Day: May 17, 2022

North Korea’s border patrol soldiers have been among the first to receive shots of the Sinovac vaccine hastily procured from China as the isolated country struggles to contain a wave of COVID-19 infections, North Korean sources said.

The Korean Central News Agency reported that more than 1.2 million had fallen ill with an unspecified “fever” believed to be the highly contagious respiratory virus from the end of April until May 15. The announcement came only two days after North Korea first admitted that some of its citizens had COVID-19. Of the people who fell ill, more than 50 later died, the country said.

Ryu Yong Chol, an official of the National Emergency Quarantine Command Center, said on Korean Central TV that there were 42 confirmed cases of the virus in Pyongyang and a total of 168 confirmed cases in seven cities and provinces.

Leader Kim Jong Un has mobilized military forces to distribute vaccines in the nation of nearly 26 million people, many of whom have weakened immune systems from chronic malnourishment and a lack medical supplies.

“The National Emergency Quarantine Command started administering Chinese vaccines to soldiers of the 31st Border Security Bureau brigade,” a military official from North Pyongan province told RFA on Sunday.

Though vaccinations also have been given to Border Security Bureau and armistice units stationed in North Pyongan and Chagang provinces, which border China, the vaccination rate remains less than 1%, said the source, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

News of COVID-19 infections surfaced after soldiers who had participated in a military parade on April 25 reported high fevers and respiratory symptoms and later tested positive for the disease.

As of the beginning of May, the coronavirus has been spreading among members of the Border Security Bureau and soldiers stationed along the entire border region, the source said.

Because of this, a delegation of the National Emergency Quarantine Command was urgently dispatched to China to obtain doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, he said.

“The delegation of the National Emergency Quarantine Command went to China, contacted the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac with the cooperation of the trade representative in China, and requested support for the COVID-19 vaccine,” the source told RFA.

Sinovac provided that vaccines for free, he said, adding that it was likely that Chinese authorities ordered the company to give the doses to North Korea.

“The vaccines from China were immediately brought in by sea and the Border Security Bureau patrols and soldiers stationed on the border were vaccinated first,” the source said. “It’s a state secret how many people can be vaccinated with Chinese vaccines, which have just now come in for the first time.”

‘Death toll will increase’

A trader from North Pyongan province told RFA on Sunday that the National Emergency Quarantine Command initially announced that there were 296,180 of “fever” cases nationwide as of May 14.

“In fact, the published figures show fever and respiratory symptoms are being reported at rates more than a few times greater than that,” he said.

North Korean officials requested COVID-19 vaccines manufactured by Sinovac because they can be stored and transported at normal refrigeration temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36-46 degrees Fahrenheit), the trader said.

“If sufficient amount of vaccines are imported in the future, Pyongyang citizens and all military personnel across the country will be vaccinated,” he said.

North Korean citizens, however, are going untreated due to lack of access to medicines, including those to treat common cold symptoms, a medical source and a resident of North Pyongan province told RFA.

As COVID-19 cases soar, hospitals are quickly becoming overrun, said the medical source, who declined to be named in order to speak freely.

“It looks like that the death toll will increase because they will not receive any medicine to alleviate their symptoms,” she said on Sunday.

Cold and fever medicines were not available after the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the country’s ruling party, began operating the emergency quarantine system at a maximum level, she said.

The medical professional warned that people who are able to get their hand on cold medicines must be careful of fake product that could harm them.

“Sometimes, pharmacists and drug dealers sell cold medicines, but most of them are fake,” she told RFA. “In fact, a patient with a high fever from Sunam district in Chongjin [North Hamgyong province] died of side effects after taking a cold medicine manufactured by the Pyongyang pharmaceutical factory.”

But a resident in North Pyongan province told RFA that all cold medicines manufactured in neighboring China are gone, as are the counterfeit drugs made by state-owned pharmaceutical companies.

“As the number of coronavirus patients rapidly increases these days, fever and cold medicines have become unavailable,” said the resident, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

Meanwhile, the cost of herbal medicines unrelated to coronavirus treatment has skyrocketed, with the price of uhwang-cheongsimhwan, a pill made from about 30 herbs used to treat various symptoms such as numb limbs, apoplexy and epilepsy in traditional Korean medicine, more than doubling to 25,000 North Korean won (U.S. $4.16) from 10,000 won (U.S. $1.66).

The price of uhwang-angunghwan, another herbal medicine, has risen to 35,000 won from 15,000 won, and the price of sochewan is up to 8,000 won, the source added.

Neighborhood monitors have stepped in to try to prevent the number of infections from growing by instructing residents to perform basic hygiene.

“The head of the neighborhood watch unit visits each household in the morning and evening, emphasizing that washing hands and gargling with salt water is an effective way to prevent coronavirus,” said the resident of North Pyongan province.

Translated by Claire Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

A Uyghur lecturer from a university in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region has been sentenced to prison for “disregarding the national language,” by failing to teach in Chinese, a Uyghur source in the town of Ghulja and local officials told RFA.

Dilmurat Awut, 65, was a senior literature teacher at Ili Pedagogical University in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) and was deputy Chinese Communist Party secretary of the school’s Marxism Institute, said a source in the city who has knowledge of the situation.

Awut is among a group of more than 20 educators at the university that an earlier RFA report said have been detained. Not all of the names of the educators have been publicly released.

Awut held administrative positions in the school’s institutes of political education and philology until his abduction in 2017. He was well respected but at times clashed with the Chinese administrators at the school, said the source, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

When government authorities banned of the usage of Uyghur language at the university, Awut sometimes continued to use his native tongue whenever his students had difficulty mastering the course material when presented in Mandarin Chinese, the official language.

In 2017, Awut was investigated on allegations that he taught in the Uyghur language and was sentenced to prison for the transgression, local education officials said.

When RFA called the university to inquire about the “crimes” of teachers there, including Awut, an official in the Education Department said he could not provide information because it was a “state secret.”

A disciplinary officer at the university, however, confirmed that Awut was among the teachers who had been detained.

The officer did not know the length of Awut’s sentence.

“I heard that Dilmurat was abducted; that’s what I know,” he said. “The rest I don’t have the authority to know. I don’t know how many years [he was sentenced to]. I don’t know this information since I’m not a member of law enforcement.”

Behtiyar Nasir, a student of Awut’s in the 1980s who now lives in the Netherlands, recalled his former teacher as being an outspoken, cheerful and active person.

“Dilmurat taught us philology,” said Behtiyar Nasir, who is now the deputy inspector general of the World Uyghur Congress. “He was medium height and white faced. A friendly teacher.”

A former Ghulja educator named Yasinjan, who now lives in Turkey, recalled that Awut had been questioned several times on suspicion of “opposing the national language.”

“Dilmurat Awut was investigated a few times by the Chinese authorities for not speaking in Chinese in school,” he said.

One of Awut’s former students who now lives overseas told RFA that the university lecturer has two children, and that his son, Dilyar, is living in the United States. RFA has been unable to locate the son.

Before 2017, Chinese authorities sought to arrest Uyghurs in Xinjiang who were known to have anti-China sentiments, the source in Ghulja said.

Since then, however, officials have abducted Uyghurs simply considered “likely to resist,” including the university teachers, because of their social influence and personal character even if they have not actively shown resistance to the China’s repressive policies, the source said.

Some of the detainees ended up in prison, while others were interned in China’s vast network of “re-education” camps in Xinjiang, he said.

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

Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen blasted a man who threw a shoe at him last week in Washington, saying that if the U.S. fails to condemn him, then similar attacks against his political opponents in Cambodia would be justified.

“If the U.S considers shoe-throwing as freedom of expression, it is encouraging [the practice] in other countries,” said Hun Sen, a strongman who has ruled Cambodia since 1985 and who allows little opposition or criticism.

“Now I am concerned for the safety of the opposition party leaders,” he said.

“Here we can also throw shoes at opposition party leaders’ heads in Cambodia,” he said.

As the 69-year-old Hun Sen prepared to meet supporters in Washington last week on the eve of a summit of U.S.-Southeast Asian leaders, a retired Cambodian soldier, Ouk Touch, flung a shoe that whizzed by his head and missed him. The incident at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel on May 11 was caught on video and went viral on social media.

Ouk Touch, 72, a resident of California, last week told RFA that he had been planning the attack for quite some time and he hoped that Hun Sen would be humiliated.  He said family members died in a 1997 grenade attack on rival politicians in Hun Sen’s governing coalition that has been widely attributed to the prime minister’s supporters.

He was able to talk his way into the group of Hun Sen supporters outside the hotel. He said Hun Sen’s bodyguards jumped toward him and attempted to beat him, but U.S. security officials intervened and urged him to leave the scene.

Upon his return to Cambodia from the U.S. summit with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Hun Sen lashed out at Ouk Touch, saying the attack was premeditated.

He said he would not be sending a diplomatic note to the U.S. over the issue, but promised that Ouk Touch would be prosecuted if he were to return to Cambodia.

In February opposition activist Sam Sokha was released after serving a four-year prison term for throwing her shoe at a poster of Hun Sen and sharing it on social media. She is among scores of activist jailed in a sweeping crackdown on opponents of Hun Sen, the media and civic society groups that begin in 2017.

Sam Sokha told RFA’s Khmer Service that Hun Sen “should be more patient and should not imprison people without finding out the reason” they protest, she said.

“Pertaining to my case, [he] should have asked me why I did it. He should have tried to find out what the cause of the dissatisfaction is.”

Throwing a shoe is nothing compared to the suffering of innocent people under Hun Sen’s rule, Khmer-American human rights lawyer Seng Theary told RFA’s Khmer Service.

“It is an individual’s frustration, but the incident represents many people’s feelings,” she said.

Exiled political analyst Kim Sok told RFA he is saddened that Hun Sen is taking the incident seriously and has allowed it to incite hatred among people and dilute Cambodia’s diplomatic relationships.

The analyst, who took asylum in Finland to avoid arrest in the 2017 crackdown, said he feared concern Hun Sen’s supporters would start attacking opposition leaders. Many opposition figures are in hiding, exile or prison.

“Any comment from Hun Sen should not be taken for granted. It is incitement. It will happen because Hun Sen is an influential figure managing all issues in the country,” he said.

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

Residents of a Tibetan village in northwestern China’s Qinghai province are being forced from their homes to make way for a government-ordered hydropower station, with monks living in a nearby monastery also told to leave, Tibetan sources say.

Monks at the Atsok Gon Dechen Choekhor Ling monastery in Tsolho (in Chinese, Hainan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture have petitioned Chinese officials to rescind the order, a Tibetan resident of the area told RFA this week.

“But the Chinese local supervisor and other authorities have been visiting the Tibetans and warning them to relocate regardless of the cost,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Monks from the monastery are also being summoned for meetings and ordered to agree to relocation,” the source added.

Construction of the power plant was authorized by the Chinese government, with supervision of the work assigned to a company called Machu after an investigation into the project’s viability concluded in December 2021, RFA’s source said.

Dechen Choekhor Ling monastery was founded in 1889 and is currently home to 157 monks, with monks under the age of 18 forbidden since 2021 by government order to live or study there, sources say.

Frequent standoffs

Chinese development projects in Tibetan areas have led to frequent standoffs with Tibetans who accuse Chinese firms and local officials of improperly seizing land and disrupting the lives of local people.

Many projects result in violent suppression and the detention of project organizers, with intense pressure put on local populations to comply with government wishes.

The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, an NGO based in Dharamsala, India, has reported that China’s development drives in Tibet have pulled the region closer to economic and cultural integration with Beijing.

Projects have failed to benefit the Tibetans themselves, however, with rural Tibetans often moved from traditional grazing lands and into urban areas where the best jobs are held by Han Chinese.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

In April 2020, independent Chinese author Murong Xuecun traveled to Wuhan under lockdown, quietly interviewing people from the front line of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. In his newly published work, “Deadly Quiet City,” his conversations with a number of people from an exhausted doctor in a small hospital to an unlicensed motorcycle taxi-driver, to a citizen journalist, are recorded for the world to read. He spoke to Jane Tang of RFA’s Mandarin Service about the experience, and about the ongoing lockdown in Shanghai:

RFA: During the lockdown in Shanghai, we have seen a lot of grass-roots creativity, including music, videos, and texts, emerge from the experience. How does this output compare with what you saw during Wuhan’s lockdown?

Murong Xuecun: First, this content deals more with the lives of the middle class: exhibitions, fashion shows … most of the people and things mentioned are part of the middle-class community. It makes me even more worried about the lives of people lower down the social ladder in Shanghai; how are the migrant workers managing? What about the elderly who live alone? That’s not so visible.

Second, there were a few citizen journalists working out of Wuhan, as well as a lot of people shooting and gathering footage, and several documentaries were released afterwards. But I don’t think that’s been possible in Shanghai, because very few people in the city have been allowed to go out, apart from white people, the police and volunteers. But back when I arrived in Wuhan, and when [now-jailed citizen journalist] Zhang Zhan got there on Feb. 1, there was still some freedom of movement. We were able to move around freely, conduct interviews and shoot footage. This time in Shanghai, pretty much everybody has been confined to their home.

Third, a lot of content is presented in a mocking way. This sarcasm is actually something of a last resort. In fact, many of this content, these videos and posts are asking the same question: how did Shanghai get to this state today, which is so different from Wuhan at the beginning [of the pandemic]. At that time, there was more grief and anger in Wuhan, and there was a layer of confusion and shock in Shanghai. How did Shanghai get here?

RFA: So you think that Shanghai has stricter restrictions on shooting and creative work this time around? Have you seen any non-fiction works along the lines of Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang?

Murong Xuecun: There are a lot of parodies. These don’t take long to do. To actually write something like Wuhan Diary requires a long period of observation, material gathering and then writing. The current situation doesn’t allow for a process like that, and anyway, I think it would be deleted by the next day.

There are actually more writers in Shanghai, but so far I haven’t seen any works like Fang Fang’s diary. This tells us that Shanghai’s lockdown restrictions, controls, and suppression  [of public speech] are much stricter than Wuhan’s were. Let me give you an example. When Wuhan needed to transport patients and their close contacts [to isolation facilities], it relied on volunteers. In Shanghai, the police are doing it.

When Wuhan was locked down on Jan. 23, 2020, we still didn’t have the QR code. But by the time Shanghai locked down, we were living in a world governed by them. Everyone is now controlled by big data, and everyone’s whereabouts are available at a glance. Also, the shortage of supplies in Shanghai is far worse than it was in Wuhan back then. I witnessed all kinds of misery back then in Wuhan, but the levels of misery and cruelty in Shanghai have been far greater than in the Wuhan lockdown of 2020.

RFA: The material for your book Deadly Quiet City came from first-hand interviews in Wuhan. How did you get into the city? Many citizen journalists ran into trouble trying to get in. How did your interviews and writing go?

Murong Xuecun: I arrived on April 6, 2020, they lifted the lockdown on the 8th, and I left on May 7. I had been there a month when the secret police called me and said they knew my whereabouts. I had already interviewed a lot of people by then, and I was afraid that that work would be lost, so I left … soon after they called me.

RFA: So did you go back to Beijing to write the book?

Murong Xuecun: I didn’t dare to go back to Beijing, because I was one of those old ‘tea drinkers’ who was often under surveillance by the secret police, or called to ‘drink tea’ or summoned for interrogation. So I holed up in Mount Emei and finished writing the book there. It was very exciting, that time. I would send each chapter to a friend of mine overseas as soon as I finished it, so he could back it up for me, then I’d delete it from my hard drive.

RFA: Were the locals willing to talk to you during your visit to Wuhan?

Murong Xuecun: They fell into two types: regular citizens were very willing to be interviewed; and community officials, doctors and nurses, who were extremely reluctant. For example, I called one residential community official several times, and he just told me straight that they weren’t allowed to give interviews. It was the same with the doctors. One doctor from Tongji Hospital hesitated for several days, then finally told me, sorry, friend, but it’s really not a good time, so we left it. I could feel that he felt a strong need to tell me about his experiences and everything he knew, but he could also have been under a lot of [political] pressure [to keep quiet].

I said: “Well, I can understand where you’re coming from, and hopefully one day you can tell me about your experiences.”

“He sighed softly and said: “It’s a shame. I hope too.”

These conversations told me that all of these officials, doctors and nurses were under a very strict ban and weren’t allowed to talk to anyone.

RFA: What impact did you observe from 70 days of lockdown in Wuhan?

Murong Xuecun: I found that many people had one thing in common. Whenever they needed to talk about the coronavirus or COVID-19, they would avoid naming it directly, and just refer to it as “this disease,” or “this thing” instead. I hardly heard them say the word coronavirus. I think it could be some aspect of post-traumatic stress.

RFA: A kind of psychological trauma after being collectively locked at home for more than two months?

Murong Xuecun: Yes. I joined several group chats of local people in Wuhan. When the lockdown was first lifted, I noticed a lady in the group said she kept crying every now and then, and she was not given to crying. Others in the group said the same thing, that they cried way more easily now, and would suddenly start weeping from the pain at random times and in random places.

As I was walking around Wuhan on April 7, I was watching as some young people were allowed to go out. Everyone wore masks. I watching those young people walking by and it suddenly hit me that almost nobody had a smile on their face. Everyone’s expression was glum. It made a huge impression on me at the time.

RFA: What was the hardest thing about lockdown for the residents of Wuhan?

Murong Xuecun: The shortage of food and supplies was the worst thing, and in particular, a shortage of medicines. I interviewed a doctor, the only one willing to speak, anonymously. His hospital ran out of every single medicine during the most stressful period in February. There were only 40 masks left in the hospital, and there was a serious shortage of thermometers. Zhang Zhan was in Wuhan too, and was locked down in an older persons’ residential community. She found that the residents there were very poor, and that some of the elderly didn’t know how to use smartphones, so they could only wait for community volunteers to distribute supplies. The shortages were really serious in the later stages.

The other thing was the psychological pressure, locking people up for weeks on end. Wuhan had it slightly easier. Even when the lockdown was at its strictest, people were still allowed to walk around their residential compounds. But in Shanghai, the majority weren’t allowed to leave their homes. That was like solitary confinement for a lot of people, which is torture. So the mental health issues caused by the Shanghai lockdown have been far more serious.

RFA: Two years after the closure of Wuhan, do you think Shanghai has learned anything?

Murong Xuecun: I don’t think so. Things have just gotten worse. The communist government never imagined how complex and difficult it would be to feed a mega-city like Shanghai. A lot of people must have starved to death at home. On an ordinary day in Shanghai, there would normally be millions of people engaged in catering and the supply of food. There was no way they were going to manage to accomplish this by locking all of these people up and relying on a few hundred thousand disease control volunteers, police or community workers to distribute food.

I don’t think the government has learned much at all from Wuhan two years ago or Shanghai today, or possibly won’t even from Beijing in future.

All they’ve learned is how better to wield social control, to control people, and they’ve gotten crueler and crueler.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

A Vietnamese blogger held for three years in a mental hospital while awaiting trial for criticizing Vietnam’s one-party communist state has been sent back to his former detention center on the orders of the Hanoi Police Investigation Agency, RFA has learned.

Le Anh Hung, a member of the online Brotherhood of Democracy advocacy group, was returned to the agency’s Detention Center No. 1 on May 10 following a decision made the day before by police investigators, his mother Tran Thi Nem told RFA in a recent interview.

His trial will now be held within a few months, Nem said.

Hung, who had logged for Voice of America, was arrested on July 5, 2018 on a charge of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state” under Article 331 of Vietnam’s criminal code. If convicted at trial, he could serve up to seven years in prison.

He was transferred in April 2019 for “observation and treatment” from jail to Hanoi’s National Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, where he was beaten and forcibly injected with psychiatric drugs, including a powerful sedative that left him unconscious, to treat his supposed mental illness, sources told RFA in earlier reports.

While held in hospital, Hung was confined with 15 female patients, journalist Huynh Ngoc Chenh—the husband of prisoner of conscience Nguyen Thuy Hanh, also held in the Institute—told RFA following a May 6 meeting with his wife. However, security guards and hospital staff had prevented Hanh and Hung from speaking with each other, Chenh said.

Held in cells all day

Meanwhile, political prisoners held at the Gia Trung Detention Center in Dak Lak, a province in Vietnam’s central highlands, are being kept in their cells all day, with only an hour allowed outside for meals, for refusing forced-labor assignments, prisoners’ relatives said.

Prisoners convicted of political crimes have been singled out for harsh treatment at the center, said Le Khanh Duy—the former husband of prisoner of conscience Huynh Thuc Vy—citing a phone call made by Huynh to family members on May 16.

“Vy told me that political prisoners at the detention center are being persecuted,” Le Khanh Duy told RFA this week. “They are locked up in their cells all day for refusing to go to work, and are allowed outside for only one hour each day to get their meals.”

Vy, who is serving a 33-month jail term for “offending the national flag” under Article 276 of Vietnam’s criminal code, also reported being harassed by common prisoners suspected of acting under orders to make political prisoners’ lives “more difficult,” Duy said.

Other political prisoners held at Gia Trung include Nguyen Trung Ton, a member of the Brotherhood for Democracy now serving a 12-year jail sentence, and Luu Van Vinh, a member of the Vietnam National Self-Determination Coalition, now serving a 15-year term.

Phan Van Thu, the leader of a religious group called Council for the Laws and Public Affairs of Bia Son, named for a mountain in coastal Vietnam’s Phu Yen province, is also serving a life sentence at the center.

Speaking to RFA, Luu Van Vinh’s wife Le Thi Thap said her husband had previously been allowed to leave his cell twice a day, but now was under heavier restrictions.

“Vinh and some other inmates don’t go out to work, and therefore had to stay in their cells while others work outside, but they were allowed to go out for a while at noon and then later in the afternoon,” Thap said.

“But I’ve heard that things have gotten worse since last month, so now I want to visit my husband and ask him about this in person,” she said.

‘No forced labor’

The use of forced labor in Vietnamese prisons has been strongly criticized by human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

In August 2020, the Vietnam Times Magazine, a publication of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO) published an article titled “There is no forced labor in Vietnam.”

Making arrangements for prisoners to work is “a demonstration of the humanity in the policy of the Vietnamese Government and Communist Party,” wrote the article’s author Nguyen Van Dieu, an official of the Ministry of Public Security’s Department of Detention Center Management.

Calls seeking comment from the Gia Trung Detention Center rang unanswered this week.

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.