Day: March 11, 2024

Videos have emerged on social media in recent days that appear to show junta personnel providing military training to ethnic Muslim Rohingyas at a site in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, amid reports of forced recruitment around the country.

On Feb. 10, the junta imposed a military draft law – officially called the People’s Military Service Law – prompting civilians of fighting age to flee Myanmar’s cities. Many said they would rather leave the country or join anti-junta forces in remote border areas than serve in the military, which seized power in a 2021 coup d’etat.

The junta has sought to downplay the announcement, claiming that conscription won’t go into effect until April, but RFA has received several reports indicating that forced recruitment is already under way.

Two videos emerged on Facebook over the weekend showing junta troops training a group of people wearing full military uniforms in the use of firearms and around 30 armed people wearing fatigues inside of a military vehicle. They were posted to the site with a description that identifies the subjects as Rohingyas.

A third video, posted on March 7, shows junta Rakhine State Security and Border Affairs Minister Co. Kyaw Thura visiting a warehouse where hundreds of people, believed to be Rohingyas, are seated in military attire.

RFA was unable to independently verify the content of the videos.

Reports suggest the junta has been forcibly recruiting Rohingyas in Rakhine in recent weeks, and residents told RFA Burmese that the video shows members of the ethnic group receiving training at a site in the north of the state, although they were unable to provide an exact location.

They said that junta personnel have detained and enlisted around 700 Rohingyas for military training from the Rakhine townships of Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Kyaukphyu, as well as the capital Sittwe, since the Feb. 10 announcement, with the goal of forming a militia.

In Kyaukphyu, the training has progressed to using firearms, said a resident who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

“It is known that the current training phase involves firearms practice,” the resident said Monday. “Gunfire has been heard over the past two or three days, although the training regimen varies daily.”

Many of the detainees are living at Kyaukphyu’s Kyauk Ta Lone camp for internally displaced persons, or IDPs, where on Feb. 29 junta authorities forcibly gathered 107 mostly ethnic-Rohingya Muslims between the ages of 18 and 35 at the camp’s food warehouse, after collecting their personal information.

Former military captain Nyi Thuta, who now advises the armed resistance as part of the anti-junta Civil Disobedience Movement, questioned why the military regime is forcibly recruiting the Rohingya when it has refused to grant them citizenship.

“These people are being coerced and manipulated in various ways into fighting to the death for the junta, which is facing defeat in [the civil] war,” he said.

‘No way to escape’

Some 1 million Rohingya refugees have been living in Bangladesh since 2017, when they were driven out of Myanmar by a military clearance operation. Another 630,000 living within Myanmar are designated stateless by the United Nations, including those who languish in camps and are restricted from moving freely in Rakhine state.

Rights campaigners say the junta is drafting Rohingya into military service to stoke ethnic tensions in Rakhine, while legal experts say the drive is unlawful, given that Myanmar has refused to recognize the Rohingya as one of the country’s ethnic groups and denied them citizenship for decades.

Myanmar’s military is desperate for new recruits after suffering devastating losses on the battlefield to the ethnic Arakan Army, or AA, in Rakhine state. Since November, when the AA ended a ceasefire that had been in place since the coup, the military has surrendered Pauktaw, Minbya, Mrauk-U, Kyauktaw, Myay Pon and Taung Pyo townships in the state, as well as Paletwa township in neighboring Chin state.

On Feb. 28, the pro-junta New Light of Myanmar claimed that Rohingya had not been recruited for military service because they aren’t citizens. Attempts by RFA to reach Hla Thein, the junta’s attorney general and spokesperson for Rakhine state, went unanswered Monday.

Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya activist, condemned the coercion of members of his ethnic group into military service as a “war crime.”

“They wield power and resort to coercion and arrests,” he said, adding that he believes the junta’s goal is to “obliterate the Rohingya community.” “I perceive this as part of a genocidal agenda.”

Earlier this month, the shadow National Unity Government, or NUG – made up of former civilian leaders ousted in the coup – warned that Rohingya were being pressed into duty by the military “because there is no way to escape.”

Kachin youth fleeing recruitment

Meanwhile, residents of Kachin state said Monday that young people in the area are increasingly fleeing abroad or to areas controlled by the armed resistance to avoid military service. The draft law says males between the ages of 18 and 35 and females between 18 and 27 must serve in the military.

A draft-eligible resident of Kachin’s Myitkyina township said that he and others like him “no longer feel safe” in Myanmar.

“Since the conscription law was enacted, it has become quite difficult for us to realize our dreams,” he said. “It isn’t even safe to go out to a restaurant. We feel threatened daily.”

But even for those who have left the country, life can be difficult abroad.

A young Kachin named Ma La Bang who recently relocated to Thailand said he doesn’t have a visa to stay in the country legally, and told RFA that people like him worry about being forced to return home.

“Young people living in Thailand without any visa feel insecure, and it is also difficult for them to get jobs,” he said. “They are struggling to get a visa and any legal status for residency right now.”

La Sai, the chairman of the Kachin Refugee Committee in Malaysia, said that Kachin youths have been flooding the country since the enactment of the draft law. 

Two weeks after the junta activated the conscription law, the number of people entering Malaysia from Kachin state has more than doubled, he said. “This kind of migration is also taking place at [Myanmar’s] Thai and Indian borders.” 

‘Sacrificing their futures’

Win Naing, a member of parliament for Kachin’s Moe Kaung township for the deposed National League for Democracy, said the future of Myanmar’s youth is being lost because of the law.

“The conscription law … has directly interfered with the opportunities of young people for education and employment,” he said. “The youth are being made to sacrifice their futures.”

Junta spokesperson Major General Zaw Min Tun was quoted in pro-junta newspapers on Feb. 15 as saying that 50,000 soldiers will be recruited every year that the law is in effect. 

Based on Myanmar’s 2019 interim census, at least 13 million people are eligible for military service. Those who refuse face five years in prison.

Translated by Kalyar Lwin and Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

Thousands marched in rallies around the world on Sunday and more than 2,100 towns – mostly across Europe – hoisted the Tibetan flag to mark the 65th anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising against China.

March 10 commemorates the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule, when thousands were killed, and Tibetans have used the day to honor their courage, press China to stop its repression of Tibetans and voice their hope for a homeland where they can live freely. 

In Dharamsala, India – home of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader – crowds listened to speeches and later marched through the hillside town, chanting and carrying banners and Tibetan flags, which are banned inside Tibet.

On a hot, sunny day in Victoria, Australia, dozens of Tibetan repeated the scene, walking along a city sidewalk, holding Tibetan flags and banners saying “Free Tibet.” 

Marches also took place in Paris, Vienna, Geneva, New York, Toronto and Taipei.

And in Washington D.C., Tibetans from across the United States gathered to lobby lawmakers to pass the Resolve Tibet Act, which pressures the Chinese government to restart negotiations with the Dalai Lama’s envoys or the democratically elected leaders of the Tibetan people.

The talks have been stalled since 2010. The bill passed in the House of Representatives on Feb. 15 and is now up for Senate approval.

Dam protests

Policymakers and activists also called on China to release the more than 1,000 Tibetans arrested in February for peacefully protesting the construction of a massive dam project on the Drichu River in Dege county, a Tibetan-populated area of Sichuan province.

The project is expected to result in the forced resettlement of at least two major communities near the river and the submersion of at least six historical and religious significant monasteries.

“It is only to be expected that we demand that all the innocent and peaceful Dege Tibetans who had been arrested be released immediately,” said Khenpo Sonam Tenphel, speaker of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, when reading the body’s official statement.

The weekend rallies also marked the 35th anniversary of martial law imposed on March 5, 1989, and the anniversary of the peaceful protests that erupted across Tibet in 2008, said Sikyong Penpa Tsering, president of the Central Tibetan Administration, in the cabinet’s March 10 statement.

“Since 2009, 157 Tibetans are known to have self-immolated for more freedom inside Tibet and for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Tibet,” he said. 

“On this solemn occasion, we remember and offer our prayers in honor of our compatriots who have given their lives for the cause of Tibet,” he said. “We stand in solidarity with those who are still suffering under the brutal occupation of the People’s Republic of China.” 

Flags raised, protest in New Delhi dispersed

In another way to recognize the day, more than 2,100 towns, municipalities, and counties around the world hoisted the Tibetan national flag.

In Europe alone, more than 800 Tibetan flags were raised outside state or town halls in the Czech Republic, 600-some in France and another 458 in Germany.

In the United States, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin officially declared March 10 as Tibet Day in his state, while raising the Tibetan national flag at the Madison City-County building. 

Flags were also hoisted in other parts of the country., including Boston and El Cerrito, Santa Barbara, Berkeley, and Richmond in California, East Rutherford in New Jersey and Burlington in Vermont. 

On Monday, 35 members of the Tibetan Youth Congress were arrested after holding a protest outside the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi, India.

Authorities grabbed demonstrators holding signs and Tibetan flags and carried them by their arms and legs to a green bus that drove them away. The arrested activists were charged with trying to storm the embassy and later released on bail late Monday. 

The protest was meant to draw attention to human rights violations inside Tibet, China’s use of boarding schools run only in Mandarin – threatening to erase the Tibetan language – the forced collection of DNA samples as a surveillance tool and arrest of dam protesters in Dege, said Gonpo Dhondup, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress.

Written by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

Beijing has improved its ability to covertly spread disinformation and may try to influence America’s 2024 presidential election, according to a report issued Monday by the U.S. intelligence community.

The annual worldwide threat assessment says Beijing is “expanding its global covert influence posture to better support” the goals of the Chinese Communist Party, with the aim “to sow doubts about U.S. leadership, undermine democracy, and extend Beijing’s influence.”

China has been “intensifying efforts to mold U.S. public discourse,” the report says, with a focus on shifting how Americans view Chinese sovereignty claims over Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet and the Xinjiang region, where the United States has accused Beijing of genocide.

But in the coming months, the report adds, the machinery of Beijing’s online influence operations may be increasingly concentrated on impacting the Nov. 5 presidential election, which looks set to again pit President Joe Biden against former President Donald Trump.

“The PRC may attempt to influence the U.S. elections in 2024 at some level because of its desire to sideline critics of China and magnify U.S. societal divisions,” it says, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

Chinese state actors, it says, “have increased their capabilities to conduct covert influence operations and disseminate disinformation” and already have a track record of using artificial intelligence to generate political content on TikTok targeted at Americans.

“China is demonstrating a higher degree of sophistication in its influence activity,” the report says. “TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”

“Even if Beijing sets limits on these activities” this year, it continues, “individuals not under its direct supervision may attempt election influence activities they perceive are in line with Beijing’s goals.”

Balancing act

Any influence attempts, though, would likely be hard to detect, leaders of the intelligence community told U.S. lawmakers on Monday during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing to accompany the report.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said that while Chinese President Xi Jinping “was convinced that the United States will not tolerate a powerful China,” he was also biding his time and has been seeking to avoid any tensions since his summit with Biden last year.

Xi “seeks to ensure China can maintain positive ties to the United States, and will likely continue to do so this year,” Haines said, because “stability in our relationship is important to [China’s] capacity to attract foreign direct investment” amid growing economic problems.

In an exchange with Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida and his party’s top member on the intelligence committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he was worried by the ways that TikTok, one of the most popular social media apps in America, could be used.

Rubio posed a hypothetical scenario in which TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance was approached by Beijing and told, “We want you to change your algorithm so Americans start seeing videos that hurt this candidate or help that candidate in the upcoming election.”

“ByteDance would have to do that under Chinese law,” Rubio said.

“That’s my understanding,” Wray said. “That kind of influence operation … [is] extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national security concerns represented by TikTok so significant.”

TikTok, which is the fourth most downloaded app on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, is currently the target of a bipartisan effort by U.S. lawmakers to pass legislation that could force ByteDance to divest its ownership to avoid a ban on the app.

However, TikTok has strenuously denied being instructed by Beijing to influence public discourse in the United States. China’s Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

Edited by Malcolm Foster

For the first time, subscribers around the world can pay to watch North Korean state-run TV.

Called Shiwani TV, the service will livestream Korean Central Television from a pro-North Korean organization based in Poland called Chollima Front for 19 euros (US$21) a month, which includes radio as well.

The programs typically include propaganda about supreme leader Kim Jong Un or other top officials, bad news about other countries – thought to instill fear among North Koreans that the outside world is largely unsafe – and stories confirming the policies that the government wants to push.

For just radio service from the radio stations Korean Central Broadcasting and Voice of Korea, it’s 9 euros ($10) a month. The content will be digitized from their satellite and shortwave broadcasts and streamed online.

“We will actually offer our service to everyone who pays for it,” a representative of Shiwani TV told RFA Korean, asking not to be identified by name. “We believe that everyone should have access to high-quality television, regardless of their location, political views, party or organizational affiliation, or contacts.”

The service will be available worldwide, including in the United States as well as in South Korea, where it may run counter to national security laws and therefore be illegal to access – which the Shinwani TV official said shouldn’t be a problem.

‘Technically illegal’

“In South Korea … it’s technically illegal to access content from North Korea, but [the laws] date back to 1948 before the internet era,” the representative said. “People aren’t prosecuted for private consumption of North Korean content these days.”

Additionally, Shiwani TV is not under South Korean jurisdiction as it is based in Poland, the representative said.

The plan has the support of North Korean authorities, he said. The North Korean Embassy in Poland is aware of the plan and has reacted very positively, he added.

The service may fill gaps left by the closure in January of two North Korean state-run news websites, when Kim Jong Un called for a “fundamental turnaround” in its stance toward reunification, reversing its previous campaign to be reunified with the South.

“They are aware of the service, and their acknowledgment stems from the understanding that it has become increasingly difficult to find high-quality television recordings online since the closure of Korean websites uriminzokkiri.com, dprktoday.com, etc.,” the Shiwani TV official added.

The representative said the service will have no contractual relationship with North Korean authorities, the embassy, or any North Korean national, the organization will not pay video usage fees. He also said that the organization is confident it will meet its subscription goals, without elaborating what those goals were.

‘No one is interested’

On its website, Chollima Front says it is an independent organization for the study of North Korean culture and its founding Juche ideology of self-reliance, regardless of politics. The organization says it fights against disinformation while sharing reliable news about North Korea.

Chollima Front has approximately 12 members, mostly Polish, but also includes Germans and Canadians.

“Chollima Front is very small organization whose members are a few young Polish people with communist political views,” a Polish North Korea and East Asia studies scholar, who requested anonymity for personal safety, told RFA, “They are in touch with North Korean Embassy in Warsaw.”

He emphasized that the organization does not have much influence. 

“No one in Poland is interested in North Korean culture, especially in comparison to South Korean culture,” he said.

The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to RFA’s inquiry about whether it was aware of Shiwani TV’s launch plan. 

The Polish Embassy in the United States thanked RFA for the information regarding the launch of the service and said it has alerted the “appropriate parties.”

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

Chinese authorities rescued a 16-year-old Cambodian girl who said she was tricked by job brokers, sold to a Chinese man and held against her will in China’s Zhejiang province, a Cambodian Foreign Ministry spokesman told Radio Free Asia on Monday.

Police went to a family home on Sunday after the girl posted a video and a written message on Facebook seeking help from Cambodian authorities, spokesman Chum Suntory said. The Cambodian consul in Shanghai informed police and accompanied authorities to the home, he said. 

The girl, who identified herself as Rum Pipha, told RFA she faced regular beatings and insults and was forced to have sex with the man who declared he hoped to get her pregnant. At times, she was locked in her room, she said.

“I couldn’t go anywhere. I would eat and then they would chase me back into the room,” she said on Facebook Messenger to RFA. “I was worse than a prisoner. I couldn’t think of anything or do anything, but just sit and cry alone.”

Cambodian women and girls are often “coerced and forced into arranged and forced marriages” in China through various means, including through the false promise of a job, according to a 2022 report from the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

The girl, from eastern Tbong Khmum province, said she and three of her friends were told by brokers in August that they could work at a market in China and earn US$700 a month – about four times the average Cambodian’s monthly earnings.

The girl and her friends were taken from Phnom Penh by car through Vietnam into China, she said.

Threatened by family members

When they arrived in China, they were taken into a room that held many other Cambodian and Vietnamese girls and women. 

They were put up for sale, and one Chinese man paid money for her, the girl said. Her three friends were sold separately, she said.

The girl was kept at the Zhejiang province home – which included the man and his relatives – for more than six months. The man’s family members threatened to harm her if she reported the case to authorities or contacted her family in Cambodia for help, she said.

The girl is cooperating with Chinese investigators and is being held in a safe place under the care of Cambodian consulate officials, Chum Suntory told RFA in a Telegram message. She will be returned to Cambodia soon, he said.

Am Sam Ath of human rights group Licadho said Cambodian government officials and police need to do more to stop Cambodian women from being lured into vulnerable situations abroad.

“And this is the role of the embassy that should hurry up to help its citizens,” he said in an interview with RFA before Sunday’s rescue.

Translated by Sok Ry Sum. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

China’s National People’s Congress wrapped up its annual session on Monday with its highly choreographed show of support for ruling Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s vision for the nation.

The extent to which the event was highly scripted and carefully stage-managed was highlighted in particular by the presence of a “provincial delegation” from democratic Taiwan, where the majority of people reject Beijing’s territorial claims on their country.

U.S.-based veteran journalist and political commentator Hu Ping takes a closer look at what he describes as an “absurdist drama”: 

Among the nearly 3,000 delegates to China’s National People’s Congress, which just concluded its annual session in Beijing, were seats for 13 “provincial delegates from Taiwan.”

The group was a little different to the other groupings of regional delegates from, say, Beijing or Sichuan province.

While elections in China aren’t strictly worthy of the name, delegates from places like Beijing or Sichuan would still necessarily be chosen by people in those places, and they would be residents of those places.

But the 13 “Taiwanese” delegates weren’t even from Taiwan. They don’t hold Taiwanese passports, nor are they citizens of the 1911 Republic of China government which has governed the democratic island since World War II in one form or another. Some have distant family connections.

Keeping up the pretense

They’re not actually Taiwanese at all, but Chinese citizens chosen by Taiwanese nationals living in mainland China.

The official website of the National People’s Congress says the delegates were “elected following consultative election meetings composed of compatriots with Taiwanese nationality across China’s provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities, agencies of the central government, and the People Liberation Army.”

They are basically fakes.

The Chinese Communist Party leaders aren’t stupid. They know these 13 Taiwanese delegates are fake. But they have to keep up the pretense all the same.

According to Beijing, the People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government of China, which — according to them — includes Taiwan.

There is currently no way to have the people of Taiwan elect their own delegates to China’s National People’s Congress.

So it has to rope in some Chinese nationals to get elected by people in China instead.

The absurdity calls to mind a situation during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, during which there was effectively a coup during which major Communist Party and government bodies were taken over by a new leftist regime in the form of “revolutionary committees,” which popped up across the country.

The Revolutionary Committee of the Tibet Autonomous Region was proclaimed in the fall of 1968, completing the takeover by revolutionary committees in 29 Chinese provinces and cities.

The People’s Daily put out an editorial, titled “The whole country turns red,” and the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications issued a special 8-cent stamp to commemorate the event using the same title.

Absurdist dramas

The stamp’s design featured a map of the People’s Republic of China colored in bright red, with the exception of Taiwan.

Perhaps some conscientious person spotted a problem and wrote in to the central government saying that there was no revolutionary committee yet in Taiwan, because the island hadn’t yet been “liberated.”

Perhaps they made the point that it couldn’t be claimed that the whole country had turned red, because that would be tantamount to saying that Taiwan isn’t part of China.

Either way, it must have suddenly dawned on the central government, because they issued a secret order to have all of the commemorative stamps withdrawn and immediately destroyed.

But they couldn’t destroy all of them, because some had already been sold.

The incident turned the “Whole Country is Red” commemorative stamp into one of the most sought-after and expensive in post-1949 China.

To this day, the Chinese Communist Party hasn’t publicly corrected its claim that “the whole country has turned red,” because it doesn’t want to draw public attention to the implications.

The National People’s Congress’ “Taiwan provincial delegation” is another example of these absurdist dramas that play out under Chinese Communist Party rule.

Hu Ping is the chief editor of the New York-based monthly journal Beijing Spring, and is on the Board of Directors of the NGO Human Rights in China. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of Radio Free Asia.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.