Day: July 19, 2023

Russian authorities grounded a Moscow-bound flight to arrest a North Korean diplomat’s wife and son who went missing from the far eastern city of Vladivostok last month, residents in Russia familiar with the case told Radio Free Asia.

RFA reported on June 6 that Russian authorities announced that they were searching for Kim Kum Sun, 43, and Park Kwon Ju, 15, who had last been seen on June 4 leaving the North Korean consulate in Vladivostok.

Kim had been working as the acting manager of two North Korean restaurants in the city in place of her husband, considered a diplomat, who traveled to North Korea in 2019 but was unable to return to Russia due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On July 7, the day after the announcement, Kim and Park were arrested after boarding a  Moscow-bound flight departing from the central Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, a resident of Vladivostok, who requested anonymity for personal safety, told RFA’s Korean Service.

“Their flight to Moscow departed from Yemelyanovo International Airport located on the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk as normal, but to arrest the mother and the son, the Russian public security authorities forced the plane to return to the airport,” he said. “When the plane landed …, the authorities arrested them.”

They would have gotten all the way to Moscow if not for the consulate getting Russian authorities involved, the Vladivostok resident said. 

As of Tuesday, Russian media has made no mention of Kim and Park’s arrest. RFA was not able to confirm with Russian authorities that they grounded the flight to arrest the pair.

Higher priority?

It was also not clear if Kim and Park had been accused of any crimes.

But it is standard procedure for the North Korean consulate to fraudulently accuse missing personnel of crimes so that Russian authorities place a higher priority on the case, a Russian citizen of Korean descent from Krasnoyarsk, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told RFA. 

“North Korea reports missing people by framing them for crimes,” he said. “So the escapees are in danger of being executed without the protection of the local state and the international community.”

But if they were accused criminals, the runaways would not be eligible for international protection, he said. 

The Krasnoyarsk resident confirmed that the authorities ordered the plane to return to the airport to arrest Kim and Park.

“There has been an increasing number of escape attempts among North Korean trade officials and workers in Russia recently,” he said. 

They may have been inspired by other North Koreans who successfully fled, including a computer engineer, a work unit manager, a work site manager, a doctor and a soldier from the General Staff Department of the North Korean military.

“The United Nations and the international community must take an active role in helping those who risk their lives to escape from the dictatorship,” the Krasnoyarsk resident said. 

“Instead of [arresting them] as demanded by the North Korean authorities and sending them to a place where death awaits them, [Russian authorities] should open the way for them to receive refugee status according to the regulations set by the United Nations.”

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

The Vietnamese government will allow the Vatican to appoint a resident representative in the communist Southeast Asian country, following years of negotiations amid the fraught diplomatic relationship between the two states. 

The development will likely be announced during the visit of President Vo Van Thuong to the Holy See by the end of July, Reuters reported on June 16, citing a senior Vatican official and a Hanoi-based diplomat with knowledge of the matter. 

Thuong and his wife will pay an official visit to Austria, Italy and the Vatican on July 23-28, Vietnamese state media reported.

Relations between Hanoi and the Vatican dissolved when communist leaders took over Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. After the country’s reunification, they placed restrictions on the Catholic Church and jailed several Catholic leaders who opposed the new government. 

Today, about 7% of the country’s population of roughly 97 million people are Roman Catholic, partly as a result of evangelism by missionaries from Portugal and Spain beginning in the 16th century.

Archbishop Marek Zalewski, the current nonresidential papal representative to Vietnam who is based in Singapore, is allowed to visit Vietnam only with government approval.

The Vatican has proposed having a permanent representative in Vietnam for more than a decade. The two states reached an agreement in principle on the proposal in 2022.

But there is concern among some Catholics that Vietnamese authorities will continue to tightly control religious clerics who speak out about social issues and human rights in the one-party country.

‘More normal’

Having a permanent representative of the Holy See in Vietnam would normalize Catholic activities in the country, said Bishop Nguyen Thai Hop, the first bishop of the newly established Ha Tinh Diocese.

“Of course, when there is a permanent representative, the work in Vietnam on religious and diplomatic issues will be easier,” he said.

With a permanent representative in place, “diplomatic work, visits to dioceses, and religious activities will be more normal,” Hop added.

During the past years, Vietnam and the Vatican have sent many working groups back and forth periodically to discuss the appointment of a permanent representative.

Hanoi’s consent to the issue is a result of the process of promoting relations between two sides, said Rev. Dinh Huu Thoai of the Redemptorists, an order of Catholic priests.

“In principle, having a permanent representative of the Holy See in Vietnam can bring about some changes and impacts in the relationship between the two sides” by improving diplomatic relations and promoting religious freedom, he said.

A Catholic resident of Ho Chi Minh City said that the new development will bring a relaxation to the celebration of holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, and to other religious activities as long as politics are not involved.

“For example, in the past, there were some Masses for justice and peace, for prisoners of conscience … then the government would find ways to obstruct and remove them,” the resident said. 

Authorities also didn’t like it when priests raised social issues during Mass, he added.

Though Vietnam’s constitution ensures that all individuals have the right to freedom of belief and religion, the situation of religious freedom in Vietnam has not progressed, Thoai said.

The country’s 2016 Law on Religion and Belief gives the government significant control over religious practices and contains vague provisions that permit restrictions on religious freedom in the name of national security and social unity. 

“There are always difficulties with religious activities,” Thoai said. “Recently, there have also been many cases where [authorities] insulted the Catholic Mass, even in the presence of the archbishop of Hanoi presiding over the Mass, but they also attacked the Mass.”

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

A severe lack of teachers in Laos is forcing school districts to use volunteer staff, merge some schools and close others, a trend that lawmakers warn could cause future generations to lose access to education.

During the Lao National Assembly’s 5th ordinary session, from June 26 to July 18, lawmakers spent a lot of time discussing the teacher shortage.

Representing the southern province of  Savannakhet, Xayxomseun Phothisan urged the assembly to hire more state employees and approve budgets to pay teacher salaries so that each school would have the adequate number of faculty needed to function.

“If the government does not have any solution to this urgent problem,  more schools in many provinces will be closed and students will lose access to education,” she said.

This year, the government is allowing recruitment of 285 new teachers nationwide, down from the 340 it hired last year. The downward trend in teacher hiring began in 2017, when the state employee quotas were reduced each year due to limited budget.

School closures

Savannakhet province has only 223 teachers on its payroll for the entire province. More than 430,000 people in Savannakhet are aged 19 or younger, though not everyone in that demographic goes to school. 

Though the province ranks first in the nation for school attendance between the ages 6-11, only 68.7% of Savannakhet children between the ages of 6-8 are attending school. For ages 9-11, the percentage rises to 85.2%.

There are also 21 schools in the province that are staffed by unpaid volunteers, many of whom quit when they learned, sometimes after eight years of working, that they would not be able to transition into paid roles.

Because of the teacher shortage, the province is expected to close 25 schools.

The Lao government has approved the province hiring 47 new teachers, but spread over 15 educational districts, it means only three new teachers per district, nowhere near enough to serve the student population.

Most of the schools experiencing teacher shortages were primary schools in rural areas, because teachers have little desire to work there, representatives of Savannakhet province’s Department of Education and Sport told RFA’s Lao Service. 

The capital Vientiane also faces a teacher shortage, with 900 on payroll – far short of what it needs. There are around 3 million youth aged 19 or younger in Vientiane, yet the central government will allow hiring only 16 new teachers. The capital is expected to close seven schools.

“The lack of teachers is widespread,” an official from Vientiane’s Department of Education and Sport told RFA. “We need over 900 more teachers in order to meet our plan. …The only thing we can do is to inform students to go to schools in other villages and dissolve the small schools, where there are no teachers.”

The official said that Vientiane had already merged seven schools since 2021 including three last year as the teacher supply dwindles. 

Aging teachers

In Luang Prabang province’s XiengNgeun district, volunteer teachers are quitting in large numbers, an education official said.

“We need about 100 more teachers for primary and secondary schools,” the official said. “The quality of our education in the district, according to the national indicators, may not meet the plan.”  

He said that many of the paid teachers are old and close to retirement, and some of them face health problems. However, development of younger teachers to replace them is lagging. 

Though the district has not seen a school closure yet, when the old teachers retire the problem will get worse, he said.

“The quota from the central government to the province to recruit new state employees has been reduced,” the district official said. “We only received permission to hire 10 new teachers this year. … For primary schools in the city areas, we have a solution by assigning one teacher to teach in 2 or 3 schools. But in the rural areas, that kind of thing is very hard to do.”

Translated by Phouvong. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

Outspoken Cambodian-American lawyer and human rights defender Theary Seng, 52, is currently on a 10-day hunger strike from a remote jail in northern Cambodia’s Preah Vihear province. 

Last June, she was sentenced to six years in prison on treason charges that stemmed from abortive efforts in 2019 to bring about the return to Cambodia of opposition leader Sam Rainsy.

Her hunger strike began on Monday, five days after the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a judgment calling her detention “arbitrary, politically motivated, and in violation of international law.”

RFA Khmer Service spoke with her pro bono international human rights lawyer, Jared Genser, on Wednesday. He said he’ll use the working group’s report to build momentum for her case and to push for the United States to designate her case as “wrongfully detained” under the Levinson Act, a 2020 law that would allow sanctions to be imposed on individuals responsible for holding U.S. nationals hostage.

RFA: First of all, I want to know about Theary Seng’s condition in jail. We know that she launched a 10-day hunger strike in jail. How is it going now?

Jared Genser: We don’t have any direct information yet. We understand that she will have a visit shortly from someone. I’m not going to name them for their own security, but we will know a little bit more in the next day or two. 

She launched a 10-day hunger strike to protest her detention and that of other political prisoners and also to protest the forthcoming election, which with the disqualification of the Candlelight Party, quite clearly cannot be in any way considered free or fair. She is undergoing a kind of hunger strike where she’ll drink liquids, water in particular. 

But as her lawyer and her friend, I’m very worried about her health and safety. And obviously, she continues to be a threat to the government of Cambodia, which is, of course, why they’re keeping her in jail, despite the fact that all she did to get six years in prison for so-called treason charges was to post some critical things about the government on Facebook.

RFA: We learned that on July 12, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a judgment calling the cases “arbitrary detention, politically motivated, and a violation of international laws.” How significant is that and why did it take so long for the U.N. Working Group over a year after her arrest to issue this decision?

Jared Genser: I think in terms of the time frame for the U.N. to issue the decision, it’s actually a pretty typical time frame. It feels like a long time and obviously has been a long time. But in fact, I think for international tribunals, it’s quite quick. If you were to take a case to the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, it would be three to five years. The same for the European Court of Human Rights. So this is actually, for the international system, on the quicker side.

The working group, you know, undertook a very detailed analysis of the facts of the case, applied international law to those facts, and ultimately concluded that she was being detained illegally and in violation of international law, not only on the basis of her violation of her substantive rights, her right to freedom of opinion, expression, peaceful assembly and political participation, but also in terms of just the egregious lack of due process in her trial.

And it has also called for her immediate and unconditional release. So I think that this will definitely help us as we work to build momentum, to put further pressure on Hun Sen and the regime going forward. I think, for that purpose, it’s very valuable.

RFA: You mentioned about using her case with the U.N. Working Group to build momentum. How will you convince the U.S. government to consider her case under the Levinson Act?

Jared Genser: It’s a strange set of circumstances because we literally have had President Biden urge Hun Sen to release her, Secretary Blinken to do the same. We’ve had Samantha Power of USAID and the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia and a spokesperson for the State Department all coming out, and they’re using the word “unjustly detained” and all calling for her release. 

So on the one hand, we have all the key officials from the very top down who have all urged Hun Sen to release her. And ultimately, that’s the most important thing that’s been going on, because at the end of the day, it makes very, very clear the position of the United States.

The bureaucratic process of the Levinson Act and making this formal determination is another matter. And it’s very strange that just the State Department is trying to explain that they’re calling for her release, the U.S. government calling for her release and that her detention is unjust. But that somehow being unjust is not the same as wrongful or unlawful. And this doesn’t make any sense when you look at the words and their definitions at all.

And so, you know, we’re going to have to continue to fight it out with the State Department. It does matter because we want her case referred to the office of the U.S. presidential envoy for hostage affairs, who can then work the case on a day to day basis. 

And so I think that we’re just going to keep pressing ahead with our efforts. And the U.S. government hopefully will catch up soon enough.

RFA: How hopeful is it that the U.S. government will do so and how will it be significant for the case if the U.S. government considers her case as wrongfully detained?

Jared Genser: So, I mean, at the end of the day, when you’re trying to get any political prisoner out of jail anywhere in the world, you have to escalate the cost for the government above the benefits as much as possible. 

Ultimately, with the U.N. judgment and with the State Department again just last week calling for her release, that will enable us to also engage governments in Europe and around the world on her behalf and will enable us to get higher level media attention.

RFA: My last question. Cambodians will go to polls on Sunday. Many national and international observers think that this election is a “sham election” whereby the ruling Cambodian People’s Party is running unopposed. And then for Cambodian people, they seemingly have no options because the party that they love, the Candlelight Party, was disqualified from the election. The opposition leaders are calling for their supporters to go to vote but to spoil their ballots. If you were the Cambodian people, what would you do in such circumstances?

Jared Genser: Obviously, Hun Sen is going to try to do everything possible to increase turnout. I’m sure that government workers will be mandated to come and vote. The best scenario here would be to have the lowest possible turnout possible. At the end of day, though, I’m not going to believe any of the numbers coming out of the Cambodian electoral commission because the whole process has been rigged. 

So, even if people come out or don’t come out and refuse to turn out, I think the numbers are still going to show a large turnout because, you know, Hun Sen can report whatever numbers he wants and there’ll be nobody to oppose those numbers. 

I think that the best thing a Cambodian person could do in this case is to boycott the election. But that’s obviously not a long term solution.

For Tenzin Tsedup Lodoe, the first-ever the International Tibet Youth Forum is a way for young Tibetans to take the initiative to preserve their religious beliefs and culture, which are under attack by the Chinese government.

“At the end of the day, action is what matters,” he told Radio Free Asia. “ Tibetan youth should play a bigger part because we are the future, and we should be the ones taking the initiatives and responsibilities.”

The youth activist from Washington, D.C., and co-founder of the Bodja podcast was one of more than 100 young Tibetans from 16 countries attending the forum in Dharamsala, India, at the invitation of the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government-in-exile. His podcast aims to raise awareness among Tibetan youth about news and events concerning Tibet. 

Fellow participant Chime Lhamo, a human rights activist and campaign director of Students for a Free Tibet in New York, said Tibetan youths have a huge role to play when it comes to advocacy. 

“Our older generations were busy trying to survive, put food on our table and protect our Tibetan identity, but the younger generation has the opportunity not just to survive, but now we are thriving in our own neighborhoods,” she said. 

“We have a wonderful, precious opportunity to not only give back to the Tibetan community in exile, but also play a role in making sure that we are amplifying the voices of Tibetans inside Tibet.” 

The theme of the event, which runs from July 18-20, is “empowering voices and inspiring actions for Tibet’s future.” 

The forum comes amid an ongoing effort by the Chinese government to maintain its control of those who live in the Tibet Autonomous Region and in Tibetan-populated areas incorporated into Chinese provinces by suppressing expressions of their Buddhist religion.   

Tibetans accuse Chinese authorities of violating their human rights and trying to eradicate their religious, linguistic and cultural identity.

The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism who is currently in Ladakh for a month-long sojourn, addressed the participants in a short video, urging them to preserve Tibetan culture and tradition. 

“The new generation of Tibetans living in different parts of the world should never forget our own tradition of moral behavior,” said the Dalai Lama. “Those living in India may not find this difficult, but those living in the West are also doing well to cherish and preserve our culture and traditions. Those with young minds should be made aware of Tibetan’s tradition of consideration for others.” 

Instead of feeling anger towards China, whose military troops crushed a revolt in Tibet in March 1959 that forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India, young people and other Tibetans should “generate compassion for them,” he said. 

Events like the youth forum are important because they inculcate leadership in young Tibetans and ensure they keep Tibetan culture alive, Sikyong Penpa Tsering, the head of the Central Tibetan Administration, told Radio Free Asia.

“The younger generation is the future of Tibet,” he said. “Our investment in the younger generation is very important. Otherwise if we are not able to bring up the younger generations as future leaders then we would be failing in our duty.”

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

If Vietnamese officials seem preoccupied, it’s because they are.

Normal court cases of land activists or independent journalists or influencers who are arrested for “abusing their democratic freedoms” with a post on Facebook proceed. A widely read online news portal was suspended for three months for failing to adhere to editorial guidance – that is failing to effectively self-censor. This follows the recent spate of arrests of environmentalists, including Hoang Thi Minh Hong, the latest in harassment of civil society that included campaigns against defense lawyers. There were procurement schemes that took down the leadership of the coast guard.

There have been more exceptional scandals, such as the ongoing court proceedings against some 54 individuals for the Covid-19 repatriation flight scandal. Over $7 million in bribes were paid in a scandal that brought down senior aides to two deputy prime ministers, a deputy foreign minister, and a swath of senior diplomats, gravely tarnishing the elite, but once respected, diplomatic corps.  Of the defendants,18 of the 54 could face the death penalty. Clearly Hanoi is trying to send a clear signal to the public that it’s taking the case seriously.

Of course, the recent unrest in the Central Highlands which has led to the arrest of some 84 Montagnard hill tribesmen, after a few years of calm in a region that has seen mass immigration of the majority ethnic Kinh and changes in the local political-economy.

The government has been quick, as authoritarian regimes tend to do, to attribute the violence to external actors, without offering much proof. But that the regime had to deploy extra security forces as well as the Vietnamese People’s Army, and rely on harsh new counter-terrorism laws, speaks of the regime’s profound insecurity. 

Underlying all of this insecurity is unusual anxiety over the economy.

This may strike some as odd. After all, there seems to be nothing but good news on the economic front. Vietnam attracted $22 billion in foreign direct investment in 2022. Its economy grew at 8.02 percent in 2022, and is still likely to grow robustly this year, though below the 6.5 percent target. No country has been a bigger beneficiary of Western industrial economies decoupling from China than Vietnam.

Signs of trouble

But if one digs deeper, signs of trouble abound , beginning with GDP growth of 3.3 percent in the first quarter — half of the target.

Exports fell sharply this year. With all that foreign investment in manufacturing, Vietnam is now very vulnerable to externalities. The global recession is taking its toll, and Vietnam, which is also part of the China supply chain, has seen exports fall by 13 percent in the first quarter and industrial production contracted 1.8 percent.

Since late 2022, there have been mass layoffs in factories across the country. In the first quarter of 2023 alone, 149,000 people lost their jobs, up 13 percent year-on-year. Exports to the EU and the United States fell by 60 and 40 percent, respectively. 

And though the country has a basic social safety net, researchers have found that workers are being forced to prematurely dip in.

What is more destabilizing than poverty is a sharp decline after years of growth, which pulls the floor out from the new and aspirational middle class.

The “Blazing Furnace” anti-corruption drive had its own impact on the economy, as government bureaucrats were loath to approve anything, for fear of being ensnared. Nothing got approved.

Top government interlocutors with the business community, including President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Deputy Prime Ministers Vu Duc Dam and Pham Binh Minh, were purged.

Even local governments were reluctant to spend the funds that they had been allocated. In March 2023, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh had to issue a directive for governments to spend their budgets. The economic engine of the country, Ho Chi Minh City, was only on track to spend 46 percent of its $3 billion fiscal year 2023 budget by July.

Gloom breeds more crackdowns

Soaring temperatures, especially in the north of the country, earlier than normal, over-taxed the country’s electric grid, causing regular brownouts. In June, local officials demanded industrial parks outside Hanoi halve their electricity consumption.

Some of the country’s national champion firms are also in for a rough ride, raising concerns about being too big to fail and the issues of moral hazard. It also raises questions of how the government could afford to intervene. 

But the real concern is in Vietnam’s housing property sector. Last year  saw the arrest of senior executives of multiple property firms for pump and dump stock manipulation or fraud in their bond issuances. Then last October, the CEO and three other managers of the largest property firm Van Thinh Phat were arrested, causing a bank run.

All of that led to a credit crunch, with property firms unable to raise money in the commercial bond market. Though credit has eased, it’s still tight, leaving a lot of firms unable to finish projects or service existing debt. Some $10.7 billion in debt matures in the real estate sector alone this year, 45 percent of which – $4.8 billion – is vulnerable to default. Major property firms, such as Vinhomes and Novaland, have all shed shares, assets, or been forced to sell off other parts of their conglomerate. 

The government now knows that moving too aggressively on property developers can cause bank runs, as all of the big real-estate firms have affiliated banks. The government used censorship of social media to avert a full bank run. It could add liquidity and guarantee deposits at Siam Commercial Bank, but few have confidence in the government’s ability to respond firmly or quickly enough if there was a multi-bank run. 

The middle class is feeling particularly hard hit. Property prices are down and real-estate is where most in the middle class invest. Those that put their money in the stock market, saw Vietnam’s two bourses amongst the worst performing in the world in 2022, though they have recovered slightly in 2023. And of course Vietnam has had its own battle with inflation. Though not astronomical, coupled with years of flat wages, the urban middle class is feeling the pinch. 

There’s hope that the economy will pick up steam in the second half of 2023, but the growth targets seem too optimistic, and the country is more vulnerable to downturns in the global economy, which it has no control over. If the global recession continues, more layoffs and economic contraction are inevitable. 

So while all the normal things that make the government in Hanoi paranoid are still going on, the fragility of the economy is exacerbating those fears. More people will be asking questions about government leadership and policy, which will only result in more crackdowns.

Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.