Month: October 2022

Myanmar’s junta says it has arrested seven men and three women for carrying out a series of killings in Yangon. A statement released on Sunday said the 10 were members of the Inya Urban Force who were taken into custody between Oct. 1 and Oct. 6.

The junta said the group was behind the killings of former Brig. Gen. Ohn Twin and his son-in-law, ex-Capt. Ye Tayza in their home in Yangon’s Hlaing township on Sept. 24. Members are also accused of killing Maj. Kaday Phyo Aung on April 10 and the murders of several Yangon ward administrators.

The Inya Urban Force confirmed some of its members had been arrested but did not give the number. It said the rest of the group went to the Thai-Myanmar border to avoid being captured.

RFA has not been able to confirm independently whether the 10 people named by the junta are all members of the anti-regime group and was unable to contact the Inya Urban Force to verify the claims.

According to data compiled by RFA, nine serving and former military officers have been killed in the past 11 months.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) said nearly 16,000 people had been arrested since the coup on Feb. 1 last year, with 12,783 still in custody.

A tiny mountain-dwelling wren was the surprise winner Monday of New Zealand’s controversial bird of the year competition, which even had Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in a flap.

The piwauwau rock wren punched above its 20-gram weight, flying under the radar to win the annual contest ahead of popular fellow native contenders, the little penguin and the kea.

Fans of the wren set up a Facebook page to help the outsider soar up the final rankings when the fortnight-long poll closed Monday.

“It’s not the size, it’s the underbird you vote for that counts,” wrote one supporter.

The annual competition ruffled voters’ feathers in years past after a native bat was allowed to enter, then won, the 2021 title.

There was also outcry this year after the flightless kakapo — a twice previous winner dubbed the world’s fattest parrot — was barred from running to give others a chance.

The annual avian beauty contest run by environmental group Forest and Bird is popular with New Zealanders, including the country’s top politicians.

The leader of the opposition, Christopher Luxon, took to Twitter — where else? — over the weekend to endorse the wrybill, a river bird with a distinctive bent beak.

On Monday, New Zealand’s prime minister was momentarily ruffled live on air when asked if she had voted for her favorite bird.

“No I haven’t yet — you can’t just chuck a controversial question at me without a warning!,” Ardern said with a smile.

New Zealand’s leader revealed she will “always and forever” be loyal to the black petrel, which only breeds on the North Island but can fly as far as Ecuador, and she hopes the 2023 competition “will be its year”.

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America

Hours before dozens of Halloween party-goers were crushed to death in one of South Korea’s deadliest peacetime disasters, Maeng Geun-yeong, a private security guard at a nearby bar, says he sensed something was not right.

Maeng, who was posted outside the Prost Pub & Grill directly above the tiny alley where the stampede occurred, was not surprised at the crowd size – around 100,000 people were gathered in Itaewon, according to media estimates.

It was Halloween weekend — the wildest party night of the year in one of Seoul’s biggest entertainment districts – and young people on Saturday night seemed eager to let loose after over two years of social distancing.

What caught Maeng’s attention was the absence of crowd control in the long path outside his pub, which is lined with nightclubs, restaurants, and karaoke bars. According to videos posted on social media, some areas were so dense it appeared difficult to move, long before the crush began.

The situation was so chaotic that the security guard said he warned his friends to avoid the area. Not only did he see no police patrolling outside his bar, officers never responded to calls when two women in the pub sustained minor leg injuries in an incident about two hours before the crowd surge, he said.

“The police just weren’t there,” said Maeng, a muscular 24-year-old, whose voice became wobbly as he alternated between anger and tears while recounting events leading up to the crowd surge that killed at least 154 people.

Maeng spoke to VOA on Monday after laying a bouquet of white flowers at a makeshift memorial on the sidewalk just below his workplace. “If police had been at the scene in advance, the accident could have been prevented,” he said. “This happened because police were not deployed.”

As South Koreans try to make sense of the Itaewon tragedy, Maeng is among many residents who say officials should have anticipated the massive Halloween turnout and either employed a much bigger police presence or more proactive crowd control measures to ensure orderly movement.

Police response

Police have defended their approach. They said 137 officers were initially sent to Itaewon, a larger number than recent Halloweens with large crowds, though it was not clear how many police were assigned to crowd control.

“This was not a problem that could have been solved by deploying police or firefighters in advance,” said Lee Sang-min, South Korea’s minister of Interior and Safety, who oversees police nationwide.

Many analysts concede that a larger number of police, especially in such a packed area, would not have necessarily prevented the crowd surge – in fact, it may have made things worse. Instead, what was needed was a better plan to accommodate the movement of large numbers of people, they say.

Some government officials have said managing the crowd was more difficult because there were no event organizers. Authorities also plan to investigate unconfirmed reports and rumors of business owners who locked their doors or who may have incited the crowd.

Police have not determined exactly what sparked the deadly rush, which resulted in hundreds of people being buried at the bottom of the small alley. But even without knowing the immediate cause, the situation becomes clearer when examining the space where the incident occurred.

Obstructed movement

The passageway is steep and narrow – only about four meters wide – with high walls. It is also non-descript, with only a small convenience store and a few other shops; there is seemingly no reason for such a large crowd to be there, unless they were trying to use the alley as a conduit connecting the upper and lower parts of Itaewon.

The problem, then, appears to have been one of movement – or the inability of the crowd to move at all, with each side pushing against the other and those on the bottom eventually losing their footing, reports suggest.

“Everyone wanted to use this [alley] as a shortcut,” said Kim Young-ook, a professor at Seoul’s Sejong University, whose academic bio references his studies “on the relation between spatial layout and spatial behavior.”

Kim, who visited the Itaewon site Monday, is highly critical of the government’s response. Police should have used more barricades, police lines, and other tools to manage crowd flow, he said. Kim thinks the alley in question should have been closed; others suggest it could have been made into a one-way street.

The bottom line: there should have been more planning, said Kim.

“This is not just a matter of it being a ‘stampede,’ or a problem with the road itself, or that the gathering had no organizer,” Kim told VOA. “It is a matter of negligence.”

“It is wrong to blame Itaewon business owners, or the people who came here, or the victims,” Kim said. “The government and the police are responsible for the safety of the people – for any accident that occurs on the street or in the public square.”

“That’s a public road,” he says, pointing to the alley where the crush occurred.

Misplaced priorities

For others, it’s a problem of allocation of police resources. South Korean officials have confirmed a “considerable” number of police were deployed Saturday to manage crowds at political protests in other parts of Seoul.

For decades, South Korean authorities have routinely assigned massive numbers of police to even small demonstrations, which are a part of everyday life in Seoul. At the protests, police frequently use long lines of buses, temporary fences, and other barricades to manage small crowds.

Such strict protest management appears to be a remnant of South Korea’s authoritarian military rule, which ended in the 1980s, said Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

Richey says it is legitimate to question the disparity between the resources devoted to protests and those devoted to the Itaewon event.

“Tell me where your manpower is and I’ll tell you what you care about. And obviously, they clearly prioritize protests,” Richey said.

“At the same time, I don’t want them to swing back the other way,” he added, expressing concern that all public gatherings would be over-policed.

Political fallout?

It is a precarious situation for South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has promised a thorough investigation into the crowd surge. Yoon, a conservative, is already unpopular. His approval ratings have hovered around 30% since taking office in May.

South Korea’s last conservative president, Park Geun-hye, was brought down in part because of public fury over what was seen as her slow and inadequate reaction to the country’s last major disaster – the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry, which killed about 300 people, mostly high school students.

“I think they had a blueprint this time for what not to do – don’t be absent, don’t be cold, be on the ground,” said Richey, who said Yoon seems to have avoided major missteps with the Itaewon incident.

Others are not so confident about the government’s response. Kim Han-gu, an Itaewon business owner, said he thinks some government officials are already trying to avoid taking responsibility.

“It’s nonsense,” Kim said, referring to the comments by the minister of Interior and Safety. “It needed to be managed better.”

Maeng, the bar security guard, is also adamant that more police should have been on scene, and quicker.

“They could have stopped it,” he said. “And yet they didn’t come.”

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America

A new global public opinion survey of people in 25 countries has revealed steep declines in support for China, although Beijing still is seen favorably by many in Africa, where it is vying for influence with Washington.

The survey by the Britain-based YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project was carried out between August and September this year, polling about 1,000 people in each country, including in three large African states: Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. The survey asked people about their opinions on China, the United States and Taiwan.

The data showed that in the West, support for China has dropped considerably in the past four years. One reason for that could be the pandemic. When respondents were asked about where it originated, most people placed blame for the outbreak of COVID-19 squarely on China.

Asked if China had a “generally positive or negative effect on world affairs” only 17% of respondents in France said it was positive, down from 36% in the first survey in 2019. In Germany that figure was even lower, at 13%, down from 30% four years ago.

Many other Western countries mirrored this trend, but the story is slightly different in Africa, where China is the continent’s largest trading partner. Although its ranking also dropped slightly over the four-year-period in Nigeria and South Africa, across the continent, China was still widely seen as a force for good.

In South Africa 61% of respondents saw China’s influence in the world as positive, in Kenya the support for China was higher at 82% and, in Nigeria, it was highest out of the three, standing at 83%.

Still, despite Beijing’s no-strings loans and large infrastructure projects as part of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, African support for the U.S. remained slightly higher.

In South Africa, 69% of people interviewed saw the U.S. as a generally positive force, and in both Kenya and Nigeria that number was at 88%.

Preferred superpower

On a separate question about which country, China or the U.S., respondents would prefer to have as the global superpower, 20 of the 25 countries polled chose the U.S., including all four Africa nations by a huge margin.

Seventy-seven percent of Nigerians chose the U.S. as the preferred superpower, as did 80% of Kenyans, and to a lesser extent 59% of South Africans.

“Results from the African countries in this study stand out for how they reflect such positive views toward both America and China as actors on the world stage,” Joel Rogers de Waal, academic director at YouGov, told VOA.

“At the same time, however, they show an obvious preference for having America, rather than China, as the reigning superpower, which perhaps raises some interesting questions about the progress of Chinese soft power in these parts of Africa.”

On other, more specific questions, the U.S. fared less favorably. For example, asked which country had engaged in “bullying” behavior globally, Washington trumped Beijing in all three African nations.

Likewise on the question of which country has “given military support to one side or another in a foreign civil war, in ways that do more harm than good to the people of that country.” Africans blamed the U.S. for this more than China. And in terms of being suspected of interference in other countries’ national elections, the U.S. again fared worse than China.

And although Washington increasingly warns Africa and the world of the threat of Chinese spying and surveillance, respondents in both South Africa and Nigeria placed more blame for international cyberattacks on the U.S.

Question of Taiwan

While China was more popular among African and many other global South countries surveyed than it was in the West, that support was not unconditional.

The survey was conducted around the time Taiwan was in the news amid the controversial visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the contested island. Since then, Washington has warned that China could move to annex Taiwan sooner than expected.

In Beijing, at the Chinese Communist Party’s congress, President Xi Jinping said he reserved the option of taking “all measures necessary” on the issue of Taiwan.

While the vast majority of African governments do not have diplomatic relations with Taipei and back Beijing—which regards the self-governing island as part of greater China—the survey indicates ordinary Africans differ with their political leaders on the issue.

“If China used force against Taiwan … do you think other countries should provide help?” the poll asked. Some 60% of Nigerians thought help should be provided to Taiwan, while 63% of Kenyans agreed, as did 47% of South Africans.

Those numbers were higher even than in some Western countries, with only 38% of French people surveyed saying help should be provided to Taiwan, and just 52% of respondents in the U.S. agreeing.

The data indicates that global politics are not as binary as some believe, with ordinary people in Africa able to see China as a generally positive force in the world, while also expressing concerns about some of its policies. as well as support for the defense of Taiwan.

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America