Day: June 21, 2023

Tibetans would willingly accept Chinese rule if granted true autonomy by Beijing, the leader of Tibet’s government-in-exile said Wednesday.

“If those kinds of autonomies are granted to the Tibetans, they will be happy to live under the framework of the People’s Republic of China’s constitution,” said Sikyong Penpa Tsering, the head of the Central Tibetan Administration, referring to the status of Scotland and South Tyrol within the context of British and Italian rule.

“It is not a matter of who rules; it is the quality of the rule,” he said, speaking to the Australian National Press Club in Canberra on “resolving Sino-Tibet conflict and securing peace in the region.”

Penpa Tsering reiterated the Central Tibetan Administration’s commitment to resolving the Sino-Tibet conflict through the “Middle Way Approach” formulated by Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. The strategy promotes true autonomy for Tibetans under Chinese rule, as written in China’s constitution.

But he highlighted the historically independent status of Tibet and said that unless that status is recognized, China would have no reason to negotiate with the CTA.

Embassy lobbying efforts

Penpa Tsering’s hour-long address, which also touched on the Chinese government’s attempts to control the reincarnation process of the Dalai Lama, surveil Buddhist monasteries and restrict the movement of Tibetans, took place despite Beijing’s best efforts.

Earlier this month, Chinese Embassy representatives met with press club chief Maurice Reily and voiced their opposition to Penpa Tsering’s appearance at Wednesday’s event, requesting that his invitation be revoked.

China has controlled Tibet since it invaded the region in 1949, and rejects any notion of a Tibetan government-in-exile, particularly the legitimacy of the Dalai Lama, who lives in Dharamsala, India. Beijing has also stepped up efforts to erode Tibetan culture, language and religion. 

Speeches given at the National Press Club are broadcast on Australian TV and attended by prominent members of the press, and observers suggested Beijing may have lobbied Reily because it was worried about the wider exposure Penpa Tsering would get.

“I want to thank the Chinese government for always being the best publicity agent,” Penpa Tsering said at Wednesday’s event, implying that Beijing’s efforts did more harm than good.

Visit to parliament

Earlier on Wednesday, Penpa Tsering delivered a speech on the geopolitical significance of Tibet at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

On Tuesday, the Sikyong observed proceedings at the Australian parliament, where lawmakers Sophie Scamps and Susan Templeman detailed the situation inside Tibet under Chinese rule. He also met with several Australian MPs.

Speaking to RFA Tibetan, Kalsang Tsering, the president of the Australian Tibetan Community Association, welcomed Penpa Tsering’s visit on behalf of the estimated 2,500 Tibetans living in Australia.

“The honor that Sikyong Penpa Tsering has received here in Australia and in the Australian parliament has been overwhelming and it is evident that there is so much support from the parliamentarians for the Tibetan cause,” he said.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

The civilian death toll in Myanmar’s civil war continues to rise.

In the month through June 15, 123 civilians were killed by the military in the most fiercely contested conflict areas – in the northern region of Sagaing, central Magway and the eastern states of Shan and Kayah, according to tallies by Radio Free Asia.

Some of the people were shot dead or hit with heavy weapons during clashes between junta troops and rebel fighters, who have put up stiff resistance to junta troops throughout the country.

In other cases, such as in Kawlin township in Sagaing, residents were massacred after the military detained and used them as human shields, residents told RFA.

“Since they had to enter a minefield, [the soldiers] forced the detained people to walk ahead of them [carrying supplies] and clear the path,” said a resident of Khan Thar village, who like others interviewed by RFA Burmese, spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

“The villagers had to do everything they were assigned,” he said. “Then, [the soldiers] interrogated the villagers. In some cases, they killed them.”

Over the four-week period, junta troops killed 43 civilians in Sagaing, seven in Magway, 37 in Shan and Kayah states, and 28 in areas controlled by the Karen National Union ethnic rebel group, including Bago and Tanintharyi regions and Kayin and Mon states. Another eight were killed in Mandalay region and Kachin and Chin states.

‘No one dares’ return

In another mass killing, junta troops killed six civilians during a series of “clearance raids” on villages in Magway’s Yesagyo township from May 26-29.

A resident of Yesagyo’s Yay Lei Kyun area told RFA that the six – a 40-year-old woman and five men in their 30s and 40s – were hit by shelling, arrested and killed while fleeing the raids, or killed when returning to their village to put out fires started by junta troops.

“The soldiers killed men accused of being members of the People’s Defense Force,” the resident said, adding that the lone woman – a mother of two children named Ma Khin Mar Po – was killed by artillery fire as troops entered Mi Hpa Yar village on May 26.

“Between May 26 and 29, the troops burned 671 houses in our Yay Lei Kyun area,” he said.

The resident said that three columns of 250 junta troops took part in the raids on 27 villages in Yay Lei Kyun, which left “more than 3,000 people homeless.”

From May 25 to June 12, junta troops killed at least 35 civilians in southern Shan state’s Moebye township, according to the Karenni Human Rights Group. Among the dead were 10 women and three minors between the ages of eight and 17.

A resident of Moebye told RFA nearly all of the town’s inhabitants fled into the jungle to escape the fierce fighting and that “no one dares” return.

“When the soldiers knock on the door, they don’t open it,” he said. “If you do so, you would be shot dead.”

The resident said that prior to the latest clashes in Moebye, junta troops had entered the township, arrested women, and raped and killed them.

“That’s why no one dares to return to their homes,” he said.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tin for comment on the killings went unanswered Wednesday. Previously, he denied reports of soldiers targeting civilians, saying the military only attacks members of the armed resistance.

‘Ruling through fear’

Banya, the founder of the Karenni Human Rights Group, told RFA that the military is “committing war crimes” with impunity and “ruling the people through fear” to maintain its grip on power that it seized in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat.

“Whenever it becomes difficult for [the military] to crush any armed organization, they kill the people in that region,” he said. “They do such things to instill fear among the people, to ensure there are no ethnic armed troops in the region. They let the people know that if there are ethnic troops in the area, ‘we’ll kill you.’”

Banya said the military seeks to “drive a wedge” between the people and anti-junta forces through its acts of terror.

Political analyst Than Soe Naing said the opposition in Myanmar is growing stronger and expects that the junta will respond with even more atrocities.

“As the people’s resistance increases, the junta’s violence will become more severe, and the number of civilian deaths will increase,” he said. “Since the junta is increasingly using airstrikes, I think the number of civilian casualties and loss of villages and houses will inevitably grow.”

In the more than two years since the military coup, authorities in Myanmar have killed at least 8,640 civilians, including more than 2,400 amid armed conflict, according to independent research group the Institute for Strategy and Policy (Myanmar).

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

It’s June, and a young woman is standing on a public square in a major world capital shouting: “Free China! This is still our responsibility! June 4th isn’t our history – it’s our current political reality!”

Her nickname is Queshi, a student from China who has come to London’s Trafalgar Square to mark the 34th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on weeks of student-led protests in Tiananmen Square and across China by handing out leaflets and educating passers-by about a seismic event in her country’s recent history.

Now a member of the U.K.-based protest group China Deviants, the kinship and sense of shared purpose that Queshi believes she shares with the cohort of 1989 protesters, now in their 50s, is palpable.

But where does it come from? 

It comes, at least in part, from the fact that many of those who stood up on Tiananmen Square, the seat of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, to demand democracy and the rule of law were young women like her.

“What do I hope to achieve by coming out onto the street? I want to shout at the top of my voice,” Queshi told Radio Free Asia.

“It has always been so much easier for men to grab the podium – why? Because women are told to behave well, and to keep quiet, so we always get men’s voices taking power, not women’s.”

“As soon as I realized this,” Queshi said, “I stopped being a good little girl, and started speaking out very loudly.”

Historical erasure

Growing up in China, Queshi had scant idea of what happened on the night that fell between June 3 and 4, 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army fired machine guns at unarmed civilians and drove tanks over protesters on the orders of supreme leader Deng Xiaoping to put an end to weeks of “counterrevolutionary turmoil” in Beijing.

She didn’t get the whole story until she arrived in the United Kingdom.

“I realized then that women’s rights can’t be separated from mainstream politics,” Queshi said. “We need a certain amount of political influence and political power to achieve those rights.”

“The Communist Party isn’t just a totalitarian regime; it’s a highly patriarchal system … in which women and ethnic minorities are just there for decoration,” she said.

When Queshi looks at historical footage and photos of the 1989 student movement, she sees that women were still very much confined to support roles, with their contributions overlooked ever since.

“When I started to learn feminist theory, like power structures, inequality and the invisible exploitation of women, I learned that women are always erased in historical accounts,” she says.

“This is actually relevant to the 1989 movement, where women worked incredibly hard, but the photos taken and the documents handed down are mostly about the men,” she says.

‘You’re the first to ask’

Former 1989 student leader Wang Chaohua agrees with Queshi.

“Her observations are pretty sharp,” Wang, who led the Peking University graduate student federation, or Gaozi.

Wang and fellow activist Chai Ling were the only two women to appear on the Beijing police department’s wanted list after the crackdown. She remembers being taken to the men’s dorm at Peking University by Chai, who introduced her to prominent leader Feng Congde.

The problem was that all the student leaders’ meetings were held in male college dorms, in crowded rooms packed full of young men, with the women relegated to helping from the sidelines.

“When we would go to visit other universities to see how the movement was progressing, I learned that it was the male dorm we needed to visit in each school,” Wang says. “The women activists were treated like the male activists’ secretaries.”

At 37, Wang was much older than most of her fellow activists in 1989, and her age gave her more of a platform among the undergraduates.

“My role was that I was older than everyone else, whereas Chai Ling was in a weaker position, yet she was full of passion, and had this image of someone pure and idealistic,” Wang said.

“That image was strongly appealing [to the media] all the way through the hunger strike,” she said.

But Wang doesn’t often get asked about the role of gender in 1989.

“In more than 30 years, you’re the first to ask,” she said. “The issue of gender roles has been erased from history, or at least marginalized.”

Women’s rights not mentioned

Lu Jinghua was part of an emerging breed of Beijing businesswomen in 1989. When the protests started, she shut up her clothing store and pitched in collecting donations and gathering supplies for the students.

“I saw a group of students carrying donation boxes … [saying that] some students were on hunger strike” Lu recalled, adding that many had arrived from places far from Beijing. “A lot of the protesters had come from elsewhere in China and had nothing to eat or drink.”

“We thought we local people could help them out, these young people who came from out of town,” she said. “Everyone got together to give them supplies, like cans of pop and home-made steamed buns.”

Lu moved in very different circles to Wang and Chai, and joined the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation that organized workers to take part in the protests. She worked as an announcer, broadcasting updates on the movement over a tannoy in Tiananmen Square.

“We had all been traditionally educated, so we weren’t likely to have any of the more radical ideas,” Lu said, adding that she had little awareness of feminism at the time. “Maybe I had some, but its voice was very weak, and nobody made a point of bringing up the topic.”

That chimes in with Wang’s memory of the movement. She noted that women’s rights weren’t mentioned when students gathered to discuss which topics they wanted to raise with Chinese leaders.

In fact, she remembers women having more power and agency during the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976. Their rights once more took a back seat when Deng Xiaoping began his economic reforms in 1979, she said, but have since gotten worse.

“Over the past 20-30 years of economic reform, the bureaucrats have become rich and powerful. We often heard during the anti-corruption campaign about them having so many young women,” Wang said, adding that women had been increasingly “relegated to the position of providing sexual services in the middle of political power struggles.”

“It has become normalized — a matter of course,” she said.

A mockery

Lu agreed, noting that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s wife Peng Liyuan never uttered a word in public when a woman was found chained by the neck in an outhouse in the eastern province of Jiangxi in 2022.

“What contribution has Peng Liyuan made to [empower] Chinese women?” Lu said. “Has she visited them at a grassroots level? Does she understand their pain?”

“The Jiangxi chained woman scandal broke in March 2022 and Peng Liyuan represented Chinese women as special envoy for women and children at UNESCO,” she said. “That made a mockery of the role.”

For Queshi, women are much more front-and-center in Chinese activism today, taking a prominent role in the wave of “white paper” protests that swept the country in November.

Yet they have also paid a heavy price, with four young women – Cao Zhixin, Zhai Dengrui, Li Yuanjing and Li Siqi – detained in Beijing for taking part in the protest now being seen as symbols of the movement, including for the considerable personal cost they sustained.

Queshi said she won’t stop at commemorating the 1989 massacre, but will always include women’s rights as part of her political activism.

“Maybe letting everyone know about feminism will awaken some civic awareness in some people, and gradually lead them to criticize the entire political system,” Queshi mused. “Feminism could actually have a much bigger impact [than other approaches] in mainland China.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

Myanmar’s Ministry of Defense and two banks that provide currency exchange services to the country’s military junta have been added to a sanctions blacklist, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

The sanctions, announced on Wednesday, are linked to the Myanmar military’s purchases of arms from foreign sellers “including sanctioned Russian entities,” according to a Treasury Department press release.

“Since the coup, the Ministry of Defense has continued to import goods and materiel worth at least $1 billion, including from sanctioned entities in Russia,” it says. 

“These imports have both provided revenue to Russia and provided access to military equipment that has facilitated the ongoing brutality inflicted on the people of Burma by the military.”

The listings ban American citizens or companies from doing business with the three Myanmar entities, which include the Myanma Foreign Trade Bank and Myanma Investment and Commercial Bank. 

Both banks are accused of “facilitating the regime’s use of foreign currency to procure arms,” says a State Department statement, which slams them for providing “hard currency to Russia’s defense sector.”

“These banks also allow Burma’s revenue-generating state-owned enterprises to easily access international markets using the banks’ offshore accounts, providing significant financial resources for the regime to exploit for military purposes,” the statement said.

The Treasury Department press release says that the banks allow Myanmar’s military junta to turn natural resources into weaponry.

They “primarily function as foreign currency exchanges and enable the conversion of kyat to U.S. dollars and euros and the reverse,” it says.

“This conversion allows Burma’s revenue-generating state-owned enterprises, including Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE), access to international markets using offshore accounts and to transact more easily with foreign entities,” the press release says.

Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021 and has since been embroiled in a civil war primarily against the democratically elected government it ousted, but also the country’s many ethnic militias.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Three Uyghur brothers who escaped from China’s far western Xinjiang province a decade ago – and have been detained in India ever since – are aiming to seek asylum in Canada, their lawyer said.

After 10 years of being detained in India and unsuccessfully seeking asylum there, they face the growing prospect of being deported to China, said their lawyer, Muhammed Shafi Lassu. 

“This (Indian) government feels threatened by China, which is why they are hesitant to release these individuals and grant them political asylum, which they are actively avoiding,” Lassu told Radio Free Asia in an interview last week. “In a way, they prefer to keep them detained.”

Since their arrest in 2013 in the northern India-administered region of Jammu & Kashmir, the brothers – Adil, Abduhaliq and Abdusalam Tursun – have been moved around to various detention centers in Kashmir. They are now being held in a prison in Jammu city, Lassu said.

Lassu said that if any country were to offer the three Tursun brothers political asylum, he would petition the Supreme Court of India to seek their release. 

In February, Canada offered to resettle 10,000 Uyghur refugees, giving them new hope.

To help people apply for asylum, a humanitarian group called the Canadian Uyghur Rights Advocate Project has set up an online application that Lassu said he plans to use on the brothers’ behalf. 

Hopefully that will bring better results than his previous attempts to write the Canadian government to request asylum, which have not elicited any response, he said.

Lassu said he also wrote to several Arab countries on behalf of the brothers, but said officials there “showed no concern for the violation of human rights.” 

The United States and the United Nations have urged against the repatriation of Uyghur refugees to China, where there is a growing body of evidence documenting the detention of up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and others in “re-education” camps, torture, sexual abuse and forced labor. 

Crossing mountains

Facing persecution from the Chinese government in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the three Tursun brothers in 2013 – aged 16, 18 and 20 at the time – trekked through the rugged Karakoram Mountain Range and crossed into India in the Ladakh region of Kashmir. 

They were apprehended by the Indo-Tibetan Armed Police Force, a division of the local Indian Border Guard Forces, and detained for about two months.

The brothers admitted to crossing the border and were transferred to a police station in Leh in Jammu, Kashmir, Lassu said. In July 2014, they were charged with illegal entry and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

But Indian authorities later re-indicted the brothers under a special security law in Kashmir and have extended their detention every six months for the last 10 years, Lassu said. 

“This law is exceptionally stringent, allowing the government to detain individuals without trial,” he said.

The brothers have managed to maintain their religious worship and have learned Urdu, Hindi and English during their time in captivity, Lassu said.

“They pray five times a day in prison and read the Quran,” he said. “They fast during Ramadan. They have always maintained their religious dedication.” 

Risk of deportation

They are in danger of being sent back to China, according to Akash Hassan, an independent Kashmiri journalist who has written several articles about their case.

Hassan said the Indian government has instructed “relevant authorities to initiate the repatriation process. Therefore, there is a possibility that these individuals will be sent back to China at any moment.”

Lassu said he has also reached out to the UN refugee agency, or UNHCR, for help with the asylum request.

“They emphasized that if the government officially recognizes these individuals as refugees, the UNHCR will provide them with all kinds of support and assistance,” he told RFA.

But UNHCR doesn’t have those same requirements for other refugees in India, including Rohingya refugees who began fleeing Myanmar in 2012. 

RFA sent a list of questions to Rama Dwivedi of UNHCR’s office in India about the brothers’ case on June 13 but has not received a response.

Even if Lassu or another lawyer is able to bring the brothers’ case to the Supreme Court of India, it is very unlikely that the court will rule in their favor, said Hassan, the journalist.

Double standard?

India has a double standard when it comes to treatment of Uyghur and Tibetan refugees, he said.

“On one hand, India welcomes thousands of Tibetan refugees who have fled from the Chinese-controlled Tibet region, and a significant number of Tibetan refugees reside in India,” he said. 

“However, the treatment of Uyghurs differs. I believe this discriminatory and disparate treatment is associated with the Muslim identity of the Uyghurs,” he said. “It appears that India, under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, is increasingly embracing right-wing Hindu nationalism.”

The Indian government should cease returning Uyghur individuals to China and refrain from treating them as criminals, Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said to RFA in a June 13 interview.

Even though India hasn’t signed the U.N. Refugee Convention, it still has an obligation to abide by international law in cases concerning Uyghurs, she said.

Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

Hong Kong’s government broadcaster has removed thousands of episodes of old shows from its podcast platform in recent months, amid an ongoing purge of dissent in the city under a draconian national security law.

Episodes of several shows that were canceled but their archive retained on Radio Television Hong Kong’s Podcast One website have now disappeared entirely, a survey of the site on Wednesday revealed.

The move has been likened to – and is possibly coordinated with – the removal of “politically sensitive” books and other content from Hong Kong’s public libraries for fear of running afoul of the law, which bans public criticism of the authorities, according to an industry insider.

The deleted content includes the whole of the 30-year-old satirical news show “Headliner,” axed in May 2020 after being criticized by top police officers for poking fun at their denials of violence against pro-democracy protesters during the 2019 protest movement.

A keyword search for the show, which prompted the government’s Communications Authority to warn RTHK for “denigrating and insulting” the police, on the Podcast One website turned up the response “No results.”

Similar results appeared after a search for “City Forum,” a former live show that featured voices from across the political spectrum debating current affairs and ran for more than four decades until 2021.

Selected episodes of other shows dealing with topics viewed as “sensitive” by the ruling Chinese Communist Party — including the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, police violence, the political cartoonist Zunzi and the national security law itself — had also been removed from the platform.

‘Political pressure’

Last month, the Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper axed Zunzi’s satirical cartoon after what he described as “political pressure‘.”

According to an in-depth investigation of the Podcast One site by independent Cantonese news site The Collective, several other shows have been removed from the site entirely in recent months, including “Left, Right, Red, Blue, Green,” “Police Report” and “This Week.”

Talk-show host Tsang Chi Ho, who anchored the last-ever episode of “Headline News,” said all trace of the show now appears to have been removed from the public domain, and said it was similar to the recent purge of pro-democracy content from Hong Kong’s public libraries.

“Now, future generations will think that there wasn’t any satire in the media, if they don’t know everything that happened in the past 10 or 20 years,” Tsang said. “It’s a similar effect to removing books from public libraries in Hong Kong.”

“Even if the general public can hold onto their copies of these banned books, and are able to read them, they are denied as a part of official history,” he said. “I think this will lead to historical errors.”

A former high-ranking executive at Radio Television Hong Kong who gave only the pseudonym Mary said the removal of RTHK’s podcast episodes is part of the responsibility of the station’s “new media” department, and has been timed to coincide with the culling of politically sensitive books from public libraries.

“Only people on the inside know who is giving these orders, and which content is being selected [for deletion],” she said. “But these orders don’t need to come down [the chain] — everyone in middle-management knows what the criteria are, and they are interpreting them in the safest way possible.”

“It seems that everyone knows they can’t [interview] anyone from the ‘yellow camp’ — pro-democracy supporters — or anyone whose speech is fairly outspoken, free and straightforward,” she said.

Government control

The government took steps in March 2021 to strengthen editorial control over its official broadcaster, bringing in career bureaucrat Patrick Li and reforming its editorial structure to “ensure it complies” with government directives.

The move, which came after repeated criticism of RTHK from senior figures including police commissioner Chris Tang, was lambasted by journalists as a further attack on press freedom in the city. The government then ordered the station to rebroadcast more “patriotic” content produced by the ruling Chinese Communist Party-backed China Media Group, to build “a sense of Chinese identity” among listeners.

Mary described Patrick Li’s appointment as a turning point for the broadcaster.

“It’s pretty clear what’s allowed now … He’s been in office for [two years] and everyone knows where the lines are drawn,” she said. “It’s not just a question of who the director is — it’s the overall atmosphere and various external events like what happened to Zunzi, which means everyone would understand that he is a target for deletion.”

She described the deletion of content as an “erasure” that would leave the public with a blank slate when it came to understanding their city’s recent history.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Paul Eckert.