said.

Based on a collaborative report by RFA’s Mandarin Service and The Reporter, a Taiwan-based investigative magazine. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.