Day: July 10, 2023

Authorities at a prison in the Xinjiang region released the bodies of at least 26 Uyghur inmates before the Eid al-Fitr holiday in late April, police in various towns have told Radio Free Asia.

RFA contacted 10 police stations in Kashgar prefecture’s Maralbeshi county to confirm that authorities at Tumshuq Prison had released the bodies. 

Five of the inmates were elderly and died of heart and lung diseases, while one other died of diabetes, sources said. 

A Maralbeshi resident said many of them died of starvation because the inmates fasted in secret during Ramadan and couldn’t eat during breakfast or after sunset because of jail rules. Officials contacted by RFA did not comment on the matter.

In June, a source told RFA that authorities at the prison had released the bodies of dozens of individuals, including that of his brother, just before the Islamic holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

To obtain more information, RFA followed up by contacting police in the 10 towns, including speaking to officials in Sériqbuya, Awat and Chongqurchaq. 

When RFA contacted the police station in Awat, a Maralbeshi market town, to inquire about the body distribution on the eve of Eid al-Fitr, one officer said he was aware of the distribution of 18 bodies of dead prisoners, but he declined to disclose any information regarding the identities or their respective family members.

“We have knowledge of the events and circumstances surrounding their deaths as they were under our supervision, but I am unable to share further information,” he said.

“I believe the overall count of deceased individuals amounts to 18,” he said. “However, I am unable to disclose their identities.”

The police officer did not say whether prison authorities took the bodies directly to family members of the decedents, to the police station, or to a mortuary.

RFA previously reported that other bodies were taken to a police station before being handed over to families. The process took place under the supervision of county, village, and people’s committee officials and police. Additionally, authorities monitored the families for several weeks.

Tumshuq Prison housed locals arbitrarily arrested during the 2017 crackdown on prominent and ordinary Uyghurs alike, jailing them in “re-education” camps and prisons for alleged extremist behavior, such as previous trips or contacts abroad or religious activities. 

China has come under harsh international criticism for its severe rights abuses of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, including forced labor. The U.S. government and several Western parliaments have declared that the abuses amount to genocide or crimes against humanity.

A police officer from Seriqbuya told RFA in April that prison authorities delivered five bodies to his police station, and that most of them had been in their 70s or 80s and had been ill. 

“It appears that most of them passed away due to ineffective medical treatments,” he said.

The police officer also confirmed that one of the corpses was that of Abdugheni Qadir.

A person familiar with the situation told RFA that Abdugheni Qadir from Seriqbuya was the son of Qadir Toxti, principal of Sériqbuya Primary School. Authorities arrested him in 2017 while he was doing business in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The other three dead prisoners were Memettursun Metniyaz, Haji’ahun and his wife Mehpiremhan.

Metniyaz was a Uyghur motorcycle repairman jailed in early 2017 for completing the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, years before. He died of diabetes in jail and his body was delivered to his family, a local residential committee member who oversaw the return of his corpse told RFA in a May report.  

Haji’ahun, a hatmaker, and his spouse Mehpiremhan, residents of Maralbeshi county, were each sentenced to 10 years in Tumshuq Prison in 2019 for “illegal” religious activities, people with knowledge of the couple’s situation told RFA in a June report.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

Tibet’s foremost spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has revealed that Chinese officials have sought contact with him, either “officially or unofficially” to discuss Tibet issues.

The Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in Dharamsala, India, addressed reporters there on Saturday as he was about to depart for the Indian capital, New Delhi, and then a month-long sojourn in Ladakh.

“I am always open to talk, and Chinese officials have now realized that Tibetan people’s spirits are very strong, so in order to deal with Tibetan problems they want to contact me. I am also ready,” he said. 

The Dalai Lama, who celebrated his 88th birthday on June 6, did not specify when or how Chinese officials requested contact. He said that Tibetans are not seeking independence and have decided to remain part of the People’s Republic of China.

China annexed Tibet in 1951 and maintains a tight rein on the western autonomous region.

“Now China is changing and Chinese officials want to contact me officially and unofficially,” the Dalai Lama said.

While in New Delhi on Sunday, the Dalai Lama visited with a delegation from the U.S. organized by the Office of Tibet in Washington. Led by U.S. special coordinator of Tibetan issues, Uzra Zeya, the delegation also included the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, Donald Lu, and a senior USAID official. 

Also attending the meeting was Penpa Tsering, leader of the Central Tibetan Administration, or CTA, the Dharamsala-based Tibetan government in exile, and Norzin Dolma, the CTA’s minister of information and international relations.

Diplomatic meetings with the Dalai Lama are controversial. In May last year, when Zeya visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, Beijing protested saying that Washington was interfering in China’s affairs. 

Regarding Sunday’s visit, China’s Embassy in India voiced Beijing’s objection on Twitter.

“The US should take concrete actions to honor its commitment of acknowledging Xizang [Tibet] as part of China, stop meddling in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of Xizang-related issues, and offer no support to the anti-China separatist activities of the Dalai clique,” the embassy’s spokesperson Wang Xiaojian said in the tweet. 

Such a response is typical for China, Tenzin Lekshey, the spokesperson for the CTA, told RFA.

 “The Chinese government has always been hostile whenever U.S. officials, or for that matter any dignitaries, meet with the Dalai Lama or Tibetan leaders from CTA, so this is not something new,” Tenzin Lekshey said.  

The spokesperson denied China’s claim that the Dalai Lama and the CTA are separatist, citing the Middle-Way Approach, a CTA official policy he described as a way to “peacefully resolve the issue of Tibet and to bring about stability and co-existence between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples based on equality and mutual cooperation.” 

The Chinese government must take the initiative to solve the Tibet problem,” he said.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Eugene Whong.

Hong Kong’s “last elected district councilors” have called on the international community to withdraw recognition for the city’s legislature after it voted to slash the number of directly elected district council seats.

The city’s legislature – which has been packed with pro-Beijing members since changes to the electoral system that saw chief executive John Lee “win” an election in which he was the only candidate – voted unanimously last week to slash the number of directly elected seats on District Council from 452 to just 88.

The move comes amid an ongoing crackdown on public dissent and political opposition in Hong Kong, and after millions of voters in Hong Kong delivered a stunning rebuke to Beijing and their own government with a landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates across the city’s 18 district councils at the height of the 2019 protest movement.

Lee welcomed the changes to the District Council election rules, which will also ensure that pro-democracy candidates won’t be able to run in the next election.

“We must … completely exclude those anti-China and destabilizing forces from the District Councils,” Lee said in a July 8 statement. “This legislative exercise [will] ensure that the District Councils are firmly in the hands of patriots.”

Lee said the government is looking for candidates who are “capable, experienced, with relevant skill sets suited to the needs of the districts, and patriotic,” although the government has yet to set a date for the district election.

Under the new rules, which took effect on Monday, candidates will have to pass a national security background check and secure at least three nominations from several committees loyal to the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.

More than 20 former District Council members in exile have called on the international community to withdraw official recognition of Hong Kong’s Legislative and District Councils, which no longer “legally represent the people of Hong Kong.”

Elections for show

The joint letter authored by former Shek Tong Tsui district councilor Sam Yip, who fled the ongoing crackdown to live in Japan, said that the latest legislation has sounded the death knell for any kind of democracy in Hong Kong.

“Under the framework of the Hong Kong government’s so-called ‘patriots governing Hong Kong’ policy, candidates must show their loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party before they can run for election,” Yip said. “[They have to] go to these pro-government people to get nominated.”

Former Legislative Council member and former District Council member Ted Hui, who is among eight prominent overseas activists wanted by national security police for “collusion with foreign forces,” said he, Yip and the other signatories to the letter were “the last democratically elected district councilors.”

“Maybe we would never get through the government’s review process … but the public opinion we represented still exists,” Hui said. “We may scatter all over the world, but we still want to serve the people of Hong Kong.”

Daniel Kwok, a former Hong Kong district councilor now living in the United Kingdom, said the whole electoral system in Hong Kong is now just there for show.

“You have to pass the qualification review [examining your loyalty to Beijing] and a political review process,” Kwok said. “It’s a high threshold.”

“The motivation is clear — it’s to cling to the principle that only patriots can rule Hong Kong, and eliminate any of the voices of the so-called ‘anti-China chaotic elements’ in Hong Kong,” he said.

2020 National Security Law

Kwok said it’s important to amplify these changes to the rest of the world.

“Many Western democracies may not have a timely understanding of the situation,” he said. “Nobody has yet formally discussed the changes to the electoral rules for the Legislative Council and District Council at the United Nations Human Rights Council.”

“We have to keep on speaking out and keep the issue alive in the international community,” he said.

The European Union said in a July 6 statement that the changes go against China’s commitment to democratic representation under the terms of the 1997 handover.

“This severely weakens the ability of the people of Hong Kong to choose representatives overlooking district affairs,” it said, noting that the decision follows the imposition of a draconian national security law on Hong Kong from July 2020.

“These developments raise serious questions about the state of fundamental freedoms, democracy and political pluralism in Hong Kong that were supposed to remain protected until at least 2047 under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 and China’s international commitments,” it said.

The Hong Kong government “vehemently rejected” the EU statement and said the bloc was “interfering in Hong Kong matters, which are purely China’s internal affairs.”

It said there was no mention of democratically elected district councilors in the handover treaty or Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

It said the elected component under the new rules would still be larger than it was under British rule during the 1980s.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Paul Eckert.

The death of Hong Kong singer and Disney “Mulan” voice actress Coco Lee on July 5 has left many mourning an international star who struggled with depression to the extent of wanting to take her own life at a relatively young age.

It has also focused attention once more on mental health in China, public awareness of which has burgeoned since the turn of the century, albeit amid an ongoing struggle to meet demand for psychological and psychiatric services.

Many in the country are at risk of depression – especially young adults, according to a recent survey.

Yet China currently has just under two psychiatrists per 100,000 head of population, compared with a developed world average of just over nine, according to the World Health Organization, while a 2021 study by Beijing-based researchers published in The Lancet found that just 9.5% of patients with depression in China receive medical treatment.

Faced with a weakening economy after three years of stringent pandemic restrictions, skyrocketing unemployment and life under a high-tech authoritarian regime, China’s 18-24 year-olds were found to have a 24.1% risk of depression in a government mental health survey completed last year, compared with an overall risk of 10.6% for adults generally.

Standardized testing carried out by government researchers for the 2021-2022 China National Mental Health Survey also showed a similar rise in reported symptoms of anxiety in the same age group.

But as many who follow Lee’s tragic story are aware, depression and other mental health problems manifest differently in everyone.

For the young people who spoke to Radio Free Asia, political repression, economic woes and workplace discrimination were cited as the main causes of mental health difficulties.

Wang Xia, a recent graduate and rights activist living in Beijing, struggles with a lack of economic security and conflict with her immediate family. Like other individuals quoted in this article, she requested anonymity to speak frankly about her difficulties, so RFA is using a  pseudonym to identify her.

“I nearly jumped out of the building yesterday afternoon,” Wang said after getting into a fight with her mother on the phone. “I cried and screamed at her for a long time. Then I opened the balcony window. I wanted to jump, but my boyfriend quickly grabbed me from behind and held onto me.”

Wang said she has been arguing on and off for the past few days with her mother, who she says has no way of understanding her rights activism. Her experiences sound similar to what other young activists have termed “political depression.”

Political repercussions

Despite an ongoing and ever-widening crackdown on dissidents and rights lawyers under ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, Wang has continued to provide assistance to dissidents and young activists, including campaigning for the release of those detained after the “white paper” protests of November 2022.

While Wang doesn’t feel as if she’s done anything significant, she is still traumatized by the fear of political repercussions.

“One time, I visited the family of a friend who was in trouble, and the state security people found me, and detained me for an hour or two,” she said.

“After that, I had trouble sleeping, and had a hard time focusing on work for about a week, and I kept drinking.”

But there are few people Wang can share her troubles with.

“Both of my parents are part of the system, and my mother is very controlling,” she said. “She likes to interfere in my personal life, and holds my personal values in disdain, which is disgusting and frightening.”

Wang can’t afford psychotherapy, and as noted by the WHO, there aren’t many doctors around with expertise in mental health. Her economic situation is insecure, so she relies on emotional support from her boyfriend and antidepressants to keep going.

A study published by China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in June 2023 found that 21.08% of college students at a university in Shandong had experienced at least one traumatic event, and that those who were unable to stop returning to a traumatic event in their minds were most at risk of suicide.

Wang Xia’s boyfriend Xiao Sun is also struggling, mostly from anxiety linked to harassment by state security police, he told RFA Mandarin.

Sun said he first ran afoul of the school authorities when he refused to install an anti-fraud app on his smartphone, arguing that it collected far too much personal information from users.

“I didn’t even do anything very extreme, such as call on others to resist it alongside me,” he said. “I just didn’t install it on my phone.”

“I kept a very low profile, but I was hauled in by my advisor, who was actually pretty nasty,” Sun said. “We were talking for more than an hour.”

‘Stability maintenance’ target

For a four-month period in 2022, Sun’s university was under COVID-19 lockdown.

Students were unhappy about the fact that there was no written record of the regulations, which were handed down by their lecturers verbally.

Sun applied to the school’s ruling Chinese Communist Party committee under disclosure of information laws, and spoke to a rights attorney via WeChat.

Sun said that conversation was intercepted by the state security police, making him a “stability maintenance” target.

“The state security police got directly in touch with the campus security and demanded that they investigate me,” Sun said. “I was interrogated continuously, and the school principal got personally involved.”

“He said there was a problem with the way my institute was educating students, and said they had to deal with me.”

Faced with huge political pressure, Sun withdrew his information disclosure request.

Later, according to Sun, his advisor arranged for one of Sun’s dorm-mates – a Communist Party member – to keep an eye on him, and report back on everything he did, plunging him into a state of constant anxiety.

“I am constantly aware that there is always someone watching me,” Sun said. “I have no privacy and I don’t ever feel safe.”

Added to that is the regular kind of pressure experienced by students and fresh graduates, especially in the current economic climate.

“On the first day of school, the dean gave a speech to the freshmen, in which he told us ‘you won’t find a job after graduating – not in this major’,” Sun said. “Your only option is to go on to pursue postgraduate studies.”

“This made everyone feel quite hopeless, since the acceptance rate for postgraduate studies is so low,” he said.

And getting a job isn’t always the key to better mental health.

Sexual harassment and bullying

Liu Fang, who landed a sought-after government job after graduating from university, was diagnosed with depression four years later.

She blames a sycophantic and hierarchical workplace culture, sexual harassment and bullying from her immediate boss.

“Their criticism of me would be that I worship foreign culture and that my thinking is more westernized,” Liu said. “I believe in universal values like freedom, equality and civil rights.”

“I think everyone should be equal.”

Liu describes herself as a straight-talking person who doesn’t like to blindly follow orders at work, and who is unwilling to engage in flattery of her superiors.

“[My supervisor] expects his subordinates to anticipate his wishes as if he were an emperor,” she said. “But I’m not the kind of person who will do that.”

“His way of retaliating is to constantly nitpick about my work, pointing out minor errors in punctuation or page-numbering,” she said. “He’ll say stuff like — ‘are you here to work or just play around?'”

“He singles me out at our weekly meetings and criticizes me for half an hour to an hour, with emotionally manipulative verbal abuse,” she said.

And his behavior hasn’t stopped there, Liu said, adding that he has also sexually harassed her, with her refusal to play along with it annoying him still further.

Liu describes the psychological abuse she has faced in the workplace as “like a nightmare,” but she can’t afford to quit in the current economic climate.

Lockdowns exact toll

Outside of the office, the environment for women is scarcely any better.

The discovery of a woman chained by the neck in an outbuilding in the eastern province of Jiangsu rocked the country last year. Authorities later said she was a trafficking victim who had borne eight children with a man who had acquired her.

“No wonder so many people in China say that a marriage certificate is a way of selling yourself to someone,” Liu said. “Because once a man marries you, he can beat you, curse you, enslave you, and use you for your labor and reproductive abilities.”

“Everyone, including the law, supports this,” she said.

Women in Jiangsu’s Feng county, where the chained woman was found, have been repeatedly denied divorces despite being victims of human trafficking from other parts of China, according to media reports at the time.

Against such a background, Liu is unwilling to date, marry or have children, despite ongoing pressure from her parents.

She was diagnosed with depression by a medical doctor in March.

Others have pointed to the three years of grueling lockdowns, mass quarantine and digital surveillance under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy, which ended in December 2022 following nationwide protests in November.

While the government has refused to release detailed statistics, anecdotal evidence has pointed to a spate of suicides during the grueling lockdowns of the zero-COVID policy, which ended in December following nationwide protests by young people.

In an apparent attempt to address the issue, the authorities called on local governments last November to set up psychological assistance hotlines for people forced into compulsory quarantine.

“Psychological counseling and support should be provided to relieve negative emotions, to alleviate their distress caused by the epidemic and to prevent extreme events triggered by psychological stress by those subject to quarantine or health monitoring,” the state-backed Global Times quoted official guidelines as saying.

‘Collective trauma’

Many of the young people who spoke to RFA cited external factors as the reason for their depression or poor mental health. The ICD-10 diagnostic manual in use in the United States lists both “reactive” and “situational” depression among its diagnoses.

“Let me put it this way,” 30-something Shanghai resident Zhao Di said, detailing a litany of economic reasons for depression among her social circle. “Not a single person I know has told me they’re happy.”

“Everyone’s dreams have been shattered these last three years,” she said of the zero-COVID policy that laid waste China’s export-oriented, manufacturing economy.

“Everyone feels like they’ve hit rock bottom,” Zhao said, adding that many don’t even have the luxury of “lying flat,” a passive response reported by China’s younger generation in the face of massive pressure to tick off traditional goals like marriage, a mortgage and children in the face of huge economic obstacles.

“The lucky ones can lie flat, but the less lucky who are carrying millions of yuan in mortgage debt feel as if their lives aren’t worth living,” she said. “Every day is filled with fear and trepidation.”

Another factor affecting people’s mood is the shrinking space for free speech, amid ever-widening controls on public expression by the government after a decade under ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

According to a 2023 report by Freedom House, the government “continues to tighten control over all aspects of life and governance, including the state bureaucracy, the media, online speech, religious practice, universities, businesses, and civil society associations.”

China’s civil society, once a significant provider of mental health and support services to the marginalized, is described in the report as having been “largely decimated.”

Many of the people Zhao used to follow on social media have now had their accounts shut down by government censors, cutting off another source of connection and support.

“People feel suffocated when their main channels of communication are cut off,” Zhao said. “It’s like being gagged, and this feeling is fermenting inside them.”

“People of our generation living [in today’s China] are trapped in a general state of depression,” she said, adding that people are now being banned just for talking about unemployment or other economic woes.

“Such things are labeled ‘negative energy’ or ‘disharmonious voices’,” she said.

Ren Ruihong, who has worked with youth mental health rescue projects in China, said economic uncertainty is one of the biggest factors creating mental health problems among young people in China today.

“We know that there is significant economic pressure, while social security provision is woefully inadequate,” Ren said. “Everyone is in a constant state of worry.”

“Many people of this generation care about politics, especially in big cities,” Ren said. “They used to be able to go online and vent their frustrations by getting over the Great Firewall, but they daren’t do that any more.”

She said many people have now reached the limit of their personal resilience.

Liu Fang agreed.

“Mental health issues have gotten to the point where it’s not just an individual problem any more – it has become a collective trauma,” she said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Paul Eckert, Matthew Pennington and Steven Springer.

The mother of a Cambodian activist arrested in Thailand has pleaded to authorities not to deport her son to Cambodia, where he could face persecution under strongman ruler Hun Sen’s sweeping campaign against political opponents.

Thol Samnang, a member of the opposition Candlelight Party, was snatched off the streets of Bangkok by men in plainclothes before dawn on Friday as he made his way to the office of the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, according to an eyewitness and human rights advocacy groups.

The arrest is the latest in a series of incidents where foreign activists fleeing repression in their home countries have been detained on Thai soil.

“I’m afraid officials in Thailand may send him to Cambodian officials to be punished,” Chaet Lak, his mother who lives in Cambodia, told Radio Free Asia (RFA), a news service affiliated with BenarNews. “I want human rights organizations to help prevent his deportation.”

Samnang fled Cambodia on July 4, a day after police and government authorities visited his home to detain him without a warrant.

The 34-year-old had criticized Prime Minister Hun Sen and the governing Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) on Facebook in the weeks leading up to his departure, his mother told RFA Khmer in an interview on Sunday.

Cham Chit, a Cambodian citizen who left the country with Samnang, said the two were seeking asylum in Thailand.

“But on July 7, plainclothes Thai officials arrested him and took him away on a motorcycle as we were leaving our residence near the Victory Monument,” he told RFA, referring to a military memorial at the heart of Bangkok.

Samnang was being held at an immigration detention center in the Thai capital, said Pornpen Khongkachonkiet, director of the Cross Cultural Foundation, a local NGO providing legal aid and advocacy for victims of human rights abuses.

“We received an assurance from the immigration officials that there will not be an immediate deportation,” she told BenarNews on Monday. “Our lawyer is processing him to gain protection through the UNHCR or the Thai government.”

She said Thailand’s recently enacted Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance Act  prohibited the deportation of anyone who faces a serious threat to life or freedom – a key principal of the U.N. Refugee Convention known as non-refoulement.

Samnang would face an uncertain fate if forcibly sent back to Cambodia. 

Hun Sen, who has ruled the Southeast Asian nation of 16 million for nearly four decades, has clamped down on democratic freedoms, jailed or exiled political rivals, and shut independent media outlets.

In May, the National Election Committee disqualified the Candlelight Party from competing in Cambodia’s July 23 parliamentary elections, leaving no credible challenger to the CPP.

‘Well-founded fear of persecution’

Human Rights Watch called on Thailand to protect Samnang.

“It is absolutely urgent that UNHCR be granted immediate access to Thol Samnang so he can explain his very serious, well-founded fear of persecution if he is forced to return to Cambodia, and receive refugee protection,” Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director, told BenarNews on Monday.

“Quite clearly, the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and key officials are turning up the heat against anyone who dares criticize government policies or questions the upcoming election, which Human Rights Watch believes will be neither free nor fair.

“Thailand should refuse to participate in Phnom Penh’s efforts at transnational repression against opposition political activists.”

A UNHCR spokeswoman said she could not comment on the details or even confirm the existence of individual cases. The Thai Immigration Bureau did not immediately respond to a BenarNews request for comment.

Thailand has hosted thousands of refugees from neighboring countries who fled war, natural disasters and human rights violations.

Still, rights advocates have criticized Thailand’s pro-military government for recent cases where refugees and asylum seekers have been deported to face prosecution and other rights abuses in their home countries. 

Khoukham Keomanivong, a Lao activist living in Thailand as a U.N.-recognized refugee, was arrested by Thai police in Bangkok on Jan. 29, 2022, for overstaying his visa. He was released on bail on Feb. 1 with the help of a human rights lawyer, narrowly avoiding deportation. 

In November 2021, Thai authorities deported to Cambodia two activists from a banned opposition party after Hun Sen ordered one of them arrested for a poem that criticized him on Facebook.

In August 2019, Lao democracy activist Od Sayavong, who was 34, vanished under mysterious circumstances in Thailand after posting a video clip online criticizing the Lao government. Listed as a “person of concern” by the UNHCR because of his advocacy for democracy and human rights in Laos, his whereabouts remain unknown. 

RFA Khmer contributed to this report. BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

Police in North Korea’s Ryanggang province have sent a formal complaint to the central government after their coworkers, agents of the ministry of state security, refused to share data on criminal cases, officials in the province told Radio Free Asia.

Stationed in every North Korean police station are local police officers under the social security department and state security agents under the ministry of state security. They often butt heads with each other due to the similarity of their mandates.

The police are charged with keeping public order, including by eradicating crime. Meanwhile, the state security agents are like a secret police force that must protect the country’s leader and the regime, as well as enforcing punishment for general crimes. The agents enjoy special privileges and powers that ordinary officers do not.

After the police in Ryanggang province requested data from the agents regarding data from previous cases involving people currently under police investigation, the province’s social security bureau submitted an official letter to the Central Committee over the impasse, a Ryanggang official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told RFA’s Korean Service.

“[The letter] said the state security department is marking its territory and is not being cooperative,” he said. 

Although the conflict between the state security department and social security department is nothing new, it is extremely rare that either group files official complaints about the other.

The police claimed in the letter that state security agents did not transfer data on a group of people it had previously detained. The police caught these people making phone calls outside the country, but were not given access to data for their previous cases that were handled by the agents.

“The police ordered [the agents] to hand over … all materials and subjects of cases,” he said.  “But many state security agents think that the police are incompetent and act with jealousy toward them.”

Despite their internal conflict, the agents and the police appear to be outwardly friendly with each other, a resident from the province, who requested to remain anonymous for personal safety, told RFA. 

“They are actually enemies to each other,” he said. “A few days ago, I personally saw an argument between a state security agent and a police officer.”

The cause of the spat, which happened inside a police station, was because the state security agent tried to get information from an informant working in a case handled by the police, the resident said.

“That day, several residents who happened to be in the police station witnessed the quarrel,” he said. “They mocked both of them afterward. Residents have very negative feelings of police officers and state security agents who give up nothing when it comes to monitoring and oppressing residents.”

Residents fear that the conflict between the two law enforcement factions could lead to competition between each other in how well they can oppress the people, he said.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong.