Day: July 18, 2023

A Myanmar junta court handed down sentences of three to six months to seven prison employees, including a warden, after a jailbreak in May in which 10 prisoners overpowered guards, seized their guns and escaped, said three sources with knowledge of the situation. 

Ten inmates, including nine fighters with the anti-junta People’s Defense Force, escaped from Taungoo Prison in central Myanmar’s Bago region on May 18 as they were being taken from their cells to a small prison courtroom for their trials. Among them was a woman and two inmates sentenced to death. 

The warden, Kyi Oo, officially the deputy director of the town’s prison department, was on Monday given three months in jail, while Than Tun and Tun Tun Oo, the two prison chiefs, Lt. Than Zin Win, Lt. Oo Toe, and staffers Khant Si Thu and Pho Kauk received sentences of six months each, said the sources close to Taungoo Prison. 

In addition to being sentenced to jail, they were expected to be fired, said the sources, who declined to be named so they could speak freely.

The move comes as the military, which overthrew the democratically elected civilian government in a February 2021 coup d’etat, cracks down on prison staff to ensure they do not help or let political prisoners escape.

Nyo Tun, a former political prisoner who was recently released, said the ruling military junta is taking more stringent action against correctional employees to suppress lower-ranking officials.

“In the past, I have only seen actions taken against the prison authorities, such as removing them from duty or demoting them in positions,” he told Radio Free Asia. “It’s not like that now [because] they are even being imprisoned.”

“By doing so, the junta hopes that the prison authorities and staff in other prisons will be pressured to continue to oppress our political prisoners with stricter rules and stricter methods,” he said.

The prison staffers’ trial was held at the Taungoo township courthouse, said one source, though he did not know the specific charges for each. Afterwards, they were taken back to the prison.

A person close to the family members of political prisoners serving time in Taungoo Prison also told RFA about the staffers’ sentences.

“The warden was accused of having connections to the PDF, and they said they had a lot of proof,” the person said. 

“They were also going to be removed from their official positions along with their prison terms,” the source added.

Security boosted

Since the escape, security at the prison has been tightened, with the installation of new closed-circuit video cameras, watchtowers and outdoor bunkers, the source said, as well as an increase in military forces there.

RFA could not reach Naing Win, deputy director general and spokesman of the Prisons Department, for comment.

Similar action has been taken against prison staff elsewhere in the country.

At Daik-U Prison, also in Bago region, eight prison employees, including Yan Naing Tun, the deputy director, were arrested and have been under investigation since late June on charges of helping political inmates communicate with PDFs, sources close to the detention center said.

On July 4, Sgt. Nay Myo Thein and a deputy sergeant who worked at Myingyan Prison in central Myanmar’s Mandalay region were fired and each sentenced to six months in jail for allegedly helping inmates, according to people close to the detention facility.

Following the Taungoo jailbreak, authorities interrogated and beat some political prisoners in jails in Myingyan, Daik-U and Tharyarwaddy, killing some and putting others in life-threatening situations, prisoner relatives and sources close to the prisons told RFA in an earlier report.

More than 60 such inmates were sentenced to three additional years in prison each on July 6 for their alleged involvement in a riot that took place in Pathein Prison in Ayeyarwady region.

In May and June, 15 inmates died of torture during interrogation or for other reasons, including shootings for trying to escape during jail transfer, according to an RFA tally. 

The military junta has detained more than 19,500 people, of whom roughly 6,850 have served prison terms, since the February 2021 coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a rights group based in Thailand.

Translated by Myo Min Aung for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

The number of cremations carried out in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang saw a rise of nearly 73% in the first quarter of this year, compared with the same quarter in 2022, according to figures posted to the provincial civil affairs department’s website that have since been deleted.

Just over 170,000 cremations were reported in the first three months of 2023, according to a cached copy of the page showing the latest provincial statistics on civil affairs. Earlier statistical reports indicated that 99,000 cremations took place in the same period last year and 88,300 in the first quarter of 2020.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned in January that China’s COVID-19 death figures were likely to be “much higher” than the nationwide toll of 80,000 claimed by its government. This view is backed up by anecdotal evidence of round-the-clock cremations and long waits for funeral services reported by residents.

The Zhejiang statistics are significant because they show a massive spike in cremations immediately after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, as the virus ripped through China’s population of 1.4 billion people.

Zhejiang is home to around 5% of China’s population, and has a cremation rate of almost 100%, meaning that its cremation rate is fairly close to the death rate.

Nationwide estimate

If the figures there were extrapolated nationwide, they would suggest that some 3.4 million cremations took place from January through March, although not all regions and provinces have cremation rates as high as Zhejiang’s.

Reuters cited epidemiologists as estimating the deaths in the first wave of COVID-19 at around 2 million.

Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator Zhang Jianping said the briefly revealed figures were in keeping with the scenes of overwhelmed crematoria seen during the first Omicron wave in China.

“Back then there were long queues for cremations in places like Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, which were much harder hit than Zhejiang,” Zhang said. “Everyone knows the score, whether they make the figures public or not.”

“Some people did simulations showing that China had more than 4 million deaths from COVID-19 at the time, and I think that’s probably accurate, possibly even quite conservative,” he said, describing the death toll as “astonishing.”

“I understand why the authorities want to avoid this issue, because this data has a high degree of authenticity,” he said. 

‘Fabricating data’

Feng Chongyi, professor of political science at the University of Technology Sydney, said the figures gave the lie to the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s claim that it had handled the pandemic well.

“The Chinese government has been concealing or fabricating data since the start of the pandemic,” Feng said. “The political aim is to show the success of China’s fight against the pandemic as a way to make Xi Jinping look good.”

But he said the death figures have exposed the truth about what happened: the government’s decision to suddenly end three years of stringent zero-COVID restrictions in December had devastating consequences for large numbers of people.

“The government suddenly lifted the restrictions without making any preparations, and a great many people died,” Feng said.

Yang Haiying, a professor at Japan’s Shizuoka University said similar coverups were seen after the mass deaths of the Great Famine of the late 1950s and after the political violence of the Cultural Revolution.

“The Chinese Communist Party just doesn’t release real data,” Yang said. “Researchers and the general public can only make estimates based on data that occasionally gets exposed.”

He said the government typically seeks to conceal any figures that could point to wrongdoing by those in power.

“The Communist Party wants people to forget their own history … and people know this but they daren’t stand up and resist, thinking that it’s all water under the bridge, and that it’s best not to pursue it further, or ask political questions,” Yang said.

Repeated calls to the Civil Affairs Bureau of the Zhejiang provincial government rang unanswered during office hours on Tuesday.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

An American soldier in South Korea scheduled for disciplinary action crossed into North Korea on Tuesday, U.S. and U.N. officials said, and is believed to be in custody there.

The incident happened in the Joint Security Area or JSA, at Panmunjom, where soldiers of both Koreas are stationed, sometimes facing each other.

The soldier was on a civilian tour of the JSA and crossed the Military Demarcation Line into North Korea without authorization, according to a Twitter post by the United Nations command. 

One person who was part of the tour and who said they saw the incident, told CBS News that after the group visited one of the JSA buildings, “this man gives out a loud ‘ha ha ha,’ and just runs in between some buildings.”

The witness said that at first there was confusion as to what was happening, but military personnel reacted within seconds.

“I thought it was a bad joke at first, but when he didn’t come back, I realized it wasn’t a joke, and then everybody reacted and things got crazy,” CBS News reported the person as saying.

Media reports, including from the Associated Press and CBS News, identified the soldier as Travis King, a private second class, citing U.S. officials.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed the incident, but not his name, and said there is still a lot American officials are trying to learn. 

“We believe that he is in [North Korean] custody and so we’re closely monitoring and investigating the situation and working to notify the soldier’s next of kin,” he said.

The soldier was in the process of being escorted back to the United States to face disciplinary actions, AP and CBS said, but after going through airport security he was able to exit the airport and join the JSA tour. 

The U.S. State Department was prepared to take any appropriate step to help resolve the situation, the department’s spokesperson Matthew Miller said, without naming any specific actions.

“All I will say is that … it’s clear that he willfully on his own volition crossed the border and the matter remains under investigation,” said Miller.

Defection?

It remains unclear what the soldier’s motivations were. If it is a defection, it would be the seventh by U.S. military personnel to the North since the end of hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War, and the first in more than 40 years.

In separate cases in the 1960s, four American soldiers – Larry Allen Abshier, James Joseph Dresnok, Jerry Wayne Parrish, and Charles Robert Jenkins – crossed the border into North Korea. They were used by North Korea in propaganda efforts, including some of them as actors portraying American villains in film.

Abshier, Dresnok and Parrish would remain in North Korea until their deaths, but Jenkins was allowed to leave for Japan in 2004 to reunite with his wife Hitomi Soga, whom he married in North Korea in 1980 after she was abducted from Japan two years earlier. Soga was one of several abducted Japanese allowed to return to their homeland in 2002.

In 1979 Roy Chung, a South Korean citizen who had joined the U.S. Army, went AWOL while serving in West Germany near the border of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Two months after his disappearance, North Korea claimed that he defected, but his family at the time said they believed he had been abducted. He is believed to have died around 2004.

In 1982, Joseph White crossed the border into North Korea. He died there three years later.

In addition to these soldiers, several U.S. citizens have been detained by North Korean authorities over the years, including Otto Warmbier, who was arrested as he was leaving the country in 2016. In 2017, he arrived in the United States in a coma and died shortly after.

Bargaining chips

Pyongyang has a long history of using detained Americans as bargaining chips, Anthony Ruggiero of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies told RFA’s Korean Service.

“Life in North Korea is not easy because the Kim regime prioritizes its prohibited nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs,” he said. “Americans should know that North Korea is not a tourist destination and respect the travel ban.”

Patrick Cronin, the Asia-Pacific Security chair at the Hudson Institute, told RFA that Tuesday’s incident could open a new channel for engagement. 

“Among other things, the administration will not want to see any other American die in North Korean captivity —even one who went there on his own volition,” he said.

 Additional reporting by Cho Jinwoo. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

UPDATED at 3:23 pm, July 18, 2023

A bill re-introduced to Congress by two lawmakers on Tuesday would expand U.S. sanctions to include foreign companies that do business with entities identified as contributing to human rights violations against ethnic Uyghurs in China’s Far West.

The proposed law, the Sanctioning Supporters of Slave Labor Act, would authorize U.S. government agencies to impose secondary sanctions on companies or individuals that have transactions with sanctioned entities, such as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or XPCC, the biggest state-owned enterprise in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. 

If it passes, any non-U.S. company that enters transactions with such entities would be banned from working with American companies and their assets in U.S. bank accounts would be frozen, according to the office of Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, one of the two sponsors of the bill.

Companies would be forced to choose between keeping sanctioned suppliers in Xinjiang or continuing to sell their products in the United States, his office said.

“Further actions must be taken to hold accountable those individuals and entities benefiting from the forced labor of Uyghurs,” Rubio said in a statement. “Not only should China’s genocidal regime answer for the crimes they are committing but also the companies that profit from these atrocities.” 

The bill expands on a previous law, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, passed in 2020, that imposes sanctions against entities determined to be supporting the Chinese Communist Party’s violations of Uyghur and other ethnic minority rights.

U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, a Republican from Indiana, introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives.

The bill had initially been introduced in 2022, during the last congressional session, but wasn’t passed, so the lawmakers have re-introduced it.

International condemnation

China has come under harsh international criticism in recent years for its severe rights abuses of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, including forced labor.

The U.S. government and several Western parliaments, including the German Bundestag, have declared that the abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the far western part of China amount to genocide or crimes against humanity.

The United States has passed two pieces of legislation to address these grave abuses.

Congress passed a law that took effect In December 2021 called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or the UFLPA, that directed the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to support enforcement of the prohibition on the import of goods into the U.S. manufactured wholly or in part with forced labor in China, especially from Xinjiang. 

And in late May, a bipartisan piece of legislation, the Uyghur Genocide Accountability and Sanctions Act was introduced, which further reinforces the two existing laws by mandating new sanctions on Chinese entities and requiring companies to disclose any ties they have to supply chains that touch Xinjiang.

Rubio was one of the sponsors to introduce these bills, and has been sanctioned by Chinese authorities.

Some lawmakers have accused American companies of aiding and abetting the Chinese Communist Party in their human rights violations.

A 2020 New York Times report revealed that major corporations such as Nike and Coca-Cola had invested heavily in lobbying Congress to weaken the UFLPA.

“Prior experience with the effort to get UFLPA passed shows that corporate America is willing to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses and even genocide, if it means maximizing their profit margins,” said a spokesperson for Rubio, requesting anonymity.

“This will only increase pressure on the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) to stop its senseless attacks on Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and the other peoples living in Xinjiang,” the spokesperson said.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Updates to change attribution of final two quotes from Sen. Rubio to one of his spokespersons.

North Korea is cracking down on women for smoking in public, saying they are promoting capitalist culture and extinguishing socialist morals, but residents say authorities are enforcing the laws on women but not on men. Tradition holds that it is natural for men to smoke, but frowned on for women to do so in North Korea, whose supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, is a chain smoker often seen in state media holding a lit cigarette.