Day: April 5, 2022

Bangladesh authorities were holding more than 300 Rohingya in transit camps after police caught them working outside their refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, or while leaving their shelters for other purposes, officials said Tuesday.

Human Rights Watch meanwhile renewed its call for the government to ease movement restrictions on Rohingya, saying that barring refugees from leaving the camps for work or shutting down their shops within the camps only compounds their misery.

During raids in the Ukhia sub-district of Cox’s Bazar on Monday and Tuesday, police arrested 216 Rohingya refuges who had left the camps or were in the process of leaving them to go outside, Ahmed Sanjur Morhsed, officer-in-charge of the Ukhia police station, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

“The Rohingya people are not permitted to go out of the camps, but very often they get out of the camps [by] adopting different tactics,” he said.

“Acting on a tip off, we conducted raids on Monday and Tuesday at different bazaars and detained Rohingya. We caught many Rohingya while they were heading out for various places [outside the refugee camps],” he said, adding that the operation was a “special drive.”

He claimed that those arrested had admitted that they worked locally outside their refugee camps. After detaining them, police sent them to transit camps run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Police in neighboring Teknaf, another sub-district of Cox’s Bazar, similarly arrested more than 100 Rohingya during the special drive on Monday and Tuesday.

“The target of the special raids is to stop the Rohingya from getting out of the camps and to bar them from working in the local market,” Md. Hafizur Rahman, the officer-in-charge of the Teknaf sub-district police station, told BenarNews.

All those Rohingya detained have been sent to the UNHCR transit camps ahead of their return to their respective refugee camps, he said.

Separately, Ukhia police also arrested 48 Rohingya who were preparing to be trafficked to Malaysia illegally, by sea.

Job competition

Nur Amin, a resident of Kutupalong camp, was one of the Rohingya refugees rounded up by police on Tuesday from a bazar in Ukhia.

“We were warned not to go out for work. I was passing my time idle,” Amin said.

“So last month I took a job at a tea stall in return for 200 taka (U.S. $2.4) a day. The police arrested me from the stall,” he added.

UNHCR has yet to confirm that the arrested Rohingya were handed over to the transit camp.

“This is sort of incident would put stress on the Rohingya refugees. So the issue should be dealt with humanely,” Ziaur Karim, a Rohingya leader at Kutupalong camp, told BenarNews.

Local Bangladeshis have voiced concerns about Rohingya refugees taking up jobs in Cox’s Bazar.

“The local Bangladeshi workers have been losing their job opportunities while the Rohingya people have been offering menial work with cheap wages,” M. Gafur Uddin, chairman of Palongkhali union council, told BenarNews.

Meanwhile, in a statement issued Monday, Human Rights Watch pointed to how Bangladeshi authorities, in recent months, had intensified their restrictions on Rohingya refugees’ livelihoods, movement, and education.

“Bangladesh is understandably burdened with hosting nearly one million Rohingya refugees, but cutting them off from opportunities to work and study is only compounding their vulnerability and dependence on aid,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

“The Bangladesh government should formalize and expand employment opportunities to bolster the Rohingya’s self-reliance and enable them to support their families and communities.”

Local humanitarian groups are aware of the issues raised by New York-based HRW.

Nur Khan Liton, a human rights activist, told BenarNews: “I don’t think there’s an easy solution to many of these issues until Bangladesh officially recognizes these Rohingya as refugees.”

A prison in Myanmar’s Sagaing region is under lockdown Tuesday after authorities opened fire on an inmate protest over the weekend, killing one prisoner and injuring as many as nine others, according to sources.

A source close to the prison on the outskirts of Sagaing’s Monywa city who spoke on condition of anonymity told RFA’s Myanmar Service that junta troops have assumed control of security at the site and that all trials and family visits have been suspended indefinitely.

“The army is still guarding the prison with military vehicles,” the source said. “Lawyers who usually attend special court proceedings [on site] are still not allowed inside. As families cannot enter the prison [for inmate visits], all information has been cut off.”

Residents told RFA on Monday that gunfire was heard emanating from inside Monywa Prison the previous night and that authorities had opened fire on a group of inmates who were chanting anti-junta slogans in a rare display of opposition to military rule, killing one and injuring nine others.

One source with ties to inmates involved in the incident said they had been protesting harsh conditions at the prison, including the use of torture during interrogations.

“During the daily inspection, as inmates were out of their cells, someone started shouting, ‘Do we, the people, unite?’ Then, the others responded, saying, ‘Yes, we do!’ A big crowd gathered, and the protest began,” said the source, who also declined to be named.

The protest started at around 5 p.m. A half an hour later, two military trucks entered the compound, and the shooting began.

“According to our sources inside, we can confirm one person was shot dead and five were injured,” the source said.

“The one who died was shot in the chest. One of the injured is in serious condition after losing a lot of blood from his thigh. But as far as we know, they have not been taken for medical treatment and were forced to help each other in the prison.”

A member of the Monywa People’s Strike Steering Committee, whose leader Wai Moe Naing is among several political prisoners being held at the prison, said emergency vehicles were diverted from patrols of the city prior to the shooting, including military trucks and ambulances.

Other sources said that as many as nine inmates had been injured in the crackdown.

RFA was unable to independently verify the number of casualties. Attempts to contact Khin Shwe, the junta’s deputy director of the Department of Prisons, went unanswered Tuesday.

Bombing campaign

Following the unrest, several prodemocracy People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary groups issued a statement about the shooting and in retaliation carried out a joint bombing campaign against five junta targets in the city, according to Boh Dattha of the Monywa PDF.

“We asked residents not to leave their houses beginning around 5:30 p.m.,” he said. “In response to what happened in Monywa Prison, we, and three allied groups, carried out bombings against the military regime.”

The other groups involved in the bombings were Monywa Generation Tiger, Monywa Special Date Date Kyei, and “a third new group,” Boh Dattha said. He provided no further details about the targets of the bombings or whether they resulted in any casualties.

A resident of the city confirmed to RFA that multiple explosions were heard in Monywa after the shooting on Sunday night.

“We heard gunshots. Later, there were a lot of explosions in the city — in no less than 10 places,” the resident said.

The junta has yet to issue a statement about the shooting incident or the explosions in Monywa, but sources described an increased presence of police and military troops since the weekend and said authorities have been conducting checks throughout the city.

Since seizing power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup, junta troops have killed at least 1,730 civilians and detained more than 10,000 political prisoners, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Last month, authorities in Sagaing’s Kalay township killed seven inmates and injured a dozen others after using live ammunition to quell what junta officials described as a prison “riot.” Sources told RFA the deaths were likely the result of a violent crackdown on a protest over ill-treatment at the facility. 

According to the military, guards at the prison tried to disable the inmates by aiming below their waists. But residents noted that photos published by the junta on its online “Viber Group” platform to accompany its statement on the incident showed that at least some of those killed had been shot in the head and chest.

Authorities have responded to earlier protests over ill-treatment by political prisoners in Yangon’s Insein Prison and Mandalay’s Obo Prison by beating protesters, denying them medical treatment, and putting them in solitary confinement.  

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

A court in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City Tuesday sentenced a journalist to three years and six months in jail for criticizing how authorities handled a corruption case he uncovered as a reporter.

While working for the Ho Chi Minh City Law newspaper in 2018, Nguyen Hoai Nam submitted evidence of wrongdoing among employees of the Vietnam Internal Waterways Agency to the Investigation Department of the Ministry of Public Security.

Authorities used the evidence to charge and sentence three employees at the agency for “abusing their positions of power while performing public duties.”

But 14 others identified in evidence as having been involved in bribery went unpunished.

Nam wrote on Facebook that the authorities’ handling of the case was insufficient and that investigators were trying to “cover it up and allow the defendants to slip away.”

On April 2, 2021, Ho Chi Minh City Police arrested Nam on charges of “abusing freedom and democracy to infringe on the legal interests of the state, organizations and individuals,” a violation under Article 331 of Vietnam’s Penal Code.

He was found guilty in Tuesday’s trial. The court concluded that Nam’s posts also violated anti-defamation laws.

International human rights organizations have said Article 331 and other vaguely written and arbitrarily applied laws are tools for the government to silence dissenting voices and restrict freedom of speech.

In January 2022, civil society groups in Vietnam composed a joint petition, calling for the removal of three sections of the country’s criminal code, including 331, because they are often used arbitrarily to crack down on political dissidents.

Translated by An Nguyen. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Myanmar, which had no journalists behind bars at the end of 2020, has rocketed up in the rankings to rival China, the nearly perennial top jailer of journalists, and authoritarian states like Egypt and Turkey. Since the since the Feb. 1, 2021 military coup, the junta has arrested 135 journalists, according to a local press freedoms group, which says the arrests of media workers is still going on.

A young Uyghur-Australian chiropractor is running for a seat in Australia’s Parliament in part to address China’s threats to the continent and to Uyghurs in Xinjiang and elsewhere in the world.

Intezar Elham, 28, told RFA that she decided in October 2021 to run in the country’s May 2022 election after she was invited to become a candidate by the newly formed Drew Pavlou Democratic Alliance, a small party that promotes human rights in China.

On her website, Elham says she is the first and youngest Uyghur-Australian Muslim to run for parliament.

Elham said she wanted to serve as a voice for Uyghurs in Australian politics. She attended a demonstration on March 30 in front of the Chinese consulate in Adelaide in southern Australia.

In a speech there, Elham noted that Australians are now waking up to the reality that Uyghurs have faced for decades. She also described her determination to run for office because of what she said is the ruling Liberal Party’s failure to be tough on China.

“But even if we don’t win — our goal is bigger than that,” she said at the gathering. “My goal is to shift the national conversation and debate on major issues like the threat the Chinese government poses to this country and the world.”

Elham spoke of her admiration for late Australian Sen. Kimberley Kitching, an Australian Labor Party MP, lawyer and trade unionist who died of a heart attack on March 10.

Kitching was “a staunch advocate for Uyghurs cause in Parliament and around the world, standing up to China having founded the Inter-Parliamentary Group on China and was the main politician pushing for an Australian Magnitsky Act,” Elham said, referring to an act passed by
Australian Parliament in December 2021 to create a legal framework for sanctions.

“Kimberley’s legacy is a world where countries like this one stand up for those who need us, and for that she has the thanks of Uyghurs here and around the world,” she said.

Elham, who goes by the nickname Inty, says on her website that she never saw herself entering politics.

“But because my grandparents fled the brutality of the authoritarian Chinese government, I cannot sit by and watch the Chinese Communist Party corrupt Australia and our democracy,” she said.

“We can see this influence for example, in the imposing Chinese consulate in Joslin built without consultation with the community and spying on us,” she said, referring to the consulate, which opened in March 2021 in an area containing a large number of Uyghurs and near a Uyghur language school. “We must stand up.”

Dilzat, a Uyghur intellectual who lives in Adelaide and supports Elham’s campaign, said Uyghurs around the world are pleased that the aspiring politician who was born and raised in Australia is fighting on behalf of Uyghurs in China.

“What she made public to the media and the world there at the demonstration in front of the consulate was her political platform, what she’s fighting against, who is standing behind her,” he said. “This event was a formal opening ceremony of sorts.”

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

Authorities in North Korea are cracking down on citizens who privately sell gasoline as fuel shortages spread across the country, sources in the country told RFA.

Private ownership and sale of fuel reserves is technically illegal in North Korea but is tolerated under normal circumstances. Now that fuel is hard to come by the government is finding the private sellers and seizing their fuel.

The crackdown began at the beginning of the month, a resident of the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“This investigation is a move to confiscate privately owned fuel in the country as it faces a fuel shortage,” he said. “These days in North Korea, the economic sectors including transportation, agriculture and fisheries are experiencing a severe shortage of gasoline and diesel fuel.”

Demand is higher this time of year with the start of the farming season, but fuel reserves are lower than normal because of a two-year trade moratorium with China due to coronavirus concerns. Though the ban ended at the start of 2022, trade has not yet reached its former volume, so stocks have not yet been fully replenished.

Global prices are also high right now due to sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

“At the beginning of this year, the price of fuel at the gas station operated by a trading company was 9,800 won per liter of gasoline [U.S. $6.17/gallon], 7,500 for diesel ($4.72/gallon),” the source said.

“No one expected that gasoline would rise to 17,000 won per liter [$10.71/gallon] or 12,000 won per liter [$7.56/gallon] for diesel by the end of March,” he said.

Prices of gas sold by individuals also shot up but is still 1,000 won cheaper per liter ($0.60 cheaper per gallon) than the government price, according to the source.

“People began to prefer trading with the individual sellers. Also, everyone knows that the fuel sold at gas stations is of inferior quality to that of private individual sellers,” the source said.

Gas stations are known to mix gasoline with cheaper fuels, such as naphtha (lighter fluid), during times of shortage. Though it stretches the gas reserves further, the adulterated gas can damage vehicles or machines intended to run on gasoline.

It was this very practice that drove people in the northwestern province of North Pyongan to flock to the individual sellers, a resident there told RFA.

“As the individual traders started selling fuels more actively, authorities began to take preliminary measures to take away their business,” the second source said.

“Residents of the city of Sinuiju believe that the reason the price of fuel is soaring these days is because of the government’s series of missile test launches. … These continuous missile launches are preventing the smooth phase-in of fuel,” she said.

She said the government tried to put price controls on gas in the city on the Chinese border, but it still has risen to unbelievable highs. Despite its proximity to China, gasoline in Sinuiju costs $7.10 per gallon and diesel costs $4.26.

“Food and other necessities are skyrocketing right now as well,” she said. “Residents are very unhappy with the police department’s crackdown on … the private sellers.”

“In springtime gas is in high demand for farming, fishing and transportation, but the authorities’ crackdown is making it difficult to get fuel because the private sellers are hiding so they don’t get caught. It is causing a major disruption to our daily lives,” the second source said.

RFA reported last month that people were trying to cash in on the fuel shortage by buying fuel vouchers in one part of the country and selling them in other parts where gas was more expensive. Fuel vouchers, however, can only be redeemed at gas stations.

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