Day: April 21, 2023

A former opposition party youth leader who was recently jailed after he posted comments on Facebook about the government and Cambodia’s king announced on Friday that he was joining the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.

Yim Sinorn met with Prime Minister Hun Sen on Friday at his home in Kandal province, where he and his family posed for photos as the longtime leader sat at his desk. 

The defection of a prominent and outspoken opposition activist comes as the CPP continues to work to silence, intimidate and co-opt opposition figures ahead of the July general elections.

Yim Sinorn has been a close ally of Kem Sokha, the leader of the now-banned Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) who was sentenced to 27 years for treason last month in a decision widely condemned as politically motivated. 

On Friday, Yim Sinorn blamed officials from the opposition Candlelight Party for ignoring him while he was in detention last month and for accusing him of being a double agent.

“Samdech Hun Sen, I want to see Cambodia to have a strong democratic system based on Cambodia’s standard and to comply with the Constitution,” he wrote on his wife’s Facebook page, using an honorific title. 

“It is my duty to be committed to protect peace and prevent any attempts to destroy the country. I have little education and experience but I want to serve the country and her people,” Yim Sinorn wrote. “If Samdech gives me a chance I would like to join the CPP to be able to serve the people and the country.”

Messages from the coffee shop

Yim Sinorn was once the head of the CNRP’s youth movement in South Korea, where nearly 50,000 Cambodians work, mostly as factory workers. In 2019, he helped organize a demonstration of workers against the Hun Sen government in Gwangju.

Later that year, he and nine colleagues were charged in Phnom Penh Municipal Court with conspiracy and inciting serious social unrest in Cambodia and elsewhere. In September 2021, he wrote a letter to Hun Sen saying the charges against him were unfair and that he never supported leading opposition figure Sam Rainsy.

Hun Sen was apparently satisfied with the letter and the court dropped all charges against him and the other nine defendants. Yim Sinorn returned to Cambodia in January 2022.  

In March, he was arrested after posting a comment on Facebook that seemed to highlight the political powerlessness of King Norodom Sihamoni, who is required by Cambodia’s 1993 Constitution to reign as a national figurehead.

“According to the people at the coffee shop, today we clearly know who is truly the king,” Yim Sinorn wrote.

He was released a week later after he posted a video and a statement from prison apologizing for the message.

“I take this occasion to ask for forgiveness from the king and apologize to Samdech Hun Sen publicly with honesty,” he said at the time.

‘A core person to Kem Sokha’

In February, Radio Free Asia reported that environmental workers and opposition party members are being offered jobs in the government by the CPP as a way of weakening any competition ahead of the July general election.

Political analyst Seng Sary said Yim Sinorn’s switch to the CPP makes it even more likely that opposition party activists will continue to defect to the CPP in the coming months.

“Yim Sinorn was a core person to Kem Sokha,” he said. “I think there might be more people defecting [to the CPP]. This defection is like a pandemic.” 

Yim Sinorn said on Facebook that he asked Hun Sen to release his colleague Hun Kosal, who was also arrested last month after posting similar comments about the king. Hun Kosal hasn’t apologized to Hun Sen and is still in jail. 

Yim Sinorn’s wife, Sophat Makara, posted photos of Friday’s meeting with Hun Sen on her Facebook page, calling the prime minister “my Samdech father.”

“My husband and family will try our best to work hard and won’t disappoint my father,” she wrote. “I can survive because of my father and mother.” 

CPP spokesman Chhim Phalvorun said Yim Sinorn has his political rights and can choose any party that he likes. He said the CPP will look into his request and his qualifications. 

Hun Sen made no comment on his Telegram account about the latest news, but he did repost an article from the pro-government news site, Freshnews, about his meeting with Yim Sonorn. 

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

Thai authorities have been investigating the disappearance of a Vietnamese dissident blogger believed to have been abducted from Bangkok last week as activists continue to review security camera footage from areas near the man’s home.

The Special Forces of Thailand’s Royal Police contacted Vietnamese-American human rights activist Grace Bui and other close friends of missing blogger Duong Van Thai on Thursday to learn more about the circumstances of his disappearance, Bui said.

Thai had been applying for refugee status with the United Nations refugee agency’s office in Bangkok. He fled to Thailand in 2019 fearing political persecution for his many posts and videos that criticized the Vietnamese government and leaders of the Communist Party on Facebook and YouTube.

Friends realized he was missing on April 13 after calls to his mobile phone that afternoon went unanswered. Police in Vietnam’s northern province of Ha Tinh announced on April 16 that he was in Vietnam. They said he had entered the country via trails on its border with Laos. 

Thai’s friends have publicly claimed that he was likely kidnapped by Vietnamese security forces and brought back to Vietnam.

Bui said there was some initial suspicion that Thai authorities may have assisted in the kidnapping. Another Vietnamese blogger, Truong Duy Nhat, was abducted from Bangkok as he was applying for refugee status in 2019. Activists have long believed that Thai police were involved in that case.

“I have spoken to the chief of Bangkok police, and he said he did not know anything,” Bui said. “I think Vietnam handled this case by themselves.”

BenarNews, an affiliate of Radio Free Asia, contacted Thailand’s deputy national police chief, the chief of the immigration bureau and the spokesman for the immigration bureau on Friday but didn’t immediately receive a reply. 

RFA also attempted to contact the Thai Royal Police via email but have not received a response.

According to the Bangkok Post, Thai police have contacted Vietnamese authorities seeking information about the blogger but haven’t received any information.

Coffee in the park

Bui and friends reported the disappearance on Tuesday. Local authorities have since allowed them to collect footage from public security cameras in the areas where the blogger might have been on the day he went missing.

Bui said they have determined from the footage that Thai left his home the afternoon of April 13 to go to a nearby coffee shop. He bought two cups of coffee and went to a park inside Rajamangala Technology University’s campus north of Bangkok.

He drank coffee with Loc AnHa, a new friend who is also a Vietnamese refugee and who also is active on Facebook, Bui said. Thai headed in the direction of his rental home after leaving the park, she said.

RFA contacted Loc AnHa, whose real name is Nguyen Khac Dinh Loc. This person confirmed that the information provided by Bui was accurate.

Loc said Thai called and asked him to go to the park to escape from the heat and enjoy the breeze – something they had done together previously. The two drank coffee while Thai did a live-streamed video in which he talked about U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Bliken’s visit to Hanoi and the recent trial in Vietnam of another blogger, Nguyen Lan Thang, Loc said.

At around 5:30 p.m., Thai finished live-streaming and returned to his rental home. Loc told RFA that he stayed in the park for a while before leaving.

Loc, a religious activist from the southern Vietnamese province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau, said he received the news of Thai’s disappearance as he waited for Thai to come to his home the next day. The two were planning to go to a market together, he said.

Vietnam authorities’ claim that Thai illegally entered Ha Tinh province from Laos was fabricated, Loc said. Thai did not intend to return to Vietnam and could not have traveled up to 920 kilometers by road from his place of residence to the Laos-Vietnam border within a day, he said.

‘Sets a grave precedent’

More than 300 Vietnamese refugees in Thailand signed a petition sent on Wednesday to the UNHCR’s office in Bangkok and to international rights organizations, urging them to investigate Thai’s case. The refugees also urged the U.N. to take measures to ensure their security and to speed up the process of resettling them in a third country.

RFA sent an inquiry by email to UNHCR’s Bangkok office on April 20 but has not received a response.On Thursday, the International Federation of Journalists condemned the abduction and detention of Thai and called on the Vietnamese authorities to immediately release him.

“Duong Van Thai’s abduction demonstrates the significant danger faced by Vietnamese journalists and sets a grave precedent for the safety of overseas media workers,” the group said in a statement. “Repressive and severe punishments in Vietnam for critical and independent journalism mean Thai will likely face persecution for his work.” 

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcom Foster. BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.

The military offensive began in Shwegu township on March 23 and continued for 19 days, during which the junta carried out more than a dozen airstrikes and engaged local resistance forces in at least 10 major battles.

Over the period, junta troops from the military’s 88th Division had killed at least 10 civilians and razed some 1,000 houses to the ground, residents said.

The offensive, which ended on April 10, is the latest push by the military to gain control of northern Myanmar’s Kachin state, where the junta has been battling local units of the People’s Defense Force paramilitary group and the formidable Kachin Independence Army since its Feb. 1, 2021 coup d’etat.

A member of the Shwegu PDF told RFA Burmese that at one point, the fighting was so intense that the junta “launched three airstrikes a day for six days.”

“They fired into the villages with heavy artillery that burned down the villages. The remaining houses were torched and destroyed by the junta troops,” said the PDF member, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing security concerns.

“A total of 12 villages were damaged. Some civilians were killed, too. When we tried to clear the ruins after they left, we found the bodies of civilians left unburned.”

Following the offensive, the junta convoy proceeded towards the main road between Shwegu and neighboring Bhamo township, the PDF member said, although he could not provide further details on its location.

A statement issued by the junta on April 9 seemed to confirm the reports, saying that “21 battles took place in Shwegu between March 23 and April 8.”

‘Those who didn’t die were shot’

A resident of Shwegu’s Si Thar village told RFA that 10 civilians from the area were killed by junta troops when their convoy suddenly appeared in the area.

“Some of them were herding the cattle in the fields, others were trying to hide when the advancing junta convoy found them,” likely on April 8, said the resident, who also declined to be named.

“They were captured and killed by the junta troops. They left some of them burning with their hands tied together behind their backs. Those who didn’t die after being set on fire were shot dead.”

The resident said members of the convoy set fire to the villages of Si Thaung, Si Maw and Nat Lan before leaving.

“The people they killed were only innocent civilians from Si Thar village,” she added, and ranged in age from 22 to more than 60 years old.

Residents buried the bodies, which were discovered with gunshot wounds and cut throats, on April 14, after the convoy departed, she said.

In its press release on April 9, the junta said that members of the military were injured during the offensive and that it had recovered the bodies of 17 KIA and PDF fighters during the fighting. It claimed that the KIA and PDF had been providing weapons and ammunition to resistance forces and smuggling timber after gaining a foothold in the area.

An information officer with the Shwegu PDF told RFA that 50 junta soldiers were killed during the offensive, while the KIA and PDF lost three fighters each. RFA was not able to independently verify the information officer’s claims.

‘We are still too scared’

Meanwhile, thousands of residents of Shwegu’s 12 villages have been sheltering in the jungle since the fighting began, according to area sources.

A resident of one of the villages, Man Hkar, said they dare not return out of fear that the junta troops would return.

“We are still hiding in the jungles, while some are staying in small huts on their farms,” the resident said. “People told us that we can go back because the fighting has cooled off, but we dare not. We are still too scared.”

Residents who have been surveying the damage said that during the 19-day offensive, junta troops burned down nearly 1,000 civilian homes in Shwegu’s 12 villages.

Some of the homes were destroyed by bombs dropped by junta jet fighters, although most were razed by arson, they said.

The junta has previously denied that its troops set fire to civilian homes.

A resident of Si Thar who was among those whose homes were burned said that rebuilding what the junta had destroyed would be difficult, noting that the local population is still dealing with the trauma of the fighting and loss.

“Some of us have fled to the town and some to the jungles, but we all are facing food shortages and sheltering difficulties,” the resident said.

“We can stay in other people’s houses for now, but we don’t have the money to buy new ones for ourselves … About 100 houses were burned in our village alone. I have become homeless.”

According to Thailand’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), authorities in Myanmar have killed at least 3,427 civilians and arrested nearly 21,500 since the February 2021 coup, mostly during peaceful anti-junta demonstrations.

Independent research group Data for Myanmar said that junta troops had burned more than 60,000 civilian homes across the country as of the end of February.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

Earlier this month, news that one of her family members in North Korea had died reached escapee Park So-yeon months after it had happened.

Park, who had resettled in the South several years ago, had heard only sporadically from her family north of the border in the past three years since the COVID-19 pandemic struck. As news of food shortages, starvation and rumblings of another famine trickled out of the North, she could only hope for the best, so she was crushed when she learned of her loved one’s passing.

“A lot of times, we find out about deaths a long time after they happened,” Park – a pseudonym to protect her identity – told RFA’s Korean Service. “I couldn’t believe the news. I still feel like it was not real.”

Most of the time, such news comes via a North Korean broker who owns a Chinese cell phone and can make calls close to the border by using Chinese relay towers. 

But recently, a clampdown by authorities on such cell phone brokers has led to reduced communication and long periods of silence, said Ji Seong-ho, an escapee who resettled in the South and was elected a lawmaker in 2020.

“It is not easy to get news of a death right away because of the situation” in North Korea, Ji said. “So, when you find out … six months or a year later, the heart breaks and it hurts more.”

Over the past year, many escapees who live in the South have been getting belated news that their relatives in the North have passed away, Seo Jae-Pyoung, secretary general of the Seoul-based Association of the North Korean Defectors, told RFA.

“Parents came to South Korea and settled here, but there are many cases in which their children died in North Korea,” said Seo. “The number of deaths has increased by two or three per neighborhood watch unit,” the typical community-level unit that meets once per week in North Korea. 

“There are many people who could not prepare firewood during the winter, so their bodies became cold and their immunity decreased because they also were not eating well,” Seo said. “They were so vulnerable.”

Many North Korean escapees fall into depression upon learning of their family members’ death, Kim Dan Geum, another escapee who settled in the South, told RFA.

“I see many North Korean defectors suffering from depression, thinking about their families they left behind in North Korea,” said Kim. “They hear the news that their family members have died of starvation.” 

Sending money – and fraud

The pandemic and crackdown on cell phone brokers has also made it difficult to send money to struggling family members in the North. 

Brokers can arrange for money sent from South Korea to an intermediary in China to be delivered to intended recipients in North Korea, after taking a percentage for their services.

Authorities have increased punishments not only on the families of escapees who try to contact their family members in the South, they are also punishing brokers.

With each broker that the government punishes, families who had been using that particular broker lose contact with their escapee family members. They will have to find new brokers to try to get in contact with their relatives.

Another problem that has risen out of the crackdown  is that sometimes escapees in the South are contacted by people posing as brokers, saying they have a message from the family requesting money.

“They say, ‘The family will starve to death if you don’t send the money.’ But we can’t confirm whether that’s true or not. There is no way to confirm,” said Kim.

She said that brokers try to emotionally manipulate escapees in the South by describing hardships suffered by North Koreans, but when they send money, there is no way to know if it was delivered or if the broker kept it for himself. 

“One lady I know said she keeps sending money, and the broker plays for her the recorded voices of the family saying ‘I got the money,’ or ‘I did not get the money,’” said Kim.

Seo said that there are frequent cases of brokers exploiting the situation in which direct communication with family members is impossible.

“Border control is now strict, so people from other provinces cannot get near the border. Still, brokers tell you to send money because they can deliver it,” he said. 

“I myself got a call yesterday. The broker said my nephew’s name and told me to send money for him,” Seo said. “I can’t connect with my nephew so I can’t just keep sending money. I can’t even check whether the money I sent actually got to him or not.”

Seo said that the defectors association has posted warnings on its website urging escapees to be careful when trying to remit money to their relatives in the North, because of the large number of reported fraud cases since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

“Remittance brokers are using various fraudulent methods to scam senders by pretending that money has been delivered to their families, taking advantage of the difficulty of access to border areas due to the recent coronavirus crisis,” the warning read.

The inability to discern between actual requests for money and fraudulent ones can be deadly for people living in the North, Seo said.

“A defector I know had a younger brother living in Hyeryong, who called her in April last year requesting money, so she sent it to him. Two months later he called again … saying he had [liver disease],” said Seo. 

“The sister said, ‘You don’t even drink alcohol. Don’t lie,’ and she hung up on him. A few months later news came that her younger brother had died. She began to wail, because what her brother said was true.”

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