Day: June 6, 2023

The long-term goal of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States is a “seamless” defense and technology industry across the three countries, Canberra’s new ambassador in Washington, Kevin Rudd, said on Tuesday.

In his first public remarks since assuming the role, the former Australian prime minister said one of his first tasks would be to help shepherd legislation through Congress to enable the March 13 deal for the United States to sell nuclear submarines to Australia.

“Our critical tasks during the course of 2023 is to work with our friends in the administration and the United States Congress to support the passage of the key elements of the enabling legislation,” Rudd said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“This is not just a piece of admin detail,” he added. “You’re looking at four or five pieces of legislation, and each with attendant congressional committee oversight. This is a complex process.”

Beijing has criticized the AUKUS pact and Australia’s purchase of nuclear-powered submarines from the United States, saying the countries were going down “a wrong and dangerous path.” 

But Canberra says the nuclear submarines, which can travel three times as fast as conventional submarines and stay at sea for much longer without refueling, are essential to protect vital sea lanes.

Unfinished business

Negotiations leading to the March 13 deal were at times messy, with Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and chairman of the Senate Armed Services, initially opposing the sale of submarines to Australia amid massive backlogs across U.S. shipbuilding yards.

In the end, the United States agreed to sell up to five older-generation nuclear submarines to Canberra in the coming years while the Australian, U.S. and U.K. governments develop Australia’s capacity to build its own submarines by the 2040s.

But Rudd told the CSIS event that was only the first step. He said the bigger question for AUKUS would be integration.

“How do we move towards the creation, soon, of a seamless Australia-U.S.-U.K. defense, science and technology industry?” he asked, adding that success in integration of the industries “could be even more revolutionary than the submarine project in itself.”

It would provide, he added, the ability to turn plans, such as submarine deals, into reality “not 15 years, but five years, four years and three years, to remain competitive and therefore deterrent.”

U.S.-China relations

Rudd, who was prime minister from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2013, said his instructions from Canberra now were to “work like hell to build guardrails in the relationship between the U.S. and China,” over Taiwan and the South China Sea to avoid “war by accident.”

But he also said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong wanted Australia to work with the United States to “enhance deterrence”  to “cause the Central Military Commission in China to think twice” about any military action.

Rudd said Chinese President Xi Jinping made clear his main strategy was to use “the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy” as leverage, which he said was only interrupted by COVID.

“Even though growth has now slowed in China, Chinese strategy is fairly clear, which is to make China the indispensable market that it had begun to become,” Rudd said. “It’s directed to countries around the world in the Global South, and in Europe, and beyond.”

Rudd said the U.S. policy of “derisking” its supply chains away from China – without completely “decoupling” the economies – was a natural reaction to that geopolitical strategy, even if Australia, as an island nation reliant on trade, still preferred free-trade policies. 

Wong, the Australian foreign minister, used in a speech in Washington in December to call on the United States, which pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, to return to a focus on trade as it seeks to counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Rudd said Australia still wanted the United States to return to the trade pact – reworked as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership under Japan’s leadership – but was realistic about domestic pressures on U.S. administrations.

“We understand what’s happened in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. We understand the rise of industrial policy in this country,” Rudd said. “Our job is to work within the grain of U.S. strategic policy settings and to maximize openness.”

“Look, this is an old relationship,” he said. “We’ve been knocking around with each other for the last 100 years or more, and in any relationship, there are going to be times when you agree or disagree, but you decide to make the relationship work.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

In a rare ruling supporting press freedom in Hong Kong, a court overturned a conviction against investigative journalist Bao Choy, who had investigated the 2019 subway station attack by men in white T-shirts on civilians.

Choy was found guilty of “improper searches” of an online car license database in April 2021, after she used the site to access vehicle license plate ownership records for her documentary on the July 21, 2019, attacks at the Yuen Long MTR station. 

She was fined HK$6,000 (US$770), and lost an appeal against the conviction at the High Court in November 2022.

But she won an appeal at the Court of Final Appeal, which said she had been wrongly accused of misusing the search function.

“It’s been a long time since I had news this good,” said Choy.

But she also alluded to the ongoing erosion of press freedom in Hong Kong, pointing to the “quiet disappearance of many things” in recent years.

“I don’t think it’s so easy to take away people’s beliefs,” Choy said. “The persistence [we have seen] over the last few years is already pretty meaningful.”

In its written judgment, the court found that Choy’s use of the site had been due to “bona fide journalism.”

“The issues of falsity and knowledge were wrongly decided against the appellant because her journalistic investigation into the use of the vehicle on the dates in question did fall into the wide catchall category of ‘other traffic and transport related matters,” it said.

Hong Kong Exodus

Choy said she hoped the ruling would serve as an encouragement to journalists still working in Hong Kong, as many have joined an exodus of middle-class professionals, fleeing the current political crackdown and regrouping overseas.

At the time of her arrest, Choy was working for government broadcast Radio Television Hong Kong, producing documentary and investigative films for a weekly series titled “Hong Kong Connection.”

Choy’s film showed that police were present as the attackers gathered in Yuen Long, but delayed their response for 39 minutes as men in white T-shirts started attacking train passengers at the MTR station.

The film used footage filmed by witnesses and security cameras – as well as number plate searches and interviews – to piece together events, uncovering links between some of the attackers and the staunchly pro-Beijing Heung Yee Kuk rural committees.

Choy’s program also showed that stick-wielding men had been brought into the district in specific vehicles hours before the attack, and that police had done nothing about the build-up in numbers.

She was arrested after the documentary aired in November 2020, allegedly because her use of the government vehicle database wasn’t for the permitted purposes.

Shift in how journalists are regarded

Choy told Radio Free Asia in November that there has been a fundamental shift in the way journalists are regarded in Hong Kong amid an ongoing crackdown on press freedom under the national security law.

“In the past, there was a belief that journalists had fourth estate rights, and that reports that used such services to verify information were legitimate,” she said. “Society recognized and believed in the principle that certain events were a matter of public interest, so journalists had the right to access this kind of information.”

Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), a government department that had enjoyed editorial independence before a draconian national security law banned criticism of the authorities, let Choy’s colleague Nabela Qoser go after her hard-hitting questioning of city officials during the 2019 protest movement, as the government moved its preferred officials into top jobs at the station.

Management had earlier terminated the permanent civil service contract of TV current affairs anchor Qoser after she fired a series of hard-hitting questions at chief executive Carrie Lam in the wake of a July 31, 2019, attack by armed thugs on train passengers in Yuen Long, prompting Lam and other top officials to walk out of a news conference.

RTHK was later criticized by police commissioner Chris Tang over its reporting of police violence during the protests.

In March 2021, the government replaced the director of broadcasting and reformed RTHK’s editorial structure to “ensure it complies” with government directives.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

More than two years after it was founded as a shadow opposition to the military junta, Myanmar’s National Unity Government continues to enjoy high rates of legitimacy. The broader Civil Disobedience Movement remains robust, while the military is reviled. So what explains the military’s cohesion and what are the implications of the low numbers of defections?

On April 2, the NUG’s Ministry of Defense issued their latest appeal to attract military and police defectors. Defections are a key part of the NUG’s military strategy, and so it’s worth delving into the document. 

The NUG claimed that by the end of February, 12,327 members of the security forces, 3,236 soldiers and 9,091 policemen had joined the program. 

These numbers are higher than what People’s Embrace, an NGO that encourages defections and offers support to defectors, had previously recorded. The NUG’s Ministry of Defense didn’t provide any supporting evidence. 

Moreover, 8,000 people had defected in 2021; the rate dropped sharply in 2022. And when defections do occur, it tends to be individuals, not groups, let alone entire units. There have also been few senior officers who have defected.

While anecdotal evidence suggests that desertions are up, there is no way to quantify them.

Deterring defections

Stemming mass defections has arguably been the Tatmadaw’s most important military victory to date. 

They have done so through keeping close tabs on soldiers, monitoring their social media posts, made easier by subsidizing or forcing them to use SIM cards sold by MyTel, the telecoms firm that is a joint venture between the Myanmar and Vietnamese militaries. 

Soldiers and their families live in military cantonments and work in military-owned companies. They have all their savings in one of two military-owned banks, Myawaddy and Innwa, which allows the leadership to monitor large withdrawals. 

There are some financial costs to defecting as well. All soldiers are forced to buy a minimum two-year life insurance policy, with an up-front cost of K500,000 ($238), a princely sum for an enlisted man, and a monthly deduction of K8,400 ($4). 

And there are reports that the insurance provider, Aung Myint Moh Min Insurance Co., which is owned by Min Aung Hlaing’s son and has had the contract since 2015, have not been paying benefits out of a shortage of cash, unit-level corruption, and/or fear of acknowledging the high rate of casualties.

At the same time, all soldiers have a compulsory monthly deduction from their salary to buy shares in the military-owned conglomerate Myanma Economic Holdings Ltd. The rate is determined by their rank. All military personnel are supposed to get an annual dividend, yet none have been paid since the coup. 

Foregoing these investments alone is not enough of a disincentive, but coupled with the others, it’s an added deterrent.

And of course there is just old-fashioned indoctrination. The military has always been able to segregate soldiers from the population and brainwash them with a sense of superiority and responsibility that only they can hold the fractious country together. 

Given the use of war crimes as a deliberate strategy, including torture and killing of POWs, intentional targeting of civilians, arson destruction of more than 65,000 homes, beheadings and desecrations, many soldiers may feel they’re too culpable to ever be allowed to defect without punishment. 

In normal times, desertion would merit a three year prison sentence. But with fighting on multiple fronts and depleted manpower, the military has been executing would be defectors to set an example. 

A newly passed law on firearms criminalizes the selling or transfer of state-owned weapons or ammunition punishable with stiff sentences and making it, in some cases, a capital offense, another deterrent for would-be defectors. 

Insufficient support

There has been insufficient funding for the defections program. For the NUG, it was a conundrum. How could they fund defectors while their own supporters were living in squalor and being asked to support the anti-junta struggle? 

The NUG has provided limited funding, in particular, for those who defect with their weapons. In April, for example, three soldiers and four policemen defected with their weapons and ammunition, receiving $3,500 each. That won’t go far. 

The international community deserves much of the blame. Unwilling to support armed resistance, funding defections is the epitome of non-lethal assistance. And yet most donors view it as lethal assistance. It would be lawful under the U.S. BURMA Act, passed as part of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. 

Defections are key to the NUG strategy. While the NUG and their PDFs and affiliated ethnic resistance organizations have outperformed, they are not going to defeat the junta militarily, despite the regime’s admission that it has lost control in 132 (42 percent) of the 330 townships and declared martial law in 47 townships (14 percent).

The NUG claims that some 30,000 junta forces have been killed and over 11,000 wounded to date. Even if unconfirmed, it’s clear that the military has suffered high casualty rates amongst its 70,000 combat soldiers and its units are undermanned and operating at unsustainable tempos. 

Morale, we know from defectors, is very low. A recent BBC report discussed the demoralization felt by rank and file from public animus. Battlefield losses, limited equipment and supplies, have further eroded support. 

The military has had trouble recruiting, even to its two elite schools, the Defense Service Academy and the Defense Services Medical Academy, despite the anemic economy. 

The NUG’s strategy is to hollow out the military to the point that it can no longer deploy and sustain its troops across multiple battlefronts.

Not only do the defections deplete the military, but they are essential in arming the NUG’s forces. Demand has driven up black market prices for automatic weapons by three- to four-fold. While most Ethnic Resistance Organizations are able to manufacture much of their own arms and ammunition, demand right now is surging and exhausting production capabilities.  

The NUG’s Ministry of Defense warned that the People’s Embrace program was not open-ended. While this is probably for financial reasons, they clearly need to encourage a new round of defections, before this year’s dry season offensive, especially as the military gave itself a 51 percent budget increase to $2.7 billion for the 2023 fiscal year. 

The NUG must make a decision on the scope of a general amnesty, and message it clearly and directly to the troops. And the international community must have the foresight to support it.

But the opposition forces also have to get their own house in order. Recent videos have shown members of the NUG’s people’s defense forces mistreating captured pro-junta Pyu Saw Htwee militiamen. That conduct is not just unlawful, but un-strategic, and will reinforce military and pro-junta militia cohesion.