Day: July 5, 2022

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has called on Myanmar’s military regime to work with the opposition to resolve the country’s political crisis, days after an ASEAN envoy concluded a visit there without meeting any anti-junta stakeholders.

According to a statement posted on the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s official website on Monday, Wang told the junta that Beijing wants to see “reconciliation” in Myanmar and that “all those involved in politics should hold a dialogue for the sake of the people.”

Wang was in Mandalay region’s Bagan city on Sunday to attend the 7th Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Summit, co-chaired by China and Myanmar. China’s Foreign Ministry said Wang met with junta Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin on Monday to discuss reconciliation in Myanmar and informed him that his country can only move forward when political and social stability are achieved.

A statement from the junta following Monday’s meeting said the two sides “discussed ways to work more closely with the United Nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).” The statement did not address China’s call for cooperation with Myanmar’s opposition, and calls by RFA seeking comment from junta deputy information minister, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, went unanswered Tuesday.

Myanmar-based political analyst Sai Kyi Zin Soe told RFA Burmese that the military regime is seeking legitimacy on the global stage with the help of China after drawing condemnation from its fellow member nations in ASEAN over its Feb. 1, 2021, coup and an ensuing crackdown that has caused the deaths of at least 2,065 civilians, according to Thailand’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

“They are aiming for international acceptance of what they are doing at home,” he said.

But Sai Kyi Zin Soe said the junta cannot expect its status within ASEAN to change overnight, even with the help of China, and expects a power struggle will continue with the bloc.

China’s Foreign Ministry has said it “supports the international community’s efforts to protect Myanmar’s interests and reputation,” according to a report by the state-run Xinhua news agency.

A spokesman for the Pro-democracy Strike Committee (Dawei), an anti-junta group, told RFA that the junta is seeking Chinese help because of declining international support.

“The junta has no international support at all … and so they must rely on China,” said the spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity. “As China is a world power, the regime is relying on it to obtain international recognition.”

Concern for investments

Kyaw Zaw, a spokesman for the office of the president for Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG), told RFA that Wang attended the Lancang-Mekong meeting in an attempt to “legitimize the junta,” and warned that doing so would be harmful to the country’s economy and development.

“It would be detrimental to regional security, as it would lead to more instability in the area and there will be even more violence in Myanmar,” he said. “The situation would become an obstacle for economic development. The military’s actions are based on violence, and violence does not bring stability.”

Kyaw Zaw said the NUG’s goals are aimed at achieving economic growth for the country and that the shadow government is committed to protecting genuine businesses, while the military is turning economic projects into “battlefields.”

Since the coup, Myanmar’s armed opposition has targeted Chinese investment and development in the country, particularly projects that could earn the junta income it says is used to oppress the people.

At least 77 clashes took place in the 42 townships where the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor project was to be implemented between July 2021 and April 2022, according to research group Institute for Strategy and Policy Myanmar.

Political analyst Ye Tun said China is concerned about its investments in Myanmar as the conflict is unlikely to end any time soon.

“Because of that, they are also concerned about their future investments in Myanmar and their security,” he said.

“That’s why they are pushing for the implementation of the ASEAN agreement,” he added, referring to a Five-Point Consensus agreed to by Min Aung Hlaing at an emergency ASEAN meeting on the crisis in April 2021.

Points agreed to during last year’s emergency ASEAN meeting included an immediate end to violence in the country, the distribution of humanitarian aid, dialogue among all parties, and the appointment of an ASEAN special envoy to Myanmar who would be permitted to meet with all stakeholders. The junta has yet to implement any of the points in the 14 months since the meeting, while continuing its violent crackdown on opponents.

China has become the largest source of foreign investment in Myanmar since the withdrawal of Western businesses following the military coup. However, trade between the two countries dwindled to U.S. $4.3 billion in the 2021-2022 budget year, down from more than U.S. $5 billion a year earlier, according to figures from the junta’s Ministry of Commerce.

‘Sham effort’

Wang Yi’s comments came days after Prak Sokhonn, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations special envoy to Myanmar, concluded a June 29-July 2 trip to Myanmar, during which he met with junta chief Snr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin, and International Cooperation Minister Ko Ko Hlaing.

He also met with seven ethnic armed groups — all signatories of a Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement with the government since 2015 — and seven political parties that won seats in Parliament in the country’s November 2020 election.

A July 2 statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Cambodia, which hosts the rotating chair of ASEAN, said Sokhonn met with Min Aung Hlaing and Wunna Maung Lwin to find a way to work with the U.N.’s representative for Myanmar, stop the violence, release political prisoners, speak with civilians — including Suu Kyi — and access areas where humanitarian assistance is difficult to reach. The statement said he discussed how the U.N. and international NGOs should be involved in humanitarian assistance with the junta’s minister for International Cooperation, Ko Ko Hlaing.

However, the envoy did not meet with any armed ethnic groups that are opposed to the junta’s coup, nor the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won Myanmar’s 2020 election in a landslide victory before being deposed in last year’s putsch.

Kyaw Htwe, a member of the NLD’s Central Working Committee, said Sokhonn’s failure to meet the opposition or other anti-junta stakeholders during his second visit to Myanmar as ASEAN envoy would only serve to legitimize military rule.

“It was a meaningless, sham effort by the junta which showcased it as a sign of goodwill towards Myanmar’s democracy, but the special envoy was only allowed to meet with those who support the military,” he told RFA.

“In fact, history has shown that talks excluding all ethnic groups and [detained NLD leader] Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is the legal winner of the 2020 elections and who still has the support of the people, have proved futile.”

Rakhine National Party Chairman Thar Tun Hla, who met with Sokhonn, called the special envoy’s visit “unsuccessful,” as it only focused on implementing one facet of the Five-Point Consensus.

“He only informed us that we will be able to do humanitarian work,” he said. “There are five points to the ASEAN consensus. Of the five, he has fulfilled only one and so the likelihood of the trip being a success is low.”

Aid allotment

Thar Tun Hla said that while no other agreements were reached, Sokhonn had revealed that ASEAN allotted U.S. $1.5 billion in humanitarian aid for Myanmar.

A spokesman for the Karen Social Welfare Group in Kayin state said that Sokhonn’s visit wouldn’t benefit refugees on the ground because he had only discussed humanitarian issues with the military.

“The military is the one causing trouble for our people — everyone can see this,” he said. “[He] only met directly with the military regime [and those they approved], and not the people, so we don’t think it will be beneficial for the refugees.”

During his first visit in March, Sokhonn met with only a few people chosen by the junta. While he held more meetings this visit, political analysts said his failure to meet with key figures, such as Suu Kyi, will not be of much use.

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

Cambodia’s opposition Candlelight Party is once again urging government officials to stop harassing its members after a provincial governor from Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling party compared Candlelight members recently elected to local offices to a “social plague,” sources in the country told RFA.

The complaint comes as members of the Candlelight prepare to meet with other minority parties to consider forming an alliance and to make recommendations to improve Cambodia’s elections process.

The Candlelight Party won roughly 19 percent of the country’s 11,622 open commune council seats in the June 5 election, establishing itself as the main opposition to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which took more than 80 percent of the vote.

Prior to the election, the Candlelight Party candidates reported harassment and intimidation by members of the CPP and its supporters, including government officials. Unless the government acts, the discrimination against Candlelight and other opposition party members will grow, Candlelight officials fear.

At a post-election ceremony in the western province of Pailin, provincial Gov. Ban Sreymom threatened the newly elected councilors affiliated with the Candlelight Party, saying they were a “plague we need to get rid of.”

“We don’t teach people to be rude and provoke a social toxin or plague. We don’t let them stay. They are a plague, they will be removed or be sprayed with insecticide to kill it,” Ban Sreymom said during the ceremony.

The comment will make it harder for the commune councils with representatives from both political parties to operate, the Candlelight Party’s chief for the province, Khem Monykosal, told RFA’s Khmer Service.

“We haven’t even started our jobs, but there has been a threat already. This comment shouldn’t be used and they should respect the people’s votes. The comment is a major offense to our councilors,” he said.

RFA was unable to reach the governor for comment Tuesday. Interior Minister Khieu Sopheak was also not available.

Bun Sreymom’s comments were not discriminatory, asserted the CPP spokesperson Sok Ey San.

“We empower the provincial governors to advise commune councilors, so I don’t believe they use the events to attack [the Candlelight Party],” he said.

Government officials should not use their offices to discriminate against their political rivals, Kang Savang, a monitor with the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia NGO, told RFA.

He urged the Ministry of Interior to investigate the case and to punish officials if they are in breach of the law.

“Senior government officials should not use terms like that in public because it is against their duties as authorities,” he said.

Candlelight Party Vice President Thach Setha said the Ministry of Interior must issue strict measures to prevent such comments in the future. 

He hopes that the party’s newly elected commune councilors will be able to serve their constituents unhindered so that they can develop their communities.

“We want the Ministry of Interior to take tough measures and punish [CPP councilors] who don’t share responsibilities with [opposition party] councilors,” he said.

Opposition alliance

Five political parties including the Candlelight Party will meet Wednesday to discuss a possible alliance.

The four smaller parties — the Grassroots Democratic Party, the Cambodian Reform Party, the Khmer Will Party and the Kampucheanimym Party — will along with Candlelight also make recommendations to Cambodia’s government on improving the election process.

“We are advocating progress on improvement to elections to the NEC [National Election Commission], and we all have plenty of work to do on the same path,” Yang Saing Koma, founder of the Grassroots Democratic Party, told RFA. 

The ruling party is not concerned about the alliance, CPP spokesperson Sok Ey San told RFA.

“They all split from the big party,” he said, referring to the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), which was dissolved in 2017 by Cambodia’s Supreme Court, paving the way for Hun Sen’s CPP to win all of the seats in the National Assembly in general elections the following year.

Many of the former CNRP members who were barred from engaging in political activities as members of that party are now members of Candlelight.

“Now they want to reunite, but the party lost election to the CPP already,” Sok Ey San said, referring to the CPP’s dominance in this year’s commune elections.

Exiled political analyst Kim Sok said the parties should merge in order to compete with the CPP by creating a new political force.

“We can’t say we are united and still support different parties,” he said. “If we don’t merge there is no significant benefit.”

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

North Korea is cracking down on government-run entities that illegally use farmland for other money-making activities, like gold mining and manufacturing, sources in the country told RFA.

For a country chronically short on food, allowing farmland to be used for anything but growing food could lead to a public backlash. Authorities are now warning collective farms and revenue-producing arms of various governmental agencies that they could be punished for doing anything except growing food on lands designated for agricultural production.

“Late last month, orders were issued from the central government to investigate the destruction and illegal use of agricultural lands meant to produce grain. Investigations are now underway,” an official from the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“The order highlighted that there are a large number of land violations in the grain producing areas, and this is hindering the country’s grain production plans. Most of the country’s special organizations openly violate agricultural land policies for gold mining or construction projects. These are powerful and reputable organizations,” he said.

The special organizations are divisions within government agencies like the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of State Security and parts of the military. They include Office 39, the organization charged with procuring slush funds for the country’s leader Kim Jong Un and his family.

The government has limited capability to properly fund itself, and each ministry or agency must go into business in order to function properly.

The source said that the special organizations have been ignoring the agricultural designations for land use and “invading” them with new factories, buildings or mining operations.

“Each cooperative farm has therefore been ordered to report in detail how the special organizations are using their land, especially for goldmines and construction,” he said.

“In principle these organizations cannot do anything other than agriculture on those lands without permission from the state, but it is common for them to use threats or bribery to convince local officials to allow them to use the land for other purposes,” the source said.

Entities that legally want to repurpose farmland must go through an arduous bureaucratic process that includes permission from five different organizations: the collective farm, the province’s farm management office, the provincial government, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Ministry of National Territory Environment Protection, according to the source.

“Authorities have been taking steps to increase food production in recent years, but they are missing the most important point. The fastest way to solve the long-term food shortage is to give the farmland back to the farmers and allow them to process their own harvest,” he said.

Such a move could provide incentive for the farmers to earn a living off of the crops they grow, but it would also go against the ideas collective farming and communal land ownership.

Cooperative farms in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong are also under investigation, and authorities are punishing those implicated in bribery, a resident of the city of Hoeryong told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“With this order, the organizations that were invading the farmland as well as the officials who took bribes will not be able to sleep at night,” the second source said. “However, this order was only a loud proclamation, and it is ultimately a fruitless measure that will end in smoke.”

The Central Committee has a history of talking about strict measures but rarely enforces them, the second source said.

“For whatever reason, the organizations that are capable of invading agricultural land and using it for other purposes are powerful, and a lot of the foreign currency that they earn goes into party funds,” he said.

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

Vietnamese police on Tuesday arrested a prominent political activist and blogger on a charge of spreading anti-state “propaganda,” as authorities continue to crack down on dissenting voices in the one-party communist country.

Nguyen Lan Thang, a contributor to RFA’s Vietnamese Service since 2013, was taken into custody at around 8 a.m. while on his way to a coffee shop in Thinh Quang ward in the capital Hanoi, family sources said.

He now faces a charge of “making, storing, spreading or propagating anti-State information, documents, items and publications opposing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”

Speaking to RFA, fellow activist Thai Van Duong called Nguyen Lan Thang a “fighter in the pro-democracy movement,” saying the two had participated together in anti-China protests in Hanoi.

Thang was an activist not only in his social media postings but also in his daily life, Duong said.

“Both I and my friends and the international media know that Thang has an excellent character, unlike the descriptions given of him by opponents of the pro-democracy movement.

“Only those who have interacted with Nguyen Lan Thang can understand his personality and the way he performs his activities,” Duong said.

Phil Robertson — deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch — told RFA by email that Nguyen Lan Thang had “peacefully campaigned for democratic reform and justice, so he should be respected and listened to rather than face this kind of unjustified repression.

“Vietnam’s excessive and unacceptable crackdown on freedom of expression has just snared another victim who will invariably face a kangaroo court trial and years in prison for speaking his mind,” Robertson said.

“Governments around the world should demand Nguyen Lan Thang’s immediate and unconditional release, and pressure Hanoi to stop this wave of abuse.”

Thang, who comes from a family of scholars in Hanoi, has a Facebook following of more than 152,000. He has taken part in protests defending Vietnam’s sovereignty in disputed areas of the South China Sea and worked to help people affected by floods and storms in the country’s Central Highlands.

In 2013, he was detained and interrogated at Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi after returning from Thailand and the Philippines, where he had met with U.N. human rights officials to report on human rights abuses in Vietnam. A year later he was barred from leaving the country to attend a World Press Freedom Day event organized by UNICEF in the United States.

According to RFA reports, Vietnam has arrested at least 18 dissidents since the beginning of the year, most of them charged with “conducting propaganda against the state” under Article 88 of the 1999 Penal Code and Article 117 of the 2015 Penal Code.

Both laws have been criticized by activists and rights groups as measures used to stifle voices of dissent in Vietnam.

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

A former student leader of the 1989 protest movement at Hangzhou University in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang is being force-fed in detention after refusing food and drink, RFA has learned.

Xu Guang has been formally arrested on suspicion of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a charge frequently used to target peaceful critics of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), after he protested the confiscation of his mobile phone by police, fellow rights activist Zou Wei said.

“Xu Guang is on hunger strike, and his family was a little concerned [about saying anything in public], because the state security police got in contact after my last interview,” Zou said.

“I got a call from state security police just 10 minutes after I gave that interview,” he said. “They called me twice.”

The news emerged via a defense lawyer who was allowed to visit Xu in detention in mid-June, but who didn’t dare to go public with the information for fear of reprisals from the authorities, Zou said.

“They met once, but the lawyer didn’t dare to say anything, and I didn’t say anything either, because the case is so [politically] sensitive.”

“The relevant departments got to the lawyer and talked them out of [saying anything],” he said.

Xu, 54, was detained after he held up a placard outside Hangzhou’s Yuquan police station demanding his phone back.

He had been approached by officers from the Xihu district police department and warned to keep a low profile during the 33rd anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre on June 4.

His family received official notification of Xu’s formal arrest on Saturday, Zou said.

A friend of Xu’s who gave only the surname Jiang said warnings to stay out of the public eye were common for Xu around the massacre anniversary.

“Xu Guang was illegally hauled in for questioning by local police, who confiscated his communications device[s] and issued a warning,” Jiang said.

“So Xu went down to the police station with a placard that said ‘overturn the official verdict on June 4’,” she said. “The state security police detained him on the same day.”

“According to Xu Guang’s family, he is on hunger strike in the detention center,” she said, adding that everyone is concerned about his health.

Repeated calls to Xu’s sister Xu Yan rang unanswered on Tuesday.

Xu has previously served a five-year jail term after trying to formally register the China Democracy Party (CDP) as a political party in 1998, and has repeatedly called on the CCP to overturn the official verdict of “counterrevolutionary rebellion” on the 1989 protests.

He is currently being held in the Xihu Detention Center.

The New York-based Human Rights in China (HRIC) describes the June 3-4, 1989, massacre as a government-backed military crackdown that ended large-scale, peaceful protests in Beijing and other cities during that year.

“Despite persistent citizen demands for the truth and an accounting of the bloodshed, the authorities have offered nothing beyond their characterization that the protests were ‘counterrevolutionary riots’ — a  label they later changed to ‘political disturbance’ … suppressed by ‘decisive measures’,” the group says in a standing description on its website.

“The Chinese government has never publicly accounted for its actions with an independent and open investigation, brought to justice those responsible for the killing of unarmed civilians, or compensated the survivors or families of those killed,” HRIC said.

“In fact, it has never made public even the names and the number of people killed or wounded during the crackdown, or of those executed or imprisoned afterwards in connection with the protests,” it said.

Public mourning for victims or discussion of the events of spring and summer 1989 are banned, and references to June 4, 1989, blocked, filtered or deleted by the Great Firewall of government internet censorship.

Beauty influencer Austin Li, part of a generation of younger Chinese people who consequently know little of the massacre, had his June 3, 2022, livestream interrupted after he displayed a tank-shaped ice-cream dessert, prompting censors to pull the plug immediately.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.