Day: August 24, 2022

A junta shake-up of Myanmar’s Central Bank leadership announced last week is part of a bid by the military regime to assume control of the country’s financial sector and extend its grip on power, experts warned Wednesday.

On Aug. 19, the junta issued a statement saying that it had replaced Central Bank Chairman Than Nyein and Vice Chairman Win Thaw with Central Bank Vice Chairman Than Than Swe and Director General of the junta Defense Ministry’s Accounts Office Maj. Gen. Zaw Myint Naing, respectively.

The announcement of the reshuffle comes two months after the junta appointed six lieutenant colonels to the Central Bank as deputy directors and ensures that all key positions at the financial institution are held by either military generals or those close to the regime.

A Myanmar-based economist, who did not want to be identified for security reasons, told RFA Burmese that the shake-up is part of a bid by the junta to gain control of the country’s economy.

“[Than Than Swe] who became the chairman is quite strong, but as far as we know, there aren’t many people who will support her,” the economist said.

Than Than Swe, widely seen as pro-military, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in April, when unknown assailants shot her at her apartment complex in Yangon amid a public outcry over a new Central Bank directive ordering the sale of all U.S. dollars and other foreign currency at a fixed rate to licensed banks.

The 55-year-old was sworn in as deputy governor of the Central Bank after the military seized power from Myanmar’s democratically elected National League for Democracy (NLD) government in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup.

Believed to be the most senior junta official to be shot since the takeover, she is known to have led efforts to reduce the cash flow in the banking and financial system under the NLD, according to a report by The Irrawaddy online news agency.

An official with a private domestic bank in Myanmar told RFA on condition of anonymity that the replacements announced last week and appointment of six military officers to deputy director positions in June indicate that the junta is working to assume total control of the country’s Central Bank.

“It’s a matter of placing your own people [in key positions] to extend your power … because the flow of money is the most important thing in the world, regardless of whether it’s for good or bad,” the official said.

“They must assume that they will learn more about the accounts of the people, including local businessmen, by controlling a key body such as the Central Bank.”

The bank official said it is too early to say whether the appointments will have a beneficial impact on Myanmar’s economy, which has been devastated by political instability in the wake of the coup, prompting businesses to fold and foreign investors to flee.

Poorly planned policies

Public trust in Myanmar’s banks has eroded since the military takeover, as indicated by a growing number of savings withdrawals, while global trade has been reduced to a trickle amid various Central Bank restrictions placed on the U.S. dollar, sources told RFA.

A Mandalay-based trader, who also declined to be named, told RFA that importing and exporting goods had become nearly impossible due to the Central Bank’s constant shifting of policies.

“I’m so tired of making adjustments in accordance with the bank’s directives. It’s not easy. I follow their instructions, but it is extremely inconvenient,” he said.

“When you have to operate your businesses according to endlessly changing monetary policies, you will suffer losses due to fluctuations in rates, and this is what has happened to us.”

The attack on Than Than Swe came days after an unpopular April 3 Central Bank directive ordering all foreign currency, including the U.S. dollar, to be resold within one day of entering the country to licensed banks at a fixed rate of 1,850 kyats to the dollar. Earlier this month, the rate was raised to 2,100 kyats, while the current market price is nearly 3,000 kyats.

According to government records, there have been a total of 2,525 employees — including 494 officers — at the Central Bank since 2012, working in seven key departments. People with knowledge of bank operations say many of the employees are former military officials who were transferred to their current positions.

On the day of last year’s coup, the military removed NLD-appointee Kyaw Kyaw Maung from his position as Central Bank chairman and arrested bank Vice Chairman Bobo Nge – also an NLD supporter.

In their places, the junta reappointed Chairman Than Nyein, who had served in the role under successive junta regimes, and promoted Than Than Swe and Win Thaw, then directors-general at the bank, to vice chairman positions.

The changes announced last week follow nearly 17 months of policies widely seen as poorly planned and damaging to the country’s economy.

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

China is actively trying to rewrite the global narrative on its far-western Xinjiang region through a variety of digital tools it uses to try to discredit accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs who live there, according to a report issued by the U.S. State Department on Wednesday.

The report, which highlights a number of previous studies detailing Beijing’s disinformation campaign in regards to its repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities, states that China uses so-called “astroturfing” to create a false appearance of support for its policies, social media hashtags to amplify “positive stories” on Xinjiang and discredit critical reports, and private media companies that craft information manipulation campaigns.

China also employs a fleet of trolls that harass the government’s global critics in an effort to intimidate them into silence, including through threats of death, rape, or assault, cyber-attacks, and other forms of cyberbullying, the report states.

“Pro-PRC [People’s Republic of China] stakeholders flood information ecosystems with counternarratives, conspiracy theories, and unrelated news items to suppress narratives detailing PRC authorities’ atrocities in Xinjiang. Government social media accounts, PRC-affiliated media, private accounts, and bot clusters, likely all directed by PRC authorities, assist in this effort,” the report says.

Astroturfing, or coordinated campaigns of inauthentic posts, seeks to create the illusion of widespread support for a policy or viewpoint, even though that support does not exist. Chinese actors seek to use social media to place positive stories about Xinjiang, including depictions of Uyghurs living happy lives and posts emphasizing the purported economic gains that Beijing’s policies have delivered to the region, according to the report.

In 2021, for example, more than 300 fake accounts posted thousands of videos of Uyghurs appearing to deny any abuses in the region, saying that they were “very free,” according to the report. Most of the videos were found to be created by propaganda officials and disseminated on China-based platforms before spreading to YouTube and Twitter.  

Pro-China networks have been using artificial intelligence-generated content since at least January to produce realistic-looking profile pictures for fake accounts, creating composite images that cannot be traced using a reverse image search, making it harder to determine whether an account is inauthentic, the report says. 

“Some of these accounts repeatedly denied the PRC’s atrocities in Xinjiang, falsely asserting that the body of overwhelming and objective independent evidence of the atrocities is simply a fabrication of the United States and its allies,” it says.

Social media hashtags such as #AmazingXinjiang and #Xinjiang meanwhile seek to highlight positive stories about Xinjiang and Uyghurs to counter independent reports of widespread abuse in the region. 

Success with spreading disinformation

In 2017, authorities in Xinjiang began arbitrarily detaining Uyghurs other Turkic peoples in a vast network of “re-education” camps and in prisons, despite no evidence they had committed crimes. China claimed the facilities were “vocational training centers” meant to prevent religious extremism and radicalism and later said they had been closed. 

It is believed that authorities have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and others accused of harboring “strong religious” and “politically incorrect” views in the camps. There is also evidence that some of the detainees were subjected to forced labor, torture, sexual assault, and forced sterilizations and abortions.

In addition, China has outsourced some of its foreign language information operations to take advantage of private sector innovation, engaging with at least 90 Chinese firms to design campaigns portraying the country in a positive light, the report says.

A publishing organization operated by Xinjiang’s Bureau of Radio, Film and Television paid a marketing company to create videos depicting Uyghurs supporting the Chinese government. A network of inauthentic accounts then amplified the videos on Twitter and YouTube.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his closest leaders in the Communist Party are largely responsible for the campaign to spread disinformation, said Albert Zhang, an analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Cyber Policy Centre.

“I think they are successful with actually spreading disinformation, but also [with] silencing people from talking about what is happening to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and other Turkic ethnic groups,” he told RFA.

“Even in the West and in English-speaking countries, although people might not believe the propaganda and disinformation coming out of Chinese official statements and state media, a lot of people are very scared to talk about this issue and won’t raise it to criticize the Chinese government because they know they will be targeted by the government with its coercive activities,” said Zhang, who wrote a policy paper issued in July on the impact of China’s information operations related to Xinjiang.

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, said the report plays a critical role in pushing back against China’s global disinformation campaign aimed at denying the Uyghur genocide. 

“This is a positive step taken to correct the misunderstandings of some countries and groups under the influence of Chinese propaganda regarding the treatment of Uyghurs in East Turkestan,” he told RFA, using the Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang. 

“We ask the international community to reject China’s narrative on Uyghurs and take meaningful actions to stop the ongoing Uyghur genocide,” Isa said.

Translated by Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

More than 4,000 villagers who lost their homes when the military torched their villages in strife-torn central region of Magway this month are suffering from a lack of food and are unsure how they will be able to rebuild their lives, the villagers told RFA.

Since August 13, soldiers, along with members of the Pyu Saw Htee militias supporting the junta, have burned down 830 homes in the villages of Hlay Khoke and Nga Ta Yaw, in Magway’s Yesagyo township.  

Now many of the villagers are homeless and have nothing to live on. 

“We couldn’t bring anything with us. All the families had to run away,” a 60-year-old woman from Nga Ta Yaw village, who lost everything, told RFA’s Burmese Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“I couldn’t take anything. We had to run for our lives. My family lost everything in the fires. We now live in a monastery, and I don’t have any food. I’m living because the monks are feeding me. I couldn’t take anything. I had a house and a little shop. They were all burned down,” she said.“ 

Another resident of the same village said he hopes people will offer the villagers help.

“They first started firing at the village with all kinds of weapons, including heavy weapons, in the morning,” he said.

“Our people had to flee from the village. After we fled, they started burning the houses. The difficulty for us now is that we have no place to live. We have almost nothing to eat. We need help as we all are in deep trouble. I would like to ask our brothers and sisters at home and abroad to send us donations,” he said.

The homeless villagers have fled to anywhere they could find refuge, nearby villages and forests, or the local monastery where they’ve put up makeshift tents, he said. They cannot return because the military and the Pyu Saw Htee still have a presence in the area surrounding the village. Farmers in the area of the burned villages have told RFA that they have been unable to tend to their crops.

Some of the people had no time to prepare an exit and had to flee with only the clothes on their backs, another woman from Nga Ta Yaw told RFA.

“Right now, I have no clothes and no food. We’re facing such hardships and feeling miserable. I can’t help crying because the entire village was razed to the ground,” she said. 

“I wish our side could win. People are facing so many difficulties and so much hardship. The local defense forces gave us encouragement. But at the moment, I am sad because I cannot contribute anything to them as I myself am already in deep trouble,” she said.

In Hlay Khoke village, which had more than 400 homes, a man and a woman both in their 90s died in a fire started by the pro-junta forces, a resident told RFA.

“They are so low down, being nasty for no reason. Just like the saying, ‘Burning the barn to be rid of the rats,’” he said.

“Between 180 and 200 houses in our village were destroyed in the fire. What is so horrible is that an old couple in their 90s died in the fire, and we were all heartbroken,” he said, adding that the army has blocked the roads and so the refugees have not yet received any aid.

Anger against the military is growing, a woman from Hlay Khoke, and mother of four children, told RFA. 

“We can never forgive them. We will fight this battle until the end whether we are homeless or not. We will fight even without food,” she said.

“I am now a widow, my son and I will join the fight. We have decided to fight against them with whatever weapons we can get our hands on,” she said. “We have now lost our homes. We have nothing to eat and no place to live. … Don’t think that we’ll lose our spirit because we don’t have a home. We’re now even more determined.”

The junta has not yet released any information regarding the events in Hlay Khoke and Nga Ta Yaw villages. Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the junta’s spokesman, has previously told RFA that their forces did not raid villages nor burn the homes of civilians.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Award-winning Vietnamese journalist Pham Doan Trang is in increasingly poor health as she heads back to court this week to appeal her nine-year jail sentence for “conducting anti-state propaganda,” her lawyer told RFA on Wednesday.

The appeal trial at Hanoi High People’s Court in the Vietnamese capital is Thursday, and her lawyers have told RFA the result depends on whether or not she pleads guilty at Hanoi’s High People’s Court, 

“I think her health was pretty poor. She was very sick,” Dang Dinh Manh, one of the four defense lawyers at her first-instance trial, told RFA Vietnamese after two recent meetings with Trang in prison.

“She was having sinusitis after getting COVID. And she had had knee pain before being arrested, so it was very hard for her to walk and she could not squat,” he said, adding that she also suffered from heavy menstrual bleeding.

“These three issues have damaged her health. In response to our questions, she said she had received almost no treatment from the detention center although she updated them about her health quite regularly,” added Dang.

Trang’s knee pain stems from her having been beaten up by security forces during the demonstrations in March 2015 to protest against Hanoi municipal authority’s decision to cut down thousands of old trees in the city center.

Manh said that his client has always denied the accusations against her and stateed that what she had done was in line with the universal rights in the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

“Trang reckons that she has only exercised the right to freedom of speech and of the press. Especially as she used to be a journalist, she thought she had the responsibility to cover the country’s issues,” he said.

Trang has been presented with many prestigious international awards, including the U.S. State Department’s International Women of Courage Award and Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Prize.

PEN America issued a statement on Monday calling on the Vietnamese government to repeal Trang’s nine year sentence and to release her immediately.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also urged the Vietnamese government free Trang. The organization plans to present its 2022 International Press Freedom Award to her in New York in November.

Vietnam ranked as the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 23 imprisoned for their work, according to the CPJ’s 2021 prison census.

Trang has not been allowed to see her family since she was arrested in October 2020, and her mother, Bui Thi Thien Can, told RFA that family members requested to attend the appeal trial, but had not received any response from authorities.

Her lawyer Mang predicted that no positive outcome could be expected from the appeal trial.

“Changes in sentences or charges are very unlikely at trials related to national security crimes. However, we’ll still be very dedicated and prepared and will defend our client to the best of our ability,” he said.

Translated by Anna Vu. Written by Paul Eckert.

A Lao government initiative to register workers in a Chinese-run special economic zone in the northern part of the country to protect them from human trafficking and other abuses has had limited success, as workers balk at paying the fees and fear that signing up will get them sent home, sources said.

The measure is aimed at protecting domestic and foreign workers, many of whom are young women, from abuse and exploitation by their employers, especially those who work in the Kings Romans Casino in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Bokeo province.

Chinese-run enclaves in Southeast Asia have come under heavy scrutiny in recent months after hundreds of Taiwanese nationals were rescued after being lured into human trafficking and abusive jobs scams in Cambodia, with many victims taken to work in Chinese-owned casinos in the coastal city of Sihanoukville.

In addition to the cost, some workers who have entered the SEZ illegally are afraid to register out of fear they will be sent back home.

So far, the government has registered 1,267 workers, only a fraction of the workers in the zone, although the exact number employed in the SEZ is unknown, according to Lao officials.

“They [workers] should register, so they can work to get pay,” an official from Bokeo province’s Department of Labor and Social Services told RFA on Monday. He said the process to register was simple.

The SEZ is a gambling and tourism hub catering to Chinese citizens situated along the Mekong River where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet. In 2018, the U.S. government sanctioned the Chinese tycoon who is said to run the SEZ as head of a trafficking network.

Middlemen working on behalf of the casino actively recruit mostly young Lao women to work as “chat girls” to scam men on social media platforms into buying shares of the company. Those who fail to meet their sales quotas have been detained against their will by their employers and in some cases have been physically abused or sold off to work in the zone’s sex industry, RFA reported in December 2021.

Officials still don’t know exactly how many Lao and foreign workers have jobs in the SEZ, though they have urged all employers and companies there to register their employees, the official said. 

Lao officials also are encouraging employers in the Boten Special Economic Zone in neighboring Luang Namtha province to register their workers, he added.

Small groups have trickled in to complete the process since the government began registering Lao workers earlier this month, but officials had hoped between 400 and 500 employees would register daily, the official said.

“The middlemen who send Lao workers to work in the Golden Triangle SEZ said most Lao workers don’t want to register due to the high fees they have to pay to register, because some companies will not pay it for them,” said the Lao official, who declined to be named so he could speak freely. 

Foreign workers from neighboring countries who work in the SEZ must pay 150,000 kip (U.S. $10) to register, while Lao citizens must pay about 75,000 kip (U.S. $5). The workers must also cover the cost of a 250,000-kip (U.S. $16) annual health exam, the Lao official said. 

Employers or new workers must cover other costs to secure jobs and travel to the SEZ, passport fees, and fees for other legal documents so they can work and stay in the zone. 

Illegal entry

Most workers do not want to register and do not want Lao officials to know where they work, a middleman who arranges for people to work in the zone told RFA.

“Now, mostly they will enter the SEZ illegally, so legal documents are not important to them,” he said. “They came past the border entry without registering, and there are more like this because it’s the same case for workers already in the zone.”

A Laotian who works in the construction sector told RFA he completed the registration so that he is protected under the law should he encounter problems with his employer.

“If any workers don’t want to register because they have no money, they can tell the middlemen or employers where they work, and they will help them register,” he said.

“If they want to work in the zone without registering, they still can do that, and the Chinese employers will take them in,” said the worker who declined to provide his name so he could speak freely.

Workers who want to avoid the registration process will continue to enter the area illegally, he added.

A Laotian who has worked in the SEZ for many years praised the government’s decision to register both domestic and foreign employees in the zone so that they are protected under Lao law.

Without such a system in place, employers would abuse workers, he said.

“[By] using the new system, they [authorities] will take care of workers when they have problems,” he told RFA.  

The Lao government is focusing on registering Lao workers first and will turn its focus to registering illegal foreign workers, such as Chinese, Burmese and other nationalities, in 2023, officials said.

There is no need for foreign workers who come to the SEZ legally to register, and all workers, legal or illegal, are protected under Lao law, an official from the zone told RFA. 

RFA reported in late July that authorities in northern Laos called on businesses in the SEZ to suspend the hiring of Laotians to work as “chat girls” in an effort to curb abuses, including human trafficking.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya for RFA Lao. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

A salt shortage in North Korea made worse by heavy rains this summer could disrupt the country’s kimchi-making season this autumn, sources in the country told RFA.

North Korea is in the thick of its July-August rainy season, and sources have reported that heavy rains and flooding have destroyed crops, businesses and homes.

The rains have also dissolved mountains of salt piled up outdoors, especially on the country’s west coast, which produces the variety of salt preferred for cooking.

Now merchants are desperately scouring the countryside to find as much salt as they can, as prices will likely skyrocket when demand spikes higher during the approaching kimchi season.

Kimchi is traditionally made in the fall on the Korean peninsula. Arguably Korea’s most well-known food, kimchi arose out of the necessity of preserving vegetables so they could last through the long Siberian winter.

“These days, merchants from all over the country are flocking to each salt field on the West Coast, including here in South Pyongan province,” a resident of Onchon county in the province, north of the capital Pyongyang, told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“This is because of a rampant shortage of salt. The salt fields on the West Coast failed to produce sufficient salt this year to cover for last year,” the source said.

Even before the rains came in mid-July, the country was low on salt.

“Last year, the authorities banned the production of salt, warning of a high risk of [coronavirus] infection through the sea,” the source said. International health experts have not identified contact with saltwater as a risk for contracting COVID-19.  

North Korea in May declared a national “maximum emergency” after a major outbreak of coronavirus in the previous month. The resulting lockdown prevented salt production in Onchon county, according to the source.

“From mid-July, inclement weather and pouring rain have again disrupted salt production,” said the source. “There is no storage for salt in the salt fields, so the salt produced is piled up outdoors to remove the brine.

“All of the salt that had been stored has dissolved. This was ruinous to all the salt mills in the county,” the source said.

According to the source, salt has been in short supply in North Korea since the “Arduous March,” what Koreans call the 1994-1998 North Korean famine which killed millions, up to 10 percent of the population by some estimates. 

“The authorities assigned many young people to each salt mill from last year to solve the salt shortage, but they have yet to see any effect,” said the source.

“Residents who work in the salt mills steal a little bit of salt every time they come home from work and store it in their house, then they sell it during the kimchi season, when the salt prices go up,” said the source. “This pays for their food and coal. This year, very few houses have enough salt to sell in the fall. The residents are worrying about how they will survive this upcoming winter.” 

The disruption to salt production this year is expected to decrease output nationwide by more than half compared to last year, but there is a possibility that production could increase slightly if there is good weather at the end of this month, the source said.

The rains and the coronavirus also disrupted production in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong, a source from the city of Chongjin told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

Even with the nationwide shortage, people still want the salt from the West Coast, according to the second source.

“It is because there is a tidal flat in the West Sea, so the salt produced there is rich in minerals,” the second source said, referring to the body of water west of the peninsula, known internationally as the Yellow Sea.

“Cooking with [West Sea] salt tastes better. The salt from the West Sea is considered the best quality,” said the second source.

“Currently, the price of 1 kg of salt in the market exceeds 2,200 won per kilogram (U.S. $0.12 per lb.), but it is certain that it will rise even more when kimchi season comes,” the second source said. “I used to worry about food. Now I even worry about salt. This world is cruel.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong.