Day: June 10, 2022

Authorities in Myanmar’s notorious Insein Prison have cut off the drinking water supply to the cells of female political prisoners who protested poor living conditions in the facility after a fellow inmate who was denied medical treatment suffered a miscarriage, sources said Friday.

Sources who visited the prison on the outskirts of Myanmar’s commercial capital Yangon told RFA Burmese that dozens of prisoners have been forced to drink from the toilet after the taps were turned off more than two weeks ago, leaving them with no other source of water.

“The authorities cut off the drinking water since the protest,” said one recent visitor, who spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity.

“They put 60-70 female prisoners in one prison hall. I was told that all of them are now forced to drink water from the toilet.”

The source said that some of the prisoners have contracted cholera and other diseases after drinking the unclean water.

Last month, a 24-year-old political prisoner at Insein named Cherry Bo Kyi Naing, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for “unlawful association,” suffered an early-term miscarriage after authorities delayed sending her to the hospital for treatment.

On May 23, the female political prisoners held a protest, claiming that Cherry Bo Kyi Naing’s miscarriage was avoidable and the result of negligence by the guards. Two days later, prison authorities shut down the protest and relocated all the female political prisoners to the single prison hall, before shutting off the water supply.

When asked by RFA for comment on the situation at Insein, Prison Department spokesperson Khin Shwe denied reports that the women had been cut off access to drinking water.

“In Insein prison, we provide adequate water supplies for both drinking and hygiene,” he said.

“We don’t give such punishments for incidents that occur in the prison. We have no such thing.”

Attempts by RFA to reach the International Committee of the Red Cross in Bangkok, Thailand, went unanswered Friday. The Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) told RFA it is still making inquiries into the protest at Insein and the response by authorities and was unable to comment.

Kaythi Aye, a former political prisoner in Myanmar who now lives in Norway, told RFA that female prisoners require better hygiene conditions than their male counterparts, and access to clean water is crucial.

“Prisoners are in serious trouble when they don’t have access to clean water, especially during the monsoon season, when mosquitos proliferate and people suffer skin conditions,” she said.

“Wet conditions cause disease to spread further. It’s inhumane to cut off clean water for the female prisoners.”

According to the AAPP, security forces have arrested more than 11,000 civilians in Myanmar since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021 coup. There are nearly 1,200 female prisoners across the country, around 200 of which are held in Insein Prison.

Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung for RFA Burmese. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

Authorities in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region sentenced seven Uyghur teachers at a sports school in Kashgar to jail terms of four to five years, a local police officer and a person with knowledge of the situation said.

The police officer, who did not give his name, provided the names of the detained teachers at the Kashgar Sports School, which is located in the district his station patrols, but said he didn’t know the reasons for the arrests.

Uyghur instructors and staff members Adil Tursun, Amir, Osmanjan and Qeyserjan were arrested in early 2017, he said. Authorities later arrested the school’s Taekwondo trainer, Abduxkur, and math teacher, Esqerjan. Another employee, Nurmemet Yasin, was the last to be detained.

“I don’t know the last names of these teachers,” he said. “They were sentenced to four years or five years each for re-education. I don’t where they are now.”

Uyghurs comprised about 20% of the employees among the school’s total 60-some workers. The rest were Han Chinese, according to a Uyghur source who knows about the school.

“Osmanjan is around 42 or 43,” said a source familiar with the school staff, who did not want to be named. “Amir is the same age as Osmanjan. They graduated from the same class. Adil Tursun is about 45. We don’t know the reasons why they were arrested.”

An earlier RFA report confirmed that authorities arrested Alimjan Mehmut, a volleyball teacher at the Kashgar Sports School who served as a torchbearer for China’s 2008 Summer Olympics.

Mehmut was sentenced to eight years in a prison in Aksu (in Chinese, Akesu) for “befriending bearded men” under a deepening crackdown on Islamic practices and culture, according to information provided by the Norway-based rights organization Uyghur Hjelp, which documents missing and imprisoned Uyghurs in the XUAR.

“Alimjan Mehmut was arrested before I went to work at the school,” said the source. “It’s been two years since he was arrested.”

In RFA’s previous story, Aduweli Ayup, the Uyghur linguist who runs the Uyghur Hjelp website, said that Mehmut was one of at least six or seven instructors, including two volleyball coaches, from the Kashgar Sports School hauled away by authorities in past years.

At the time, Ayup also named Mehmut’s colleagues, Ezizjan and Ezisqari from the Kashgar Sports School among those arrested, though their detentions have not yet been confirmed by police.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Employees of a Chinese-owned rubber company in rural Laos illegally stopped a local rubber tree farmer trying to sell his harvest to another buyer for a higher price, sources in the Southeast Asian country told RFA.

Zhongtian Luye operates a rubber processing factory in Khua district in the northern province of Phongsaly along the border with China. The company created a contract farming system with rubber tree farmers in the area to maintain supply.

It pays farmers U.S. $0.56 per kilogram ($0.25 per pound) of natural rubber. Though it has contracts with local farmers for certain quantities of their yield, nothing is stopping them from selling the rest of their crop in nearby Oudomxay province, where prices are around 25% higher.

Employees of the rubber company blocked a road to prevent a car packed with raw rubber from leaving town, a villager told RFA’s Lao Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“They thought that the driver was shipping his output to sell in Oudomxay province [in breach of contract.] They also thought that he was trying to buy output from other villagers who have contracts with the company,” the villager said.

“That is why they stopped his car and took it to their camp area. Normally if a car is stopped and there is any kind of wrongdoing, it should be taken to the district police station,” he said.

Police showed up at the work camp to investigate, later ordering the company to release the driver. Zhongtian Luye did not have a contract with the man who was stopped, and the rubber was all from his own farm, the villager said.

Police fined the employees for blocking the road without permission.

A second villager said the company may feel justified in buying rubber at below market prices from local farmers because of the money it has invested in the area, including for road construction and to help farmers start producing rubber.

There also have been cases where the farmers broke their agreements with Zhongtian Luye to try to make more money elsewhere, the second villager said.

“They already signed agreements, but some farmers are not satisfied with the price set by the Chinese company,” the second source said.

“The company has a concession and the right to buy from the farmers as stated in the memorandum of understanding. However, when the trees are mature for harvesting, some farmers don’t want to sell for so low.”

A woman who used to do business with Zhongtian Luye told RFA that the company feels entitled to all the rubber produced in the area, even from farmers who are not under contract.

“They want them to sell it to their company only, even though they can get a higher price in Oudomxay,” she said.

RFA was able to contact Zhongtian Luye’s interpreter but he declined to comment on the issue.

Under the most common contract farming system in Laos, referred to as “3+2 contract farming,” companies provide funding, training and marketing services to producers, in addition to buying the product, while farmers provide land and labor. The central or local government is usually responsible for ensuring that neither party is taken advantage of.

An official from the Phongsaly province’s Department of Agriculture and Forests told RFA that Zhongtian Luye, the province and the farmers have signed production agreements. The company can decide to block roads to prevent the farmers from selling elsewhere, the official said.

“It is to up the provincial and district level authorities to consider how to solve this kind of problem and the district deputy governor will hold a meeting to find a solution,” the official said.

“But the agreement states that the rubber farmers who signed a contract-farming agreement cannot sell to other companies, but only this company,” he said, without explaining why the company has a right to prevent the farmers not under contract from selling elsewhere.

The official said the company does not tell his department the prices it pays, but said the department would meet with the company to double check that the contracts are fair.

Zhongtian Luye has been operating in Khua district since 2006. It is unknown how many farmers have contracts to produce rubber for the company.

According to the report from the Phongsaly province People’s Assembly, there are two Chinese rubber companies in the district.

Translated by Phouvong. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Myanmar’s ruling military junta has not issued execution orders for a former lawmaker from the deposed government and a prominent democracy activist sitting on death row after convictions on terrorism charges, despite reports that the men would be hanged Friday evening local time, a Prisons Department spokesman told RFA.

On June 3, the junta announced that it would proceed with the planned executions of former Member of Parliament Phyo Zeya Thaw and Ko Jimmy, a longtime democracy activist and former leader of the 88 Generation Students Group. Anti-regime opponents Aung Thura Zaw and Hla Myo Aung are also facing the death penalty.

Myanmar’s military, which seized control from the democratically elected government in a February 2021 coup, has cracked down on anti-regime activists, sentencing more than 100 to death. The executions of Phyo Zeya Thaw and Ko Jimmy, whose real name is Kyaw Min Yu, would be the country’s first judicial executions since 1990.

Authorities had not received execution orders from the junta for Phyo Zeya Thaw and Ko Jimmy, who are being held in Yangon’s Insein Prison, said Prisons Department spokesman Khin Shwe.

“We haven’t receive anything from the superiors,” he said. “We also don’t know about the news that they will be hanged this evening and that there had been religious rites in prison for the inmates.”

All four inmates are in good health and have been transferred to death row where they are wearing orange prison suits given to those facing execution, he said.

Junta spokesman, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, told RFA on Tuesday that all four men would be executed under the regular procedures of the Prisons Department.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), sent a written appeal on Friday to Sen. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, head of the State Administration Council (SAC), the formal name of the junta regime, to “reconsider the sentences and refrain from carrying out the death sentences.”

“The death sentences and reported planned execution of a number of anti-SAC individuals have attracted great concern among ASEAN member states, as well as ASEAN external partners,” he wrote.

If carried out, the executions “would trigger a very strong and widespread negative reaction from the international community” and hurt efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis in Myanmar, Hun Sen wrote.

A former member of the hip-hop band Acid, Phyo Zeya Thaw served as a lawmaker from the National League for Democracy from 2012 to 2020. Following the coup and the subsequent crackdown on peaceful anti-regime protesters, he went into hiding but was arrested in November 2021.

Phyo Zeya Thaw, whose real name is Maung Kyaw, and Ko Jimmy, who was arrested in October 2021, were both sentenced to death by a military tribunal this January for treason and terrorism.
Activist Nilar Thein, who is the wife of Ko Jimmy, said the junta will have to take responsibility for giving her husband the death penalty.

Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung for RFA Burmese. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

North Korean police officers, who have a well-earned reputation for brutality, are being told to be nicer as the combination of a devastated economy and an outbreak of COVID cases raises fears of social unrest, sources in the country told RFA.

People in the isolated country have endured so much over the past few years that North Korean leaders are afraid pockets of resistance to the autocratic leadership might develop among people who are struggling the most.

Bullying and harassment, mainstays of North Korean law enforcement, could push frustrated citizens over the edge, hence the call for the new charm offensive.

“The internal directive calls for provincial, municipal, county, and regional security departments and agencies to strengthen internal discipline and work toward improving relations with residents,” a source connected to the judicial system in the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA’s Korean Service Wednesday on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“They issued this directive because internal discipline has been lax, and the police are not giving up the idea that they have to dominate over the people, even as social dissatisfaction increases with the COVID-19 situation. If the tyranny of the police officers is left alone, public dissent will accelerate,” he said.

North Korea is in a state of “maximum emergency” due to an outbreak of the coronavirus that spread starting in April. The government was forced to acknowledge its first confirmed cases and deaths after denying it had even a single case since the beginning of the pandemic.

Efforts to keep the virus out included shutting down the Sino Korean border in January 2020 and suspending all trade, which effectively destroyed what was left of the economy already weakened by international nuclear sanctions.

Though rail freight eventually resumed in 2022, it was shut down again with a resurgence of the virus in China.

The police command structure is also being reorganized and each regional department is required to give daily, weekly and monthly progress reports to the Ministry of Social Security in Pyongyang, the source said.

 “The plan also calls for resolving conflicts with local residents and restoring the image of the police by making decisive improvements to the attitudes of the police officers and to the services they provide. This may go a long way towards addressing problems that arise within local jurisdictions,” the source said.

In the northeastern province of North Hamgyong, the provincial security bureau’s top brass went out to the various cities and districts to explain the directive to their subordinates, a source connected to the judicial system there told RFA.

“Social security officials are very nervous because how they execute this directive may determine the path of their future careers,” the second source said on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

The police in the area have had a noticeable change in attitude, according to the second source.

“They used to look down on the residents, even swearing at them and beating them up. Now they have become much gentler,” he said. “Even so, many residents are skeptical as to how long the trend will last.”

It is not the first time that the government has issued directives telling police to be nicer, so citizens remain wary that police brutality will soon become the norm again.

“In the past, directives from the central government would change how the police acted for a little while, but they would gradually become violent again over time,” he said.

Forcing the cops to be nice and friendly can only do so much at a time when so many people are desperate though.

 “If they really want to boost public sentiment, it’s important that the authorities realize that their most urgent task should be to provide a way for the residents to make a living,” said the source.

“The authorities have cooked up half-hearted measures like this to try to deal with the cold public sentiment caused by COVID-19.”

Though North Korea has acknowledged that the virus is spreading inside the country, it has only reported a handful of confirmed COVID-19 cases, which 38 North, a site that provides analysis on the country and is run by the U.S.-based Stimson Center think tank, attributed to insufficient testing capabilities.

The country is, however, keeping track of numbers of people who exhibit symptoms of COVID-19. The number of new daily cases peaked at around 754,800 on May 19, before sharply decreasing over the next week.

Wednesday marked the first day since May 19 that fewer than 100,000 new cases of fever were recorded.

The Seoul-based Daily NK news outlet reported Wednesday that the people do not trust the government’s figures and believe the coronavirus situations is much worse than they are being told.

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

A group of ex-military servicemen in Myanmar who are assisting prodemocracy paramilitaries say skills they acquired during their past training helped them produce four types of combat weapons to battle junta troops.

Analysts told RFA Burmese that the arms manufactured by the People’s Soldier Production Team (PSPT) — a group of defectors that include graduates of the Defense Service Academy and military officials from the Directorate of Artilleries — represent a first in self-produced weapons by insurgent forces in Myanmar, although they were mixed on what effect they might have on the fight for control of the country.

Capt. Nyi Thuta, the leader of the PSPT, told RFA Burmese that the group had selected four types of guns and other weapons for production from eight it had experimented with recent months. The new weapons are already being used in military campaigns.

“We are manufacturing single-shot firearms. We also produce automatic submachine guns. They can fire single shots or empty an entire magazine,” he said.

“We are also manufacturing land mines as well as bombs that can be dropped using drones. We have plans to produce many other weapons, but we can’t disclose that information right now.”

Nyi Thuta said that while the research required to manufacture a gun typically costs up to 1,000,000,000 kyats (U.S. $540,000), the cost to produce them outside of a factory is as much as four times cheaper than those on the market. He gave the example of a PSPT-produced submachine gun, which costs only 1.3 million kyats (U.S. $700) compared to 5 million kyats (U.S. $2,700) from a retailer.

Nyi Thuta said that PSPT weapons are of “standard quality and effectiveness,” but the group is only able to produce one-eighth of what normal manufacturers can because of limited access to equipment.

Min Zaw Oo, executive director of the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security (MIPS), said the PSPT is the first group of defectors in Myanmar to manufacture weapons to fight the military that trained them.

“After 1988, there were also defectors from the military, but they were not able to manufacture guns because of technology limitations and lack of raw materials,” he said.

“The military troops [this resistance is] fighting has larger armory. That’s why they began to explore innovative ways to produce the weapons they need to fight. This is unprecedented.”

Minh Zaw Oo said MIPS’s research suggests that among the weapons produced by the PSPT, land mines would likely have the most devastating effect on the military.

The PSPT told RFA that its weapons workshops are based in territories controlled by ethnic armed groups and the anti-junta People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary group in embattled Sagaing region but declined to provide information about the number of facilities they operate or their exact locations.

The group added that it mostly relies on raw materials available on the black market to produce its weapons, although some materials must be clandestinely imported.

Mixed expectations on impact

Thein Tun Oo, executive director of the pro-military Thaenaga Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, said any weapons produced outside of factory settings would be largely useless against Myanmar’s military.

“The technology needed to build military weapons requires far more precision than what can be found in civilian industry. The accuracy required is on the microscale level, so I question whether that can be achieved in a regular workshop,” he said.

“Secondly, it would be nearly impossible for them to maintain consistent quality on a mass-production scale, given the lack of raw materials. … These challenges are crucial to overcome if they are hoping to win a revolution.”

However, Naing Htoo Aung, permanent secretary of the shadow National Unity Government (NUG), rejected Thein Tun Oo’s views, suggesting that with help from the NUG in securing funding and raw materials, the PSPT’s weaponry could turn the tide for the resistance.

“In this situation, improving self-production facilities, both in terms of quality and quantity, is the most helpful way to contribute to the revolution,” he said.

In a report on its achievements to mark the one-year anniversary of its founding, the NUG said that it had spent around U.S. $30 million in funding on the resistance movement, although the shadow government’s defense ministry acknowledged that it would be unable to supply the PDF with enough weaponry to meet its needs.

The NUG Defense Ministry said it is working to address the weapons shortage by improving the capacity of PSPT teams and sharing PSPT technology so that the PDF can set up duplicate production facilities.

RFA has received reports about injuries and deaths resulting from informal weapon production, which sources have attributed to a lack of experience and quality materials. The NUG had yet to respond to a request for more information on the incidents as of Thursday.

Junta weapon procurement

Meanwhile, the junta is using state revenue to purchase weapons from China, Russia and other nations that are being used to suppress the people of Myanmar.

On Feb. 22, former U.S. Rep. Tom Andrews, who serves as U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said in a report to the U.N. Security Council that countries should stop selling arms to the junta, citing its brutal crackdown on civilians since the takeover.

The report called out permanent Security Council members China and Russia, as well as India, Belarus, Ukraine, Israel, Serbia, Pakistan and South Korea, for selling the weapons, which Andrews said are almost certainly being used by the military to kill innocent people.

According to Thai rights groups the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, security forces have killed at least 1,929 civilians since the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, coup, mostly during peaceful anti-junta demonstrations.

Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung for RFA Burmese. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.