Day: October 11, 2022

A court in France has dismissed two defamation cases brought against Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy by Prime Minister Hun Sen and a senior police official, but both sides were quick to claim victory in the proceedings, citing elements that advanced their own narrative.

The Paris tribunal judiciaire ruled on Monday that Sam Rainsy – a dual citizen of France and head of the banned Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) – was guilty of defamation against Hun Sen when he posted a message to social media in 2019 claiming that the prime minister had ordered the assassination of Cambodia’s former National Police Chief Hok Lundy.

However, the court found that Sam Rainsy’s right to freedom of expression trumped the ruling and granted him clemency.

Hok Lundy died in 2008 when his helicopter crashed in Svay Rieng province during bad weather, but Sam Rainsy maintains that the aircraft was downed in an explosion.

“The correlative factual basis for this imputation [that Hun Sen is responsible for Hok Lundy’s death] is tenuous,” the court said, adding that Sam Rainsy’s statements were made “in a context of denunciation of violations of human rights by a political opponent who … cannot go to Cambodia in order to continue its investigations” of the incident.

“Under these conditions, it appears that a criminal conviction would undermine manifestly disproportionate to the right to freedom of expression protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

The court also ruled that an allegation in Sam Rainsy’s social media post that Hok Lundy’s son, Deputy Commissioner General of the National Police Dy Vichea, was aware of Hun Sen’s involvement in his father’s death and planned to take “revenge” on the prime minister, did not meet the legal definition of defamation. Dy Vichea is also Hun Sen’s son-in-law.

“The reference to a political opponent who could have other reasons to dismiss Hun Sen from power does not necessarily refer to recourse to violence but may as well refer to an alliance of a political nature,” the ruling said, noting that Sam Rainsy provided no details in his comments about the details of the alleged revenge plot and its status.

“Therefore, in the absence of precision on the projects thus imputed to Dy Vichea making it possible to establish their illegal nature and even to discern their exact content, the remarks do not undermine his honor and his consideration.”

In addition to granting clemency to Sam Rainsy, the court dismissed a countersuit by the opposition leader that Hun Sen pay for his expenses related to the proceedings.

In a June 2019 Facebook post that prompted the lawsuits against him, Sam Rainsy wrote that “Hun Sen killed Hok Lundy using a bomb placed inside his helicopter … because he knew too much about Hun Sen’s misdeeds.”

He also claimed that Dy Vichea “knows well the cause of his father’s assassination” and is “hatching a plan to avenge his father’s death.”

The Paris tribunal judiciaire heard both defamation cases against Sam Rainsy in a five-hour session on Sept. 1 before delivering its verdict Monday.

Ruling reactions

In a statement that followed the verdict, Sam Rainsy’s legal team welcomed the two acquittals, saying that “the French justice system has solemnly confirmed the legitimacy of his actions and defended his freedom of expression.”

“For our client, this judgment is much more than a personal victory, but is a ray of hope for defenders of freedom and justice in Cambodia and elsewhere.”

Sam Rainsy said Monday that he had won the case, despite the court’s ruling that he was guilty of defamation and then spared.

“[The] French court rules that Sam Rainsy wins the case against Prime Minister Hun Sen and his son-in-law,” he said in a post to the Telegram social media network, referring to Dy Vichea.

On Facebook, Sam Rainsy characterized the court’s decision as “good news.”.

Hun Sen also jumped on the ruling as proof of his “innocence” in Hok Lundy’s death during a speech he made to a university graduation ceremony in the capital Phnom Penh on Tuesday, saying the court found Sam Rainsy’s accusations “baseless and unwarranted” because they lacked evidence to support them.

He said Sam Rainsy had failed to provide direct evidence or any testimony through witness affidavits to prove the crash was due to an explosion, and no autopsy report was available to provide the court.

“It means that [Sam Rainsy] just made these accusations without having any evidence to submit to court. So the court said that this had nothing to do with Hun Sen,” he said, referring to himself in the third-person, according to a report by the Phnom Penh Post.

“What did Hun Sen want from this that prompted him to trouble Rainsy at his home? Hun Sen wants innocence and nothing else. [Rainsy] claimed that they won the case somehow and I don’t know how they can possibly say this.”

Hun Sen said he has no intention of appealing the court decision, but would follow along if Sam Rainsy does.

Hun Sen’s comments follow those of his lawyer, Ky Tech, who told local media in France on Monday that the court’s ruling showed Sam Rainsy had provided “no clear evidence or confirmation” of the prime minister’s involvement in Hok Lundy’s death.

Ky Tech also claimed that the court “also gave another reason to confirm that Sam Rainsy did indeed defame [Hun Sen], which cannot be denied,” without providing further details.

Cambodia case

The French court’s ruling follows Sam Rainsy’s December 2021 trial in absentia by the Phnom Penh Municipal Court for “falsifying information” regarding the death of Hok Lundy.

Sam Rainsy has lived in France since 2015 to avoid what he says are a string of politically motivated charges and convictions against him.

The acting CNRP leader tried to return on Nov. 9, 2019 to lead nonviolent protests against Hun Sen, urging Cambodian migrant workers abroad and members of the military to join him.

However, his plan to enter Cambodia from Thailand was thwarted when he was refused permission to board a Thai Airways plane in Paris.

CNRP President Kem Sokha was arrested in September 2017 for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government. Two months later, the Supreme Court banned the CNRP for its supposed role in the scheme.

The move to dissolve the CNRP marked the beginning of a wider crackdown by Hun Sen on the political opposition, NGOs, and the independent media that paved the way for his ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) to win all 125 seats in the country’s July 2018 general election.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

The grisly killings of two Chinese nationals, whose bodies were found stuffed into bags and floating in rivers within two weeks of each other, have put residents of Laos on edge.

No connection between the two killings has been confirmed, but authorities say both may have been involved in business deals gone sour, sources in Laos told Radio Free Asia. 

On Sept. 15, villagers from Vientiane Province’s Phon Hong district found a body floating near a dam that was identified as belonging to Chinese businessman You Hai Yang, 37, who had operated an iron bar manufacturer. The body was found in a plastic bag with his hands and feet bound, a police official said.

“They are still investigating and the cause is unknown,” a police official from Vientiane’s Naxaythong district told RFA’s Lao Service. “There is no closed-circuit camera at the location where they dumped the body. They don’t know where it came from, what direction. They know only that this body is of the person from the iron bar company.”

Yang was a “big boss” at his company, and had come to Laos three months prior, another police official from the capital said. The body was cremated in Vientiane, and some of the bones are to be sent to China for further investigation. The suspected motive is a business-related conflict, the second police official said.

Dismembered body

Two weeks later, Thai police on Sept. 29 discovered a suitcase floating in the Mekong River containing the dismembered body of Viphaphone Kongsy, 36, chairwoman of the Lao VIP investment company. A dual citizen of Laos and China, the woman also went by the name Lì Jūn Vp. She had been missing since Sept. 10.

The Lao Ministry of Public Security set up a special committee to investigate, but hasn’t released any statements or information about evidence. 

An official from the rescue team in Thailand’s That Phnom district, where the body was found, told RFA he went to pick up the body bag and found evidence that suggested murder. 

“Her face was beaten by something strong like an iron bar,” he said. “The right side of her stomach has been torn out. She might have been beaten hard with an iron bar before she died.”

A couple days later, residents in Vientiane spotted what turned out to be her car floating in the Mekong River.

Her decomposing body parts are being kept at the Nakhon Phanom hospital in Thailand, a Thai police official said. “They have to test her relatives’ DNA before they can return her body to Laos,” the official said. 

The two killings are the latest in a string of similar incidents involving Chinese nationals engaged in business in Laos, where China has invested heavily in infrastructure and manufacturing projects.

‘Very Afraid’ 

With the news of each case, the Lao public has grown ever more fearful, sources told RFA, sparking fears of growing lawlessness.

“News of the murder is making villagers very afraid. They want local officials, police and soldiers to patrol all the time, and the villagers want to take part to be the eyes and ears helping them as well,” said a villager from Phon Hong, where Yang’s body was found. Soldiers patrol the dam where the body was found 24 hours a day, he said.

“This was a murder with the intent to kill this guy without mercy,” a police official said, asking not to be identified.  “There have been killings in many provinces in Laos in the past mostly from drug trafficking and drug trades or robbery and stealing, conflict in the family, or among friends, but not as harsh as this one.” 

Reports of such killings have increased in recent years of growing resentment in Laos over Chinese business presence in the country, over Chinese casinos and special economic zones which have been linked to human trafficking and crime. 

Viphaphone’s investigation should be handled in a transparent way to ease the fears of the people, a Lao source who has been following the case told RFA. “They should announce what they know to the public, what’s going on, right now,” he said. 

Another Lao source who is following the case said that it was likely a business-related killing. “Based on observation, this case of murder looks like it stems from business conflict. But the police have not revealed anything yet,” the second source said. “We never dreamed that anything like this would happen in Laos.”

A former Lao government official with knowledge of cases like these also believes the deaths are a result of business conflicts, “perhaps with Laotian, Vietnamese or Chinese who invested money and had a conflict with her and lost,” he said.

A Lao expert on criminal law declined to express an opinion on the case or speculate on its outcome. “But I believe that related sectors must urgently solve this case because it is a horrible case for the public to think about,” the expert said.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya and Ounkeo Souksavanh. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Pyongyang is not yet in a position to deploy tactical nuclear weapons that could hit precise targets in South Korea but is likely to begin testing such weapons in the near future, experts told Radio Free Asia.

Recent high-profile missile tests carried out by the North were described by North Korean state media on Monday as having been a “simulation of loading tactical nuclear warheads” to strike military centers in the South.

But experts say the North is far from reaching such capabilities and was likely readying to test a tactical weapon – a smaller bomb not intended to cause widespread destruction – at its underground Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, where its six previous nuclear weapons tests took place. 

Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director-general for safeguards at the International Atomic Energy Agency, told RFA that Pyongyang did not have adequate fuel to produce multiple tactical nuclear weapons.

“The bulk of its plutonium has the wrong composition for short-range targeted strikes,” Heinonen said, adding that the North was striving “to produce good fissile material for miniaturizing nuclear weapons.”

Yet even once Pyongyang builds up enough enriched plutonium, he added, the testing of weapons would lead supplies to be depleted.

“They need to conduct nuclear tests if they want to miniaturize weapons. Once they will test it, they will see if it works,” Heinonen said. “Only then can they manufacture more efficient and smaller weapons.”

‘Not serious operational tests’

The recent missile tests were themselves “not very serious operational tests,” added Bruce Bennett, a senior defense researcher at the RAND Corporation, who said Kim Jong Un may have been driven by a desire “to make sure his personnel really understand how to fire the missiles.”

“In real operations, these theater missiles would need to be fired within a few tens of seconds of each other to then give their launchers time to escape before they could be targeted,” Bennett told RFA.

“But on the North’s five recent test events involving two missiles, the shortest separation in the launches was nine minutes, the longest 22 minutes, and the average 14 minutes. That is not really operational,” he said.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a press briefing on Tuesday that the United States was committed to “dialogue and diplomacy” to defuse tensions with North Korea but was also ensuring that its “deterrent capabilities are where they need to be.” 

“We want to see the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” Price said. “We believe that the best way to do that is through diplomacy – through principled, hard-nosed diplomacy with the DPRK,” referring to North Korea. “Clearly the DPRK is not there yet.”

Andrew Yeo, senior fellow for Korea studies at the Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, said Pyongyang was widely expected to soon shift toward ramping up its tests of tactical nuclear weapons.

“North Korea may be seeking to diversify its nuclear arsenal by advancing tactical nuclear capabilities,” Yeo told RFA, adding that its desire to test tactical weapons was “consistent with speculation from U.S. experts.”

“The U.S. and [South Korea] as well as Japan need to be vigilant in monitoring any military activity or movements in North Korea,” he said.

Written in English by Alex Willemyns, who also contributed reporting.

Two Rohingya have been detained and Bangladesh authorities are searching for others after pictures and videos circulated on social media of an event apparently marking the sixth anniversary of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) in several refugee camps.

A Rohingya leader said the Oct. 9 event, called “Happy Day” was the first time the armed organization openly declared its presence in the Cox’s Bazar-area camps, which are home to about 1 million refugees.

“Two Rohingya refugees have been detained and Bangladesh authorities are searching for others,” Faruk Ahmed, assistant superintendent of the Armed Police Battalion, told BenarNews.

The two, identified as Mohammad Joynal, 32, and Bakkar Uddin, 19, were detained in the Ukhia Balukhali camp-10 in Cox’s Bazar on Sunday and Monday, according to Faruk.

“Joynal was directly involved in hanging posters and spreading propaganda in favor of miscreants at the refugee camps,” Faruk said. “We already got some names from Joynal and we hope more names of those involved in this conspiracy will be revealed during interrogations.”

Police said “necessary legal action” has been taken against the two, who were handed over to officers at the Ukhia police station. They declined to say if charges had been filed against them of if they had appeared in court.

The insurgent group, which is active in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, was established in 2013 under the name Harakah al-Yaqin but was renamed ARSA on Oct. 9, 2016.

ARSA circulated videos and photographs of the sixth anniversary events on Facebook, Twitter and messaging apps including Whatsapp.

A video from Sunday showed dozens of people celebrating “Happy Day” while wearing t-shirts, carrying signs and hanging banners at camps in Cox’s Bazar.

Participants yelled out, “Oct. 9 is what day? Happy Day, Happy Day.”

In another, men clad in matching T-shirts stand at a table with a cake on it while an unseen person proclaims that Oct. 9 is the day ARSA “attacked Burma’s authoritarian rulers and freed the Rohingya people from oppression.”

International Crisis Group, an NGO headquartered in Belgium, identified ARSA’s leader as Ataullah Abu Ammar Jununi, who was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and grew up in Saudi Arabia. His current location is unknown.

In a video posted to Facebook, Ataullah is seen saying: “Oct. 9 is a day of help for the Rohingya community. It is a very important day.”

A camp leader in Ukhia who asked not to be identified over safety concerns said this was a first for ARSA members in Cox’s Bazar.

“Earlier they held meetings secretly, but this time they held meetings publicly and made it public on their social media sites,” the Rohingya leader told BenarNews on Monday.

Faruk said police have increased surveillance since the incident.

Repatriation

Within the camps, Rohingya leaders who want members of the community to be repatriated to Myanmar complained that the celebration could delay such efforts.

Bangladesh and Myanmar officials agreed to a repatriation plan in November 2017, but none of the refugees have been returned to their home country in nearly five years.  

Myanmar’s February 2021 coup and intense fighting since then between the Burmese military and anti-junta forces have made repatriation an even more distant possibility.

Myanmar authorities conducted a bloody crackdown on the Rohingya minority beginning on Aug. 25, 2017, after ARSA insurgents attacked a handful of Burmese police posts. The crackdown, since labeled a genocide, caused about 740,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.

Now, in Bangladesh, ARSA is terrorizing the Rohingya population it purports to protect, some say.

“ARSA forces common Rohingya refugees to join their programs. They are issuing threats to kill ordinary refugees if they refuse to join the program,” the Ukhia camp leader said.

He told BenarNews that ARSA frequently threatened him and other pro-repatriation Rohingya leaders, including in a video message issued on Aug. 29.

Security analyst Abdur Rashid, executive director of the Institute of Conflict, Law and Development Studies in Dhaka, said ARSA staged the celebration to demonstrate its presence.

“To keep visible its presence, ARSA is now holding programs inside the refugee camps,” he told BenarNews.

Asif Munir, an immigration and refugee affairs analyst, called on the government to take action against “Happy Day” participants.

“Though Bangladesh has long denied the presence of ARSA in Rohingya camps, intelligence and law enforcement agencies have information that some of the people in the refugee camps have connections with ARSA,” he told BenarNews.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

Two Tibetans have died from a pneumonic plague spread by mice and other rodents in a southern county of Tibet, with Chinese authorities now ordering county residents to stay at home, RFA has learned.

The two victims, who lived in Lhoka city in Lhoka (in Chinese, Shannan) prefecture’s Tsona (Cuona) county, both died in September, a source living in the region told RFA, adding that neither has been publicly identified.

“Moreover, people are not allowed to discuss it,” the source said, requesting anonymity in order to speak freely. “But we have learned that the two individuals had been helping someone else showing symptoms of the plague.

“One of them died at a hospital in Tsona county,” the source added.

A strict lockdown is now in force in Tsona, with county residents being told not to leave their homes, the source said.

“And authorities are warning people not to talk openly about this issue, saying they will be charged with spreading rumors if they are caught.”

A Sept. 27 statement by the Disease Control Center of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and other official Chinese reports have so far confirmed one of the two deaths, saying the individual died on Sept. 25 after developing breathing difficulties and a high fever.

Reached for comment, staff at Tsona county’s Public Office also confirmed one death but declined to provide further details of the plague’s spread or the numbers of people now infected.

“We have been able to contain the rodent plague for now, so if anyone wants to travel to Tsona county they just need to follow the protocols already established to stop the spread of COVID,” the staff member said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

Official sources on Monday reported 18,501 cases of COVID infection in the TAR, where sources have reported harsh conditions of lockdown including quarantine with inadequate food and medical care and the forced mingling of infected and uninfected persons.

Authorities in China’s Inner Mongolia in April issued a rodent plague warning in the region’s Baotou city, warning residents to keep away from mice and other wild animals, after finding a dead mouse in Baotou, according to an April 3 report in the official Global Times.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Written in English by Richard Finney.