Day: July 11, 2023

Junta officials are preparing to sue two independent media outlets, accusing them of not paying broadcasting fees imposed just before the military took power in a coup d’etat more than two years ago.

The Yangon offices of the Democratic Voice of Burma, or DVB, and the Mizzima news agencies were raided by junta security forces in March 2021 – a month after the Feb. 1, 2021, military coup d’etat.

The State Administrative Council, the official name of the military government, revoked the operating licenses of the outlets, which now operate online and underground.

The junta’s Ministry of Information announced the lawsuit on Saturday, saying they still must pay for using the state-owned Myanmar Radio and Television platform to air news and entertainment in the months before the military takeover.

According to the lawsuit, DVB owes a month’s fee of more than 20 million kyats, or about US$9,500, while Mizzima must pay 80 million kyats, or about US$38,000, for four months of services. 

DVB and Mizzima told RFA on Monday that the lawsuit was illegal because it was brought by a junta that unlawfully seized power. 

‘Within minutes of the military coup’

That’s also why DVB doesn’t owe any fees to the junta, said Editor-in-chief Aye Chan Naing. Its broadcasting license contract was signed with a civilian government that was elected by the people, he said.

“We had to pay MRTV every three months,” he told RFA. “We were never late to pay. But within minutes of the military coup, our television channel was cut for exactly one month without any notice from them.”

Mizzima’s founder and chairman, Soe Myint, told RFA that the outlet would pay the bill if it could access its bank account, which had 90 million kyat (about US$42,000) when it was seized by the junta in March 2021. 

He said he hasn’t received any emails or official paperwork about the lawsuit. 

“If it is in an independent, judicially competent and safe situation, I am ready to defend this lawsuit in court at any time. Whether it is inside Myanmar or anywhere abroad,” he said. “I can present the fact that the military junta unlawfully seized my house and all my properties in any free and fair court of law.” 

The junta has also charged seven Mizzima employees with violating Section 505(a) of Myanmar’s Penal Code, Soe Myint said. That part of the law pertains to the circulation of statements, rumors or reports with the intent to cause military officers to disregard or fail in their duties.

RFA attempted to contact junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for a response on the lawsuit, but his phone rang unanswered.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

In Brief

The death of a French teenager of African descent shot by police during a roadside confrontation has sparked public clashes with police and riots across France. 

Coverage of the riots by Chinese language Twitter accounts are rife with misinformation accompanied by misleading videos not taken during the riots and fake images “corroborated” by other fake images. 

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) checked and disproved four such widely circulated stories about the riots. 

In Depth

Are animals running wild on the streets? 

An article published by Liu Hong, the former deputy editor-in-chief of the Chinese news outlet Huanqiu magazine, for the Wechat news column Jinri Toutiao on July 2 mentions that “several lions and elephants” were released from a zoo during the riots, without providing any visuals to support the claim.

After running keyword searches for “riots in France” and “zoos” across both Twitter and Facebook, AFCL found several accounts making similar claims that included various videos as evidence. Two of the most widely circulated clips were of a zebra and lion escaping from the zoo. Image searches using screenshots taken from both videos provided no results due to poor image quality. 

However, a follow-up search for related stories using the phrase “zebra escape france” showed that a similar video clip of the zebra was published in a report by the UK news outlet Daily Mail on April 13, 2020. 

The report states that the zebra escaped from a zoo in the Paris suburb of Ormesson-sur-Marne during a COVID lockdown in 2020 before being filmed running on the road. 

A separate video spread on Twitter and TikTok with the phrase “saint denis” in the title also purported to show lions let loose during the riots. AFCL searched Google using the phrase “saint denis lion” and found that a user had posted the same video on YouTube in 2020.

Despite the edited version of the video showing only the top half of the original video’s frame, both versions have an identical name of “mardi” located in the lower left frame. The two videos’ identical lighting, framing and content confirm that they come from the same source.  

Did armed French teenagers hijack a police car?

The same article on Jinri Toutiao that mentioned the animals also included a photo of armed youths driving a police car while holding a French flag, accompanied by a warning to all Chinese tourists in France to avoid areas already hit by the riots and to report any emergencies to the police. 

This same photo was separately posted by a Chinese language Twitter account accompanied by a description that the protesters were armed with military weapons and had hijacked a police car during the course of the riots.

Several accounts on the popular Chinese social media site Weibo also reposted the photo, claiming that the police have turned into bandits during the riots in France.

After searching the photo through Google, AFCL found it had originally been posted online in January 2023, before the riots began. One of the results from the search was a link to the Chinese video sharing platform Douyin, where a suggested keyword “Athena movie” and a final search using the phrase found revealed that the photo was actually a still taken from the 2022 Netflix movie Athena.

The same image appears at 1:26 in the film’s official trailer, proving that the photo was not taken during the recent riots in France.

Were French youths shooting like snipers from the tops of buildings?

A separate photo circulated by Chinese netizens on Twitter shows a young man in a black down jacket aiming down from a tall building while holding what appears to be a sniper rifle, with captions added by the netizens describing the person as a teenage sniper in the riots.

AFCL searched the photo on Google and found a video uploaded by a Twitter user on June 9, 2023 among the search results.

The search also returned sources dated as early as 2022, however the links to these older search results were broken. AFCL was unable to further verify whether the video features a real sniper or is merely a prank. Regardless, the earlier posting dates of all these results verify that this image is unrelated to the recent riots in France. 

Do French people enjoy sipping wine even during a riot? 

Several Twitter accounts posted the same photo of a man and woman sipping wine on a street with a fire burning directly behind them, accompanied by nearly identical comments that read “French people have big hearts. …… Find a good spot to watch the action.” 

The photo in fact had nothing to do with the current riots. The photo appears in a March 2023 report from the British newspaper The Independent which notes that it was taken during separate protests launched that month against French President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform. Many Weibo discussions at the time commented on French people’s ability to maintain calm in the face of the riots.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity has awarded grants amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars to three Uyghur groups dedicated to Uyghur rights advocacy and education amid ongoing repression against the mostly Muslim ethnic group by Chinese authorities.

The Germany-based World Uyghur Congress and U.S.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project were selected as grantees for planning to host a conference of Uyghur allies and activists later this year in New York to discuss the international response to the persecution of Uyghurs, which the U.S. government and other Western parliaments have labeled a genocide. 

They will hold the event along with Jewish World Watch, another grantee.

The third Uyghur organization selected as a grantee is Ana Care and Education, a nonprofit based in Virginia, in the United States, that provides programs for Uyghur families living in the diaspora to preserve their language, history and culture.

The grantees were selected “based on their commitment to advocating for the Uyghur community, who are being unlawfully detained by the Chinese government in an effort to create a single-ethnic state,” the nonprofit organization said in a statement issued on Monday.

Grants totaling US$550,000 were awarded to the activist organizations as well as to four other nonprofits for educational fellowships, though the specific amounts for each were not given.

The grant-making initiative, launched in October 2022, supports organizations whose efforts are grounded by the values of Elie Wiesel, a writer, educator, political activist and Holocaust survivor who died in 2016. 

Wiesel and his wife, Marion, set up the foundation after he received the 1986 Nobel Prize for Peace.

Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chairman of the foundation, told Radio Free Asia that by using the money to shed light on the Uyghur genocide, the world will learn about the crimes that are occurring in Xinjiang.

“The largest genocide on the planet is [that of the] Uyghur minority,” Elisha Wiesel said. “Right now, the Chinese government is trying to end their Muslim practices, trying to assimilate their faith, and as is in many ways trying to end their identity as a people, including the use of detainment camps.”

“We feel it is the cause that is the most severe on the planet, and yet not many people are speaking about it.”

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, said the grant is important because it will help make the world accept the genocide, gain the world’s sympathy, and make the Jewish community more aware of the Uyghur issue and act upon it.

Sureyya Kashgary, director of Ana Care & Education, said her organization received a $50,000 grant for school-based learning for students and adults that connect them to their Uyghur ancestry. 

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

Vietnam has released Australian citizen and pro-democracy activist Chau Van Kham about four years into a 12-year prison sentence he received while visiting the country in 2019. 

Kham, 74, who returned home to Sydney on Tuesday, had been a member of Viet Tan, a pro-democracy group with members inside Vietnam and abroad, which has been described by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as a moderate activist group advocating for democratic reform. 

Hanoi, meanwhile, claims it is a terrorist organization that aims to topple the government.

Dai Le, Australia’s first Vietnamese-born member of parliament, confirmed the release to RFA’s Vietnamese Service on Tuesday.

“I believe Mr. Kham was released in the last 48 hours,” she said. “He arrived back in Sydney today. I was not notified, but obviously it was all very hush hush. It was done in a very highly confidential environment to manage the publicity around it.”

Le had been instrumental in Canberra’s efforts to lobby Hanoi for Kham’s early release, even visiting with Kham in prison and delivering him a letter from his family.

Arrested hours after arrival

Kham was arrested Jan. 13, 2019, hours after he arrived in Vietnam and met with a fellow pro-democracy activist. 

The 12-year sentence, for “terrorism aimed at toppling the people’s administration,” was handed down after his trial in November 2019, and the appeals court upheld the sentence in March 2020.

New York-based Human Rights Watch called it a death sentence given Kham’s advanced age, and his family worried that several medical conditions could worsen in prison.

Kham suffers from glaucoma, high blood pressure, and kidney stones, according to Viet Tan.

His release came on humanitarian grounds “in a spirit of friendship” between Canberra and Hanoi, according to Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, CNN reported.

“This is a result of careful advocacy, which has been undertaken by the Australian government with the Vietnamese government, over a number of months now,” Marles said.

The release came after repeated calls from the international community to release Kham, including a January 2023 open letter signed by human rights activists and elected officials from around the world. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese raised the issue last month during a diplomatic visit to mark 50 years of relations between the two countries.

Vietnam War

Born in 1949 in southern Vietnam, Chau Van Kham had joined the South Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War, which ended with the South’s defeat in 1975 to the communist North.

Kham, having supported the South, was sent to study in reeducation camps for three years, and eventually made his way to Australia in 1983, where he joined Viet Tan and became a senior member.

News of Kham’s release and return to Sydney was welcomed by Viet Tan, Nguyen Do Thanh Phong, a member of the group’s Central Committee told RFA’s Vietnamese Service.

“[The release] is a good thing, because recently  Mr. Kham’s health had declined due to his old age, and long-time  imprisonment of more than four years,” said Phong. 

He credited Kham’s release to the efforts of the international community and the Australian government.

More than 150 political prisoners

Kham’s case was one of several instances of Hanoi imprisoning foreign nationals of Vietnamese ancestry. In most cases, they are released ahead of schedule in what Hanoi calls its “clemency and humanity” policy.

But the releases are not examples of the government acting merciful, they are the direct result of international pressure, Phong said.

“In recent years, many democracy activists and human rights activists have been arrested, and the sentences are getting heavier and more severe,” he said. “That cannot reflect humanity. The very nature of [this kind of] arrest and imprisonment is a work that is especially inhumane.”

Human rights groups have applauded Kham’s release.

“Today is a momentous day for the movement to free wrongly imprisoned people around the world, and serves as a reminder that Australians in their tens of thousands will take action to defend human rights,” Rose Kulak, Amnesty International’s Australia campaigner said in a statement.

Kham’s release is “fantastic news,” Elaine Pearson, Asia Director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in a statement, but she was critical of Hanoi for continuing to hold more than 150 political prisoners for “peaceful acts of free expression.”

“The one-party state has no tolerance for anyone who expresses a narrative contrary to the government, and the Australian government should continue to call on Vietnamese authorities to release all political prisoners,” she said.

Translated by An Nguyen. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

The risk of nuclear arms being used is higher now than at “any time in recent history” with the world only “one miscalculation away from apocalypse,” Indonesia’s top diplomat warned Tuesday, calling on foreign powers to keep Southeast Asia safe from such weapons.

At a meeting in Jakarta, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi urged nuclear-armed powers to sign a 30-year-old treaty that seeks to keep the region free of nukes. She issued her warning ahead of four days of ministerial-level meetings in Jakarta between member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The crisis in Myanmar meanwhile is expected to be among the main topics at the summit, which will also include talks with China, Russia and the United States later this week.

“The risk of nuclear weapons use is higher today than at any time in recent history,” Retno said at Tuesday’s meeting of the Commission of the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ). 

“We keep hearing warnings about the possible use of nuclear weapons. We also see nuclear power remains part of some countries’ military doctrine, including in our region. We know fully well we cannot be truly safe with nuclear weapons in our region.”

She added: “No weapon is more powerful and destructive than nuclear weapons. And with nuclear weapons we are only one miscalculation away from apocalypse and global catastrophe.”

In 1995, all of ASEAN’s members signed the SEANWFZ Treaty, also known as the Bangkok Treaty, that committed to keeping the region free from nuclear weapons. The treaty prohibits its signatories from developing, manufacturing, possessing, testing or using them.

But none of the world’s nuclear powers have signed the protocol, citing various objections over the scope and verification of the treaty. Some of them have also argued it infringes on their rights to transit and navigate in international waters due to its inclusion of continental shelves and exclusive economic zones.

Combined, the nine nuclear-armed nations Russia, the U.S., Great Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea possess an estimated total of 13,000 nuclear weapons, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Earlier this year, the United States, Britain and Australia unveiled AUKUS, a trilateral defense agreement to enable Indonesia’s next-door neighbor, Australia, to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, as part of a U.S. doctrine that aims to contain China’s military expansionism, particularly in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.

The deal has stoked concerns among leaders in Southeast Asia about whether it could provoke a nuclear-arms race, but U.S. President Joe Biden has issued assurance that the submarines won’t be armed with nuclear missiles. 

However, despite the warnings raised by Foreign Minister Retno, AUKUS was not officially part of Tuesday’s talks in Jakarta. 

“There is no agenda on the submarines at the SEANWFZ meeting, and in the context of the latest developments in the region, the nuclear-powered submarines are not a nuclear weapon,” Sidharto Suryodipuro, director for ASEAN cooperation at Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, according to local media reports.

B-52s in Indonesian skies

Retno’s warning about nuclear weapons came weeks after U.S. Air Force B-52s took part with Indonesian fighter jets in joint exercises in Indonesia. The exercises were the first ever in Indonesian skies involving the strategic, eight-engine bombers that are capable of carrying nuclear weapons.   

Under another military pact with Australia, Canberra has allowed the U.S. to deploy some of these giant planes at the Tindal Base in northern Australia.

When asked this week whether Indonesia would consider a similar deal, a spokesman for the Indonesian military said Jakarta, because  of its traditional policy of non-alignment to any superpowers, would not permit the U.S. to station B-52s on its soil. 

“As long as we are nonaligned, it is impossible [this will] happen,” military spokesman Rear Adm. Julius Widjojono told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

“They were only here for the exercise, unlike their permanent position in Australia,” he said, referring to recent joint exercises with the B-52 bombers that were staged from the U.S. military base in Darwin, northern Australia.

Radityo Dharmaputra, a lecturer in international relations at Airlangga University in Surabaya, said nuclear powers do not want to give up their ability to deter or intimidate their rivals in a strategically important and contested part of the world.

“Nuclear weapons are a deterrence tool, which can make other countries refrain from doing something,” he told BenarNews.

He said that each nuclear power has its own interests and stakes in Southeast Asia, especially amid the current rivalry over issues such as trade, human rights and territorial disputes.

Human rights 

Speaking separately at a meeting of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, Retno said the bloc must not waver in addressing human rights issues in the region, despite complexities on the ground and differences among its members.

“ASEAN Human Rights Dialogue is a testament of ASEAN’s maturity to engage in frank and open dialogue without naming and shaming,” she said.

“It is therefore important for it to be conducted regularly. We are therefore aiming for a Leaders’ Declaration on the ASEAN Human Rights Dialogue,” she said.

ASEAN must unite in rejecting politicization of human rights and double standards while proving its ability to tackle issues within its own backyard, she said, without elaborating.

One of the region’s most pressing human rights issues is the crisis in Myanmar, where a military coup in February 2021 has plunged the country into chaos.

More than 3,000 civilians have been killed by Myanmar security forces and nearly 24,000 arrested since the coup, according to rights groups.

ASEAN has attempted to resolve the conflict with a five-point plan that includes an immediate end to violence and dialogue among all contending parties.

But Myanmar’s military government has largely ignored the plan, prompting ASEAN to bar its military leaders from top-level gatherings.

The Myanmar crisis is expected to dominate discussions later this week when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other top diplomats join the ASEAN foreign ministers as dialogue partners.

The U.S. and its allies have imposed sanctions on Myanmar’s military and called for the restoration of democracy, while China and Russia have been more cautious and urged respect for Myanmar’s sovereignty.

ASEAN has been trying to bridge the gap between the rival powers and persuade them to support its peace plan.

Indonesia, as this year’s ASEAN chair, has quietly engaged with various stakeholders in Myanmar, including the military, the opposition National Unity Government, ethnic armed groups and civil society groups.

Retno said last week that Indonesia had conducted 110 engagements “in the form of in-person meetings, virtual meetings, and phone calls” with representatives of Myanmar. She said Indonesia hoped to see progress in the implementation of the ASEAN plan before the end of the year.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

A Uyghur college student arrested by authorities in Xinjiang for posting a video on social media about the “white paper” protests has been sentenced to three years in prison, local authorities and a person familiar with the situation said.

Kamile Wayit, a 19-year-old preschool education major at the Shangqiu Institute of Technology in China’s Henan province, was detained in December 2022 for sharing a video on a social media app about the “white paper” protests that swept across China a month earlier during which people held up blank sheets of paper to complain about COVID-19 restrictions and the lack of free speech.

Wayit was one of dozens of young people around China detained in relation to the protests, which were sparked by a fatal lockdown fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi that killed about 40 Uyghurs.

Her arrest has attracted international attention with the U.S. government, rights activists, scholars, professors and students demanding that Chinese authorities provide information on her case and release her. 

In June, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson told The Economist magazine that authorities sentenced Wayit on March 25, but did not state the length of her sentence. Her crime was “advocating extremism.”

She spent six months in the State Security Detention Center in Atush and is now serving the remainder of her sentence at Mush Women’s Prison in Kashgar Prefecture, the person with knowledge of the situation said, asking not to be named for security reasons. 

Atush is the capital of Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, where Wayit’s family lives and where authorities arrested her while she was home during winter break.

A staff member at a police station in Atush confirmed that Wayit is serving a three-year sentence and is in Mush Women’s Prison.

Embraced her

The relative youth and innocent appearance of the new prisoner saddened not only the fellow inmates but also some of the Uyghur prison staff who were on duty that day, said the source, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution.

When the Uyghur inmates learned that she was Kamile Wayit, they embraced her, thinking of their own children whom they hadn’t seen in five or six years, the source said.

When RFA contacted relevant authorities in Atush, an employee suggested the reporter contact local police who handled her case.

Other officials provided inconsistent responses, at times suggesting to consult higher authorities, while on other occasions referring to the case as a “state secret” and refraining from disclosing details about Wayit’s sentence. 

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.