Day: September 29, 2022

Cambodian authorities said the bodies of the final eight missing Chinese migrants from a small fishing vessel that sank last week off the Cambodian coast washed up on a Vietnamese island, bringing the total number of dead from the accident to 11.

Officials in Preah Sihanouk province initially posted photos of the eight on Facebook after they were found on Phu Quoc, which is off the coast of Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand. The photos were later removed from the social media platform.

The wooden boat, which was carrying 33 Chinese migrants, encountered problems on Sept. 22 near the Cambodian coastal city Sihanoukville, a popular resort town known for its casinos, and capsized. The Chinese aboard had been promised jobs as fishermen. 

Twenty-two passengers were rescued by Cambodian authorities and by a fishing boat in Vietnamese waters. Three of the migrants were found dead in the initial aftermath of the accident, while eight remained missing until Thursday.

Sihanoukville is a hotbed for human trafficking, with victims from across the region being tricked into working in the casinos or as online scammers, and sometimes being held against their will by employers. According to an earlier report by AFP, the surviving passengers said they had been promised 10,000 to 20,000 yuan (U.S. $1,405-$2,809) to work in Cambodia for 10-20 days.

Speaking at the 6th National Inter-Faith Forum Against Human Trafficking on Thursday, Prime Minister Hun Sen on Thursday blamed illegal gambling operations in Cambodia as contributing to rampant human trafficking and pledged tough action in response.

“It is a complicated issue and it doesn’t only happen in Cambodia,” he told attendees at the conference, organized under the theme “Do Not Use Cambodia as a Destination of Trafficking in Persons.” 

“If we are not prudent, Cambodia will become a safe haven for criminals to commit crime in our country,” Hun Sen said. “They are using Cambodia as a place to produce drugs and then distribute them to Vietnam, Thailand and other countries.”

Ny Sokha, president of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, an NGO known as ADHOC, said he welcomed the prime minister’s commitment to fighting human trafficking, but questioned the government’s ability to follow through. 

He noted that Hun Sen has made other pledges, such as ending illegal logging in the country, that have not come to fruition.

“Human trafficking is not committed by ordinary poor people, and the justice system in Cambodia must prevent impunity because with impunity and corruption, human trafficking can’t be prevented,” Ny Sokha said.

Interior Minister Sar Kheng told attendees at the conference that the country was working to prevent trafficking, rescue victims and apprehend ringleaders. 

“Criminals are committing crimes silently online via cyber-technology and are using other tricks to exploit victims to work overtime [or] to detain, torture and kidnap them,” he said. “Some criminals are armed, and if they are not deterred, they will become a threat to national security in the future.”

As of late August, Cambodian authorities received almost 400 complaints about human trafficking, and authorities had rescued about 400 victims, about 55 of whom had been trafficked, according to Cambodia’s Interior Ministry. The victims were from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, China, Pakistan, India, Myanmar, the Philippines, the United States, Turkey and South Korea.  

At least 43 suspects have been brought to justice, and their operations have been shut down, according to the ministry.

Translated by Samean Yun for RFA Khmer. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

North Korean officials have been told that more than 350,000 people in the country died of illnesses over the past year, many likely related to COVID-19, sources told RFA, as authorities began a new vaccination campaign on the country’s border with China more than a month after declaring victory over the coronavirus.

Attendees of a training session for government officials were surprised by the number of suspected deaths from COVID, and also from diseases like the flu, tuberculosis and from waterborne pathogens, a government official from South Pyongan province, north of the capital Pyongyang, told RFA’s Korean Service.

“At the meeting, the issue of continuing the quarantine measures to prevent the spread of an infectious disease was repeatedly emphasized because deaths from COVID-19 are suspected to account for the majority of the 350,000 deaths,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“I can tell from my surrounding area that many people have died from sickness this year,” he said. “A friend of mine on the provincial People’s Committee died a few days after suffering from a high fever and sore throat. Another friend’s parents also died, and this friend assumes that his parents died of COVID-19.” 

RFA was not able to confirm the death total, but if it is accurate, the number of COVID-related deaths is far higher than the government has publicly stated. For the first two years of the pandemic, Pyongyang claimed to be completely “virus free.” 

North Korea finally acknowledged the virus was spreading within its borders in May, when it declared a national “maximum emergency” due to a major outbreak of the disease that it traced back to a military parade the previous month.

North Korea reported during the emergency that 4.7 million people had developed so-called “fever cases,” with state media reporting 74 related deaths. The government declared an end to the emergency on Aug. 10.

These figures were never officially confirmed to be COVID-19 related, likely because of a lack of testing capabilities.

The actual death toll is probably between 100,000 and 170,000, according to a journal article penned by Shin Young-jeon, a South Korean preventative medicine expert at Hanyang University in Seoul.

Prior to the emergency, anyone who died of symptoms suspected to be related to COVID-19 were hastily cremated and buried, making a confirmation of the disease impossible, sources said.

Even as more information emerges about the number of North Koreans who died in the past year, authorities are still threatening to punish citizens who “spread rumors” about COVID’s impact, an official from Onsong county in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“Last week the Central Committee [of the Korean Workers’ Party] delivered an emergency order … to take measures to prevent the spread of words that disturb the public mind,” said the second source. “There have been stories circulating among residents that more than 350,000 people have died of sickness this year. 

“The State Security Department and the Social Security Department, as well as party and labor organizations, have stepped up their propaganda efforts and started cracking down on residents for believing or spreading false rumors,” he said. “But the citizens find it more believable that it is not a rumor and that the government actually did announce a high death toll during official meetings.” 

The second source said that publicly authorities still stick to the official line that only around 70 people died during the national emergency.

“Many of the residents are devastated by the fact that hundreds of thousands of people may have actually died from COVID-19,” he said.

Vaccine campaign

Although the COVID emergency has been officially over for more than a month, the country began to inoculate people in Ryanggang province last week, marking the first time that COVID vaccines have been made available to people living along the border with China, sources there told RFA.

In May, RFA reported that authorities had made a propaganda event out of vaccinating soldiers who were involved in a major national construction project in the capital Pyongyang, calling the Chinese-made vaccine an “immortal potion of love,” from leader Kim Jong Un. 

Authorities later began vaccinating citizens of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, in July, but now residents of the border city of Hyesan can also get the vaccine, a Ryanggang resident told RFA.

“Authorities have already declared that the coronavirus has ended, so the people don’t know why they are vaccinating us now,” the third source said. 

The vaccine is distributed through neighborhood watch units and schools, another resident of the province told RFA.

“Residents, who were terrified of dying from colds or pneumonia, feel fortunate that they can get vaccinated even if it’s this late in the game,” the fourth source said. “When I asked the medical staff, they said the vaccine was made in China. 

“In July, Pyongyang citizens were vaccinated. This must have been a measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in advance of major national events such as the  National Conference of War Veterans, held on the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War on July 27,” the fourth source said, using the North Korean term to describe the anniversary of the armistice agreement that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War, in what most historians consider to be a stalemate.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service on Tuesday reported to the National Assembly that North Korea started a large-scale vaccination campaign in the border area.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung.

Facebook owner Meta’s use of algorithms to promote user engagement and increase ad revenue contributed to anti-Rohingya sentiment in Myanmar ahead of a brutal military campaign against the ethnic group in 2017, rights group Amnesty International said Thursday.

In a new report entitled, “The Social Atrocity: Meta and the right to remedy for the Rohingya,” Amnesty lays out how Meta failed to prevent Facebook from amplifying the kind of hateful rhetoric that led to communal violence against the ethnic group and a state-sanctioned “clearance operation” in 2017 that forced more than 700,000 across the border to Bangladesh, where many continue to languish in refugee camps.

“In 2017, the Rohingya were killed, tortured, raped and displaced in the thousands as part of the Myanmar security forces’ campaign of ethnic cleansing,” Amnesty Secretary General Agnès Callamard said in a statement accompanying the release of the report.

“In the months and years leading up to the atrocities, Facebook’s algorithms were intensifying a storm of hatred against the Rohingya which contributed to real-world violence.”

Callamard said that while the military was committing crimes against humanity against the Rohingya, “Meta was profiting from the echo chamber of hatred created by its hate-spiraliing algorithms.

“Meta must be held to account. The company now has a responsibility to provide reparations to all those who suffered the violent consequences of their reckless actions,” she said.

Meta did not immediately respond to requests by RFA Burmese for comment on Amnesty’s findings. Amnesty said that in June, Meta declined to comment when asked to respond to the allegations contained in its report.

Social media role ‘significant’

In its report, Amnesty specifically pointed to actors linked to the military and radical Buddhist nationalist groups who “systematically flooded” the Facebook platform with disinformation regarding an impending Muslim takeover of the country and seeking to portray Rohingya as sub-human invaders.

“The mass dissemination of messages that advocated hatred, inciting violence and discrimination against the Rohingya, as well as other dehumanizing and discriminatory anti-Rohingya content, poured fuel on the fire of long-standing discrimination and substantially increased the risk of an outbreak of mass violence,” Amnesty said in its report.

Following the 2017 violence, the U.N.’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar called for senior military officials to be investigated and prosecuted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

The body found that “[t]he role of social media [was] significant” in the atrocities. Amnesty said its report found that Meta’s contribution “was not merely that of a passive and neutral platform that responded inadequately.” Instead, it said, Meta’s algorithms “proactively amplified and promoted content on the Facebook platform which incited violence, hatred and discrimination” against the Rohingya.

Because Meta’s business model is based on targeted advertising, the more engaged users are, the more ad revenue Meta earns, the report said.

“As a result, these systems prioritize the most inflammatory, divisive and harmful content as this content is more likely to maximize engagement,” it said.

Examples of anti-Rohingya content cited by Amnesty included a Facebook post referring to a human rights defender who allegedly cooperated with the U.N. fact-finding mission as a “national traitor” and which consistently added the adjective “Muslim.” The post was shared more than 1,000 times and sparked calls for their death. The U.N. group called Meta’s response to its attempts to report the post “slow and ineffective.”

Unheeded warnings

Amid the swelling rancor and growing likelihood of communal violence, local civil society activists repeatedly called on Meta to act between 2012 and 2017, but Amnesty said the company failed to heed the warnings.

Instead, the report said, internal Meta documents leaked by a whistleblower show that the core content-shaping algorithms that power the Facebook platform “all actively amplify and distribute content which incites violence and discrimination, and deliver this content directly to the people most likely to act upon such incitement.”

By failing to engage in appropriate human rights due diligence in respect to its operations in Myanmar ahead of the 2017 atrocities, “Meta substantially contributed to adverse human rights impacts suffered by the Rohingya and has a responsibility to provide survivors with an effective remedy,” Amnesty said.

Amnesty’s report called on Meta to work with survivors and civil society organizations to support them to provide an effective remedy to affected Rohingya communities and to undertake a comprehensive review and overhaul of its human rights due diligence to address what it called “the systemic and widespread human rights impacts” of its business model.

Authorities in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong have sent an investigative team to an arts university to probe the suicide death of a rising dance star who was also an out gay man, state-backed media reported.

Gao Yan, 19, died by suicide while at his parental home in the northern province of Hebei, where he had gone to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, a time dedicated to family reunions.

Gao, who came first in a province-wide dance examination, had performed several times at the Spring Festival gala performance for state broadcaster CCTV in February, and who had already won a prestigious dance award, was about to begin his junior year majoring in dance at the Shandong University of Arts.

“There are suspicions that he had been bullied and suppressed by his class teacher for some time prior to his death,” a report on the Chinese news portal Sina.com said.

“An investigative team has gone to Shandong University of Arts hoping to find out the truth and make some account on behalf of this beautiful youth.”

“He loved his major and loved to dance so much … and had promised his friends he would work hard for the postgraduate entrance examinations, and he had the potential to become a future dance star,” the article said.

“Why is the school procrastinating? Was Gao Yan’s suicide caused by [issues in] his family of origin, or [homophobic] discrimination by his class teacher?”

“Everyone should stay calm and wait for the team to investigate,” it said.

Parents seek explanation

A post on the Wikipedia-like site Zhihu said the main reason Gao had been ostracized and suppressed by his class teacher was his sexual orientation.

“While same-sex marriage has not been legalized in our country, these groups still exist, and none of them have been declared illegal,” the post said. “So you may not accept or understand them, but I hope you can learn to respect them.”

“It’s not as if they are affecting your daily life.”

Gao’s parents were seen in one video circulating on social media weeping and calling for an explanation from the school.

“We are from the countryside, and we have been here for eight days,” Gao’s father tells the camera. “Now we are waiting here for a statement, and we can’t say anything.”

“The school just keeps trying to avoid any responsibility, so we don’t know what to do now; there’s nothing we can do,” he says.

Their comments drew a stinging rebuke from Li Jun, dean of dance at the Shandong University of Arts, who accused them of trying to profit from Gao’s death.

Screenshots from Gao’s chat history showed an exchange with his class teacher Zhang Dalu, in which Zhang tells Gao he’s going to be assigned to a “low-quality” class for his junior year, despite his excellent performance and achievements to date.

A group of Gao’s classmates also took to social media, speaking out on Zhang’s behalf, saying “we believe our teacher, whom we know better than any of you.”

Homophobia remains common

Some online reports suggested that Zhang had mocked Gao’s sexual orientation with quips about a gender reassignment operation in Thailand.

A gay man who went to university in Shandong and gave only the surname Chen said homophobia is still fairly common in higher education in China.

“My classmates would often make fun of LGBT people, and [I would] feel uncomfortable after hearing it,” Chen said.

Pan Zhigang, a member of the banned China Democracy Party currently living in Los Angeles, who is also a gay man, said growing intolerance of sexual minorities is directly linked to a change in official attitudes since ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012.

“They’re not tolerant; they view such minorities as something alien,” Pan told RFA. “This will always exist in a tyrannical system, and will never be absent from an authoritarian system.”

LGBT+ groups have been increasingly moving away from the public sphere amid growing political restrictions on public speech under Xi Jinping.

In October 2021, LGBT Rights Advocacy China (also known as Queer Advocacy Online) announced it was ceasing all activities and shutting down its social media accounts.

The group had campaigned for LGBT+ rights, including same-sex marriage, and its founder Peng Yanzi once went undercover at an electroshock “conversion therapy” facility, successfully suing it.

It had also brought landmark cases to the court, including those granting custody rights to non-traditional families.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Government censors have banned a prominent poet from social media platforms after she penned a poem that many interpreted as being a comment about the forthcoming ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 20th National Congress, at which CCP leader Xi Jinping will seek an unprecedented third term in office.

The Weibo account of Sichuan-based poet Hu Minzhi flashed a brief message reading “This account does not exist,” before disappearing on Sept. 29.

Hu has reportedly been banned from both Weibo and Douyin after reporting that she had been “invited to drink tea,” a euphemism for being hauled in to talk to state security police, in early September.

“She hasn’t been heard from [on social media] for several days now,” Voice of America journalist Ye Bing said via Twitter. “The outlook for her situation, for her liberty, seems bleak.”

His tweet was retweeted by independent, Beijing-based journalist Gao Yu.

Hu’s barring came after she published a poem titled “Waiting for the Wind,” a poem apparently satirizing people’s lack of agency around the party congress — one of the most significant political meetings to occur in China since Xi took power.

“More than a billion people are waiting for the wind,” the poem says. “It will come from the direction it comes from.”

“Officials are waiting; entrepreneurs; ordinary people too,” it continues. “We have no idea if it’ll be an east wind or a west wind, this autumn … a wind that blows forwards, or one that blows backwards.”

Taking China backward

The poem came as many political commentators had begun to highlight concerns that Xi stands poised to take China back to a centrally controlled economy and a political culture similar to the Mao era, and away from the economic reform and opening up begun by late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979.

“We are just waiting here like puppets … to hear our fate; ours personally, as well as that of the country,” the poem says.

Hu’s apparent silencing comes as Chinese police detained more than a million people in a nationwide security operation ahead of the party congress.

Beijing resident Wang Jiangqing said the city is now filled with soldiers and police officers.

“The 20th National Congress is approaching, and they’re getting more and more nervous,” Wang told RFA. “You can’t go anywhere now.”

But he appeared to believe the measures would be counterproductive.

“The more they do this, the more unstable the country becomes,” he said.

Beijing resident Li Ning said anyone from out of town has been escorted out of the city, while even games of mah jong have been banned in the run-up to the event.

“All police stations are being tasked with [detaining people], with quotas for each officer for arrests and solved cases,” Li told RFA. “It’s all about making up the numbers, so they detain people for the smallest thing.”

Petitioner roundup

A resident of the northeastern city of Shenyang surnamed Liu said things were similar where she lives.

“They’re just making up the numbers — gradually making their way through 1.4 billion people,” Liu said. “They arrest whomever they want, or how would they be able to flex their authority.”

“Any meeting, any movement will result in a tip-off and people getting detained,” she said.

A Shanghai resident surnamed Chen said large numbers of petitioners — ordinary Chinese pursuing complaints against the government — have been sent out of town to stay at resorts, farmhouses or cheap hotels under police escort for the duration.

“[They are holding them] either at home or at a tourist resort,” Chen said. “Petitioners are graded [by threat level].”

“For example, if you are a key petitioner, they will hold you in a resort, while they give others a sum of money and tell them not to petition [around the party congress].”

“Some will send you to a farmhouse or a hotel … and pay for three meals a day.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

At least five Tibetans in the regional capital Lhasa have  taken their lives as a rigid Chinese government zero-COVID lockdown nears its second month, but Beijing is covering up the severity of the situation in Tibet, sources there told RFA.

The Chinese government imposed a lockdown 52 days ago in Lhasa as COVID numbers there and throughout China continued to climb. The netizens say the lockdown order came without enough time to prepare, leaving people in some cases short of food, while finding treatments for COVID-19 positive patients has also proven difficult. 

Reports of Tibetans jumping from buildings in Lhasa, which have surfaced on social media in recent weeks, are true, a source inside Tibet told RFA’s Tibetan Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“One of them was a woman, but I don’t have detailed information about the others,” the source said.

“People have been forced into this lockdown, and all the sources of information in Lhasa are blocked. It is even impossible to find information on what is happening to one’s neighbor,” the source said. 

“There are not just one or two people jumping from buildings …  actually there are many more.” 

The COVID lockdown policies placed specifically on Tibetans are inhumane, a Tibetan living in the capital who requested anonymity to speak freely, told RFA.

“The Chinese government is trying really hard to cover up any information related to people dying during this lockdown, and family members are warned not to share any information,” the second source said. “The family members are harassed and threatened over the phone that they will be punished if they ever share anything.”

The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy told RFA that it confirmed the veracity of reports about jumps from buildings.

“We have spoken to three sources inside Tibet who actually saw five Tibetans taking their lives by jumping off buildings,” Tenzin Nyiwoe,  a researcher at the India-based rights organization, told RFA. 

Chinese state media have reported 111 more cases of COVID-19 infection as of Sept. 25, with 60,597 people still held in quarantine in conditions described as harsh by sources inside the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).

Meanwhile, 786 people have been prosecuted by authorities for violating COVID lockdown directives in the TAR since the current outbreak was first reported on Aug. 8, official sources say.

Tibetans are not alone in suffering particularly harsh Chinese zero-COVID lockdowns and other restrictions. 

RFA reported last week that at least 22 people died of starvation or lack of medical attention on Sept. 15 China’s COVID lockdown policies in the northern Xinjiang city of Ghulja.

Videos posted by desperate Uyghurs on Chinese social media platforms—and quickly deleted by government censors—show local people under strict zero-COVID lockdowns struggling to access food and medical care, with some saying family members had starved to death.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Eugene Whong.