Month: June 2022

Five days of intense clashes between Myanmar’s military and joint anti-junta forces near the Thai border in Kayin state have left more than a dozen coalition fighters dead and several wounded on both sides of the conflict, sources in the region said Thursday.

The fighting began on June 26 when prodemocracy People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitaries and fighters with the ethnic Karen National Defense Army/Karen National Liberation Army (KNDO/KNLA) launched a joint attack on a military outpost near Myawaddy township’s Ukrithta village, according to a report by the pro-military Myawaddy newspaper.

The attack prompted a military retaliation that included artillery fire and airstrikes, the report said. More junta troops are being deployed to the area, the report said.

Sources on the battlefield confirmed to RFA Burmese on Thursday that a joint force of ethnic Karen and PDF units led by Cmdr. Saw Win Myint of the KNDO Special Commando Battalion are fighting to take control of the Ukrithta camp held by junta troops.

Battalion sources told RFA that at least 13 members of the coalition forces have been killed in the five days of heavy fighting, which includes clashes in the nearby villages of Wawlay and Myaing.

KNDO officer Boh Salone said that Myanmar’s air force had been pounding opposition positions with strikes since June 26, including as recently as Thursday morning.

“There are injuries on both sides but there are many on their side,” he said.

“They have been attacking us with jet fighters for the past four days. All throughout the day. When they came, they flew over the area four or five times and fired at us. The jets came nine or 10 times a day. They have already come 10 times today.”

The military has not released any information on the number of casualties from the fighting and repeated calls by RFA seeking comment from the junta’s deputy minister of information, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, went unanswered on Thursday.

KNDO chief, Gen. Saw Nedar Mya, told RFA that the junta is “desperately fighting to prevent the camp from falling” because of its strategic importance, although he did not elaborate on its significance to the military. The fighting is occurring near the Thai border south of Myawaddy, in an area controlled by the ethnic Karen National Union’s (KNU) Brigade-6.

Fighter jets scrambled

Thailand’s air force scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to patrol the border area on Thursday after its radar captured Myanmar air force jets allegedly violating Thai airspace briefly during their aerial assault against the Karen rebels, according to a report by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news outlet.

“At 11.16 hours, air force units found unidentified aircrafts violating territory at Pob Phra district, Tak province, to attack the minority along the border and later disappeared from radar screen,” the Thai air force said in a statement, adding that helicopters were also detected in the area, although they did not appear to enter Thai airspace.

“Therefore, the air force scrambled two F-16s to promptly perform combat patrol mission along Pob Phra border area and directed the air force envoy to Yangon to warn Myanmar’s related agencies to avoid reoccurrence.”

BBC Thai showed photos of a Russian-made MiG-29 jet flying over Thai soil and reported that it fired rockets into Myanmar’s Kayin state.

The alleged incursion occurred a day after junta chief, Snr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, hosted a delegation headed by Lt. Gen. Apichet Suesat of the Royal Thai army in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw for the 34^th meeting of the Thailand-Myanmar Regional Border Committee, according to a report by the official Global New Light of Myanmar.

The report said that the two sides had discussed ways to strengthen cooperation between defense forces and anti-terrorism measures to improve stability in the border area.

Zay Thu Aung, a former Myanmar air force captain who defected to join the anti-junta Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), said videos of Thursday’s airstrike showed that the junta is using Russian-made MiG-29s to raid the area.

“The videos show a MiG-29 attack, with the fighter gaining altitude following a bombing dive,” he said. “MiG-29s are very good as all-weather long-range attack fighters. They must have flown from [Yangon’s] Hmawbi Airbase.”

Residents fleeing

Residents of Kayin’s Myawaddy township told RFA that Thursday’s clashes had been the worst of the five days of fighting.

“There were a lot of airstrikes today. Quite a lot. We also heard today that there was fighting in [nearby] Lay Kay Kaw [township] last night. We heard the military fired more than 20 artillery shells,” one resident said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“At present, people from Wawlay, Myaing and Ukrithta are fleeing.”

Sources in the area said that the number of people who have been forced to seek refuge is unclear. Several airstrikes have been conducted in the area since anti-junta coalition forces seized a police station in Wawlay on May 18, detaining three policemen including the station’s commander, and freeing several PDF fighters, they added.

In December 2021, about 200 fully armed junta troops arrested several CDM staff and PDF members sheltering in a KNU-controlled area in Lay Kay Kaw. Several days of fighting ensued between junta forces and the KNU, causing more than 70,000 residents to flee the area.

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

An appellate court in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh upheld a lower court’s decision not to return the passport of Yeang Sothearin, citing an ongoing investigation into the former RFA editor and reporter, he told RFA.

 Yeang Sothearin, who also worked as a news anchor for RFA’s Khmer Service, was taken into custody in November 2017 along with Uon Chhin, who was an RFA photographer and videographer.

They were charged with “illegally collecting information for a foreign source” after RFA closed its bureau in the capital in September that year amid a government crackdown on independent media. They have since been charged with additional crimes.

If convicted of the first charge, they could face a jail term of between seven and 15 years. They remain out on bail but in legal limbo after a series of appeals have been rejected by courts.

Yeang Sothearin said the court’s decision would prevent him from visiting his ailing father, an ethnic Cambodian living in southern Vietnam, or participating in NGO activities outside of Cambodia.

“I told the court that it has been five years, it is a long time and I don’t know when it will end,” Yeang Sothearin told RFA’s Khmer Service.

“There is no indication from the judge of when the investigation will end and they won’t tell me when my passport will be returned, so how can I live? I will use my rights to demand [my passport],” he said.

He said that he will appeal again by taking the case to Cambodia’s Supreme Court.

The decision not to return the passport violates Yeang Sothearin’s rights because the case has been delayed for many years and has not yet reached conclusion, Ny Sokha, president of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (Adhoc) told RFA.

He said the delay affects both Yeang Sothearin and Uon Chhin. 

“We don’t see any indication that they want to avoid the court or flee overseas. They have houses here and they want the freedom to travel to make a living. I don’t see any reason to restrict their freedom,” he said.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong

North Korea’s military has designated the end of June and most of July as “Anti-U.S. Joint Struggle Month” as a means to foment greater hostility toward the U.S. in retaliation for the Biden administration’s lack of interest in negotiating with Pyongyang, military sources told RFA.

There were two summits between the two countries during Donald Trump’s presidency: 2018 in Singapore and 2019 in Hanoi. But ultimately the U.S. and North Korea were unable to work out a deal on sanctions relief in exchange for denuclearization. The shift in policy of the new administration makes a return to negotiations less likely, so North Korea is bringing back a more hostile style of rhetoric toward the U.S.

The month-long education project started on June 25, the anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, and will last until July 27, the anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended hostilities in the conflict.

Over the course of the month, military personnel must learn why the U.S. is North Korea’s main enemy, a military related source in the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“The General Political Bureau of the People’s Army… created new anti-U.S. education materials that say the U.S. is our main enemy and sent it down to all the subordinate units. From the 25^th, all units… have been attending anti-U.S. classes during their mental education hours, which are held each day for about an hour,” the source said.

“Previous materials made since the time of the 2018 North Korea-U.S. [Singapore] Summit have used the [softer] term ‘imperialism’ to describe the U.S, in order to not provoke them,” said the source.

The new materials have been changed to use harsher language.

“They now call the U.S. an ‘imperialist aggressor.’ The content is intended to strengthen anti-U.S. sentiment and says things like, ‘The aggressive nature of the United States never changes. They are our enemy who must not live under the same sky with us,’” said the source.

“The General Political Bureau has also instructed the political departments of each unit to visit their respective education center during Anti-U.S. Joint Struggle month. The political department should organize officers and soldiers to attend classes there, and they must also punish those who neglect to visit with their units. So the military officials are nervous,” the source said.          

Every province, city and county in North Korea has set up education centers that collect and display anti-U.S., anti-South Korean and anti-Japanese materials, according to the source.

“Since 2018, when we were trying to improve relations with the U.S., anti-U.S. education for military personnel was suspended, but this time, we will bring it back in time for the anniversary of the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War,” the source said, using the North Korean term for the day the armistice was signed.

The source said the soldiers are not happy with the government’s flip-flopping on whether the U.S. is the number one enemy or not.

“They say, ‘They removed the hostile phrases to improve relations with the U.S., and now they are bringing them back. We don’t know how to play along.’”

The new materials say that peaceful coexistence with the U.S. is not possible, a military source in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“It says that coexistence is just an illusion and equivalent to death, and we must be armed with a high sense of antagonism and ideological determination to fight against the U.S.,” the second source said.

“But the officers and soldiers come out of their mental education classes expressionless and with indifference,” said the second source.

“The General Political Bureau is also telling all units to post up new propaganda signs bearing the slogan, ‘Destroy all U.S. imperialist aggressors, the absolute enemies of the Korean people’ in their barracks. By posting anti-U.S. slogans, which previously we only attached to combat equipment, they will more intently concentrate on hostility toward the United States.”

The sources both said that they interpreted the renewed hostility toward the U.S. as the government expressing its dissatisfaction with a shift in Washington’s stance on North Korea to a more hardline position since the beginning of the Biden administration.

Though fighting in the Korean War ended with the signing of the armistice on July 27, 1953, North and South Korea are still technically at war.

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday ahead of the 25th anniversary of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule, saying the city had “risen from the ashes” under a draconian national security law that left former opposition lawmakers under house arrest and journalists shut out of official events.

“Hong Kong has withstood challenge after challenge and won many a battle in recent years,” Xi told a crowd who turned out to greet him waving national flags and cheering, at the start of what observers said will be a heavily stage-managed trip subject to citywide security measures.

“Hong Kong has lived through turbulent times and risen again from the ashes to renewed vigor,” said Xi, who arrived by special train with first lady Peng Liyuan on Thursday.

As he spoke, former pro-democracy lawmaker Avery Ng tweeted that he had been placed under house arrest, likely for the duration of Xi’s visit, a form of treatment usually meted out by state security police to mainland Chinese dissidents during important political events.

“I am now in prison,” Ng wrote, adding “#ifyouknowyouknow” and a salty Cantonese epithet referring to somebody’s mother.

Ng took to social media to livestream about the anniversary instead, telling followers: “This is the first time this has happened … I’m sitting here at home with nothing to do … I can’t go out.”

Organizers of the city’s once-traditional July 1 protest march said it wouldn’t be going ahead, citing conversations with the national security police, who are spearheading a citywide crackdown on peaceful political opposition and public criticism of the authorities.

“Today, some volunteers and friends from the League of Social Democrats were spoken to by the national security police,” LSD chairwoman Chan Po-ying said in a statement earlier this week.

“We have assessed the situation, and there will be no demonstration on July 1,” Chan wrote on June 28. “We hope you can forgive us. We are in a difficult situation.”

Roadblocks  and station closures

Xi’s visit has also prompted a huge deployment of police at roadblocks near the 25th anniversary ceremony venue.

People and vehicles heading to the area around the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre will be stopped and checked, while footbridges and flyovers along the route of Xi’s motorcade will be closed, police told journalists.

The MTR subway station serving the venue was closed on Thursday, and will reopen after the ceremony on Friday, while a no-fly zone has been set up over the whole the city’s iconic Victoria Harbour, including for drones.

Xi’s itinerary includes visits to the Hong Kong Science Park, dinner with outgoing chief executive Carrie Lam and top officials, and meeting carefully selected “people from all walks of life” in Wanchai.

The Chinese leader, Hong Kong’s top officials and Xi’s entourage will remain in a bubble throughout, to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission. Xi, Peng and their entourage wore masks on arriving at the West Kowloon high-speed rail terminus.

Exiled former pro-democracy lawmaker Ted Hui said the reality of life in Hong Kong is very far from Xi’s claims, and that Beijing’s promise to allow Hong Kongers to run the city under “one country, two systems,” had come to nothing.

“Xi Jinping called ‘one country, two systems’ a good system … but the people of Hong Kong feel very differently,” Hui told RFA. “The human rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Basic Law have completely disappeared.”

“Hong Kong is part of one country, and one system now,” Hui said, adding that many have yet to recover from the trauma of the crackdown on the 2019 protest movement, during which police violence sparked an international outcry.

“He says Hong Kong has been reborn from the ashes, but I only see anger in Hong Kong; anger and hatred for the [CCP] regime,” he said.

Just like the mainland now

Hui said Xi’s visit is the first by a high-ranking Chinese leader during which protests and demonstrations have been banned.

“The relationship between the people and the government has been lost,” Hui said, adding that bans on protests were a symptom of the CCP’s cowardice in the face of criticism.

“This never used to happen in Hong Kong, only mainland China, but now it’s happening today in Hong Kong,” he said. “Does the lack of [public] dissent mean success, or the end of freedom? It’s a huge step backwards.”

Hui said those who greeted Xi were hired for the role in the manner of movie extras, and had nothing to do with regular Hong Kongers.

The Hong Kong Journalists’ Association (HKJA) said only a selected number of media outlets were invited to apply for accreditation to cover the anniversary celebrations.

“Similar handover official events in the past were open to media registration without requiring invitations,” the group said in a statement on its website, saying it was “deeply concerned” by the move.

“At least 10 well-known local online and overseas media outlets, news agencies as well as photo wires were not invited nor allowed to sign up for the events, making them unable to report from the handover’s official events,” the HKJA said in a June 16 statement.

The government replied on June 29, saying the decision was “a balance as far as possible between the needs of media work and security requirements,” government broadcaster RTHK reported. The government declined to comment on accreditations for individuals or organizations.

Meanwhile, London mayor Sadiq Khan said the crackdown on Hong Kong had been “devastating,” pledging to do everything in his power to help Hong Kongers fleeing the crackdown to start new lives in the British capital.

The Greater London Authority said it had set up the Migrant Londoners Hub to provide Hong Kongers arriving under the British National Overseas (BNO) passport and visa scheme.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

China’s efforts to turn its far-western Xinjiang into a manufacturing powerhouse could force more Uyghurs to work against their will and make it harder to track whether the country’s exports are made with forced labor, according to a new report from a Washington, DC-based research group.  

The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), which studies global conflict and transnational security issues, said China is establishing industrial parks, providing more financial assistance from state-owned enterprises, and connecting manufacturers within its borders as part of a long-term objective to bolster supply chains.

“The Chinese government is undertaking a concerted drive to industrialize the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which has led an increasing number of corporations to establish manufacturing operations there,” the report says. “This centrally-controlled industrial policy is a key tool in the government’s efforts to forcibly assimilate Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples through the institution of a coerced labor regime.”

The 25-page report, titled “Shifting Gears: The Rise of Industrial Transfer into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” analyzes publicly available data and case studies to detail the political nature of China’s industrial transfer in the Xinjiang, the patterns through which it takes place, and the scale at which abuses in the region are embedded within Chinese and global supply chains.

“Forced labor is a major component of these human rights abuses,” the report says.

“It occurs not only within extrajudicial detention centers and through the placement of detainees in factories but also through the threat of detention to pressure Uyghurs into jobs across XUAR and throughout China.

“Both state-owned and private corporations are significant perpetrators of human rights abuses, implementing coercive working conditions, indoctrination and mass surveillance.”

The main mechanism for the central government’s industrialization drive in the XUAR is a program to pair Xinjiang counties and municipalities with wealthier provinces and municipalities on the east coast. The effort began 25 years ago and was expanded in 2010, the report says.

Government bureaus in the coastal provinces design and implement programs in their respective partner localities in the XUAR and help train Uyghur workers to build loyalty and obedience to the Chinese Communist Party, the report says.

“The central government wants economically dynamic east coast cities to reproduce their successful export-led growth model in the region by attracting manufacturers through low labor costs and subsidized land, electricity and freight fees,” the report says.

For example, the Yining Textile Industry Zone, containing two industrial parks — the Yining County Home Textiles and Garment Industrial Park and the Yining County Weaving Industrial Park, in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) prefecture — was constructed under the pairing program of Nantong, Jiangsu province, a major textile production hub in eastern China.

The Yining zone is linked with the Jiangsu Nantong International Home Textile Industrial Park, the largest home textile distribution center in the world. As of March, about 20 Nantong-based textile companies had set up operations in the Yining Textile Industry Zone, the report says.  

At least 1,000 people work in the Yining industrial park, including those sent via organized labor transfers from the surrounding county, according to the report. Several ethnic Kazakhs have testified that they were forced to work in a factory in the park after being released from a detention camp.

‘Modern industrial workers’

The industrial transfer policies have increasingly focused on four prefectures in the southern half of the XUAR with concentrated Uyghur populations and relative economic isolation that the Chinese government sees as problematic to its assimilation goals, says the report.

“The government sees the mass detention campaign and the establishment of a police state as prerequisites that allow Chinese manufacturing companies to feel secure enough to move into XUAR,” it says. “In turn, these manufacturers move Uyghurs from their farms and villages to factories and industrial parks where they can be monitored, indoctrinated and transformed into ‘modern’ industrial workers.”

Since 2017, Chinese authorities have ramped up their repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities throughout the XUAR, detaining up to 1.8 million members of these groups in internment camps. The maltreatment also includes severe human rights abuses, torture and forced labor as well as the eradication of linguistic, cultural and religious traditions.

Credible reports by rights groups and the media documenting the widespread abuse and repression in the XUAR have led the United States and some parliaments in Western countries to declare that the Chinese government’s action amount to a genocide and crimes against humanity.

The Center for Advanced Defense Studies analyzed Chinese corporate data of tens of thousands of companies based in the XUAR, publicly available trade data, and government and media reporting to show how manufacturers there are linked to local governments and companies in eastern China.

The group said that subsidiaries and partner companies in China make it hard to track whether goods originated from Xinjiang and were produced by forced labor.

The U.S. enacted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in December 2021 to strengthen an existing ban on the importation of goods made wholly or in part with forced labor into the country and to end the use of forced labor in the XUAR.

The act, which took effect on June 21, creates what is referred to as a “rebuttable presumption” that assumes goods made in Xinjiang are produced with forced labor and thus banned under the U.S. 1930 Tariff Act. The law requires U.S. companies that import goods from the region to prove that they have not been manufactured at any stage with Uyghur forced labor.

But the report said the structure of Chinese industrial policy, where goods are shipped and reshipped within its borders, will make enforcing forced labor laws difficult.

“[A]s long as the flow of goods produced in the region to exporters elsewhere in China is left unaddressed, tainted goods will continue to enter global supply chains,” the report warns. “Global stakeholders must improve due diligence and enforcement efforts to ensure they are not enabling forced labor and oppression in the Uyghur region.”

Economically beneficial to Uyghurs?

The report also disputed claims by Chinese leaders that their industrialization policies are good for the people of Xinjiang.

“[W]hile the Chinese government frames moving industry into the region as economically beneficial to the Uyghurs, you can see from the statistics of the leadership in these companies that it’s really a pattern of Han Chinese corporate officers and owners,” Nicole Morgert, a human right analyst who wrote the report, told RFA. “And then what you have is the Uyghurs working in the factories, so this is not really serving to empower Uyghurs.”

“[I]n many cases, we have evidence that they’re being forced to work in these factories,” she said. “When you look at the statistics on the corporate leadership, you see that it’s that people with Turkic names are highly underrepresented, particularly in companies that are above a certain level of value.”

Companies that import products from China must step up efforts to trace their supply chains to ensure they are not sourcing products from the XUAR or working with firms that support the repression of Uyghurs, says the report.

“Doing so will require a more comprehensive understanding of the ways state and private corporations are complicit in China’s ongoing campaign of human rights abuse against Uyghurs,” it says, adding that stakeholders can easily trace the ties by understanding the three pathways through which industry in the XUAR is connected to eastern China.

Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.