Day: March 19, 2024

More than a dozen people have been infected by anthrax in two districts in southern Champassak province and authorities have responded by placing restrictions on the movement and slaughtering of some farm animals, several officials told Radio Free Asia. 

Provincial health officials announced on March 12 that anthrax – a rare, serious infectious disease caused by bacteria – was found in the carcasses of 97 cows, buffaloes and goats. 

Three people in Champassak tested positive for anthrax last week, but that number jumped to 14 on Tuesday, according to the provincial Health Department.

The 14 patients all have large, dark scabs and are receiving treatment, a health official told RFA. Authorities believe they contracted anthrax – or what’s known as “black blood disease” – by eating meat from infected cows or buffaloes..

Anthrax usually affects livestock like cattle, sheep and goats, but humans can be infected if they are exposed to contaminated animal products or animals. 

According to the World Health Organization, anthrax isn’t generally considered to be contagious between humans, although there have been some cases of person-to-person transmission.

The provincial health department has issued a notice asking local medical centers and authorities to report any new cases and urging anyone who develops black bumps on their body to see a doctor as soon as possible.

“We’re concerned. We have stopped eating meat,” a Soukhoumma district resident told RFA. “Now, we eat only pork and fish.”

Transporting and slaughtering farm animals has been temporarily banned, and people are required to properly bury their dead animals, the department said.

A slaughterhouse worker told RFA that they are complying with the order and have stopped buying animals from local farmers. 

An agricultural official in Pathoumphone district said authorities have stepped up surveillance efforts and have officially warned the public not to eat locally slaughtered meat.

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

More than 20 administrators of villages in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state have resigned after the junta ordered them to choose residents for military service and to form militias amid preparations for nationwide conscription, sources with knowledge of the situation said Tuesday.

Following a number of devastating defeats at the hands of ethnic armies in recent months – most notably the Arakan Army in Rakhine state – the junta enacted Myanmar’s military service law on Feb. 10. The announcement has prompted an exodus of young people to rebel-controlled territories and abroad to avoid the draft.

While the junta has said conscription won’t begin until April, RFA Burmese has received reports over the past four weeks of forced recruitment and efforts by authorities to document draft eligibility.

The resignation of the 21 administrators in Rakhine’s Thandwe township on Monday followed a junta directive ordering them to select two residents from each large village and one each small one for military service, with a focus on those who had failed the country’s matriculation exam, a source close to one of the administrators told RFA Burmese.

The junta had also ordered administrators to forcibly recruit 20 residents from large villages and five from small ones to form a local militia, said the source who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

“Yesterday, villagers refused to join the military,” he said. “[The administrators] argued with the villagers and then submitted their resignations [after they couldn’t convince them to join].”

The 21 administrators account for more than one-third of the heads of Thandwe’s 62 village-tracts.

One of the administrators noted that all of the resignations came from the heads of villages in northern Thandwe, where the junta “forced them to recruit youths by drawing lots.”

“The administrators worried that they could not recruit enough people for military service and it would put pressure on them, so they submitted their resignations,” he said.

RFA spoke with several of the administrators who said they had been invited to a meeting by township-level authorities on Tuesday to discuss the situation. They refused to provide further details, noting that their resignations were still in process.

Pe Than, a veteran Rakhine politician and former lawmaker said that the administrators made the right decision by resigning, saying “no one wants to be under this kind of pressure.”

Rohingya youths arrested

The resignations came amid a series of raids, beginning Monday, by authorities on multiple villages in Rakhine’s Maungdaw township, during which they detained several ethnic Rohingya youths, residents told RFA.

Some 20 Rohingyas were arrested in Ka Nyin Tan village and more than 10 others in Maung Ni village, said a Rohingya resident of the township, who also declined to be named.

“They were forcefully taken by junta troops,” he said. “Residents from neighboring villages are fleeing, uncertain of the reason behind the arrests.”

Another Rohingya from the area told RFA that it was unclear where the detainees had been taken.

“The captured people were loaded into vehicles and their destination remains undisclosed,” he said.

A third resident of Maungdaw suggested that the detainees were “being conscripted into the military.”

“Such incidents are not isolated to Ka Nyin Tan, but are occurring in other villages as well,” he noted.

RFA was unable to independently verify the reported arrests of Rohingya youths or the number of those allegedly detained. Attempts by RFA to contact Attorney General Hla Thein, the junta’s spokesperson for Rakhine state, for comment on the resignation of the 21 administrators and arrests of Rohingyas, went unanswered Tuesday.

The junta has reportedly recruited about 1,000 Rohingyas in the Rakhine state capital Sittwe, as well as Buthedaung, Maungdaw and Kyaukphyu townships, according to aid workers.

Travel ban on Rakhine residents

Meanwhile, junta authorities in Myanmar’s largest city Yangon have implemented restrictions on domestic travel for people holding National Registration Cards, or NRCs, with the prefix No. 11, which signifies residency in Rakhine state, employees of passenger bus lines told RFA on Tuesday.

The junta issued a notification letter “outlining a complete ban on travel between townships” for Rakhine cardholders on Monday, according to one employee, who said the edict had been circulated to all of the city’s bus companies.

Furthermore, cardholders registered outside of Rakhine state will be required to provide recommendation letters from their respective ward administrative office, police station, or employer in support of travel plans when purchasing tickets, the employee said.

The bus company employees RFA spoke with said they were unaware of the reason behind the travel restrictions.

A Rakhine state NRC holder who has resided in Yangon for more than a decade described the travel ban as a “deprivation of our fundamental rights.”

“It’s akin to being fenced in,” he said, adding that the ban would likely impact employment opportunities.

A representative from an airline ticket sales department in Yangon confirmed to RFA that Rakhine cardholders had been barred from domestic road travel, but said air travel remained unrestricted as of Tuesday.

Reports have surfaced of arrests and interrogations of residents of Sittwe returning home from Yangon via a Myanmar Airlines flight on Feb. 26.

And on Feb. 20, authorities reportedly arrested more than 100 youths returning to Rakhine state from Yangon by highway at a checkpoint in the city’s Shwe Pyi Thar township.

Sources suggested to RFA that the junta is afraid that, when faced with the likelihood of being drafted, youths are returning to Rakhine and other regions to join the rebellion.

Htay Aung, the junta’s attorney general and spokesperson for Yangon region, did not respond to requests for comment on the travel restrictions on Tuesday.

Families threatened

RFA also learned Tuesday that junta authorities in southwestern Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady region have threatened to “take action” against families of anyone who flees after being selected for military service.

On Monday, four men aged 24-35 were selected in a draft lottery in Pyapon township’s Aung Tharyar village.

One of the men fled Aung Tharyar shortly after the lottery, prompting authorities to threaten all of his family members with unspecified punishment if he failed to return by Wednesday, said a resident of the village, who declined to be named.

“The family members are terrified,” said the resident.

The junta began a lottery system for military service in Ayeyarwady’s Myaungmya, Pyapon, Kangyidaunt, Leputta and Hinthada townships in the third week of March, residents said.

RFA was unable to reach the junta’s Ayeyarwady spokesperson and Social Affairs Minister Khin Maung Kyi for comment on Tuesday.

A young man who is facing a lottery drawing in Hinthada told RFA that he has considered fleeing if selected.

“I don’t want to serve in the military,” he said, “but the junta has threatened to arrest the remaining family members of anyone who runs away.”

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

A Thai court on Tuesday sentenced a Chinese businessman and three accomplices to 50 years in prison following their convictions on charges of operating a transnational ring that paid Thai women to serve as surrogate mothers.

The Criminal Court in Bangkok sentenced ringleader Ran Zhao and the other three for their roles in the illicit operation that they ran between 2015 and 2020. Seven others, including his wife, Su Yingting, were sentenced to four years and released because they had been jailed following their February 2020 arrests.

The public prosecutor had charged the 11 with crimes related to participating in an international criminal organization and facilitating commercial surrogacy.

“The defendants, forming an international criminal organization, conspired to buy, sell, import, or export eggs or embryos. They facilitated commercial surrogacy using assisted reproductive technology by recruiting and paying several Thai women to become surrogate mothers,” the court ruled.

Ran Zhao and his top associates received the maximum sentence permitted by Thai law, after the court initially handed down sentences totaling 150 years for the ringleaders.

“The total sentence for four defendants amounted to 150 years. The four defendants confessed, benefiting the deliberation to reduce the penalty by half to 75 years. According to the law that stipulates imprisonment should not exceed 50 years, the sentence for all four defendants is maintained at 50 years each,” the judgment specified.

Su Yingting and the six others were sentenced for participating in the international criminal organization. Additional charges were dismissed because of insufficient evidence.

As the defendants were led away from the courtroom, family members of those sentenced to four years embraced their relatives as they had already served more than the required time and were released immediately. Ran Zhao and his accomplices, meanwhile, were escorted to prison to begin serving their sentences.

Thai police did not respond to requests for comment by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news outlet.

2020 arrests

The case stems from a February 2020 raid by Thai authorities on 10 residences in Bangkok and other provinces, leading to the arrests of members of the transnational surrogacy ring led by Ran Zhao. Authorities had been investigating the group’s commercial surrogacy operations, which began in 2015.

Thai Police discovered that the operation involved taking Thai women to neighboring countries for embryo implantation, then returning them to Thailand for pregnancy, and eventually taking them to the destination country for childbirth.

Agreements were made for prices ranging from 400,000 to 600,000 baht (US$11,100 to $16,600) per case, with about 30 instances of surrogacy conducted across five provinces in Thailand. The surrogate mothers would receive compensation of 300,000 to 500,000 baht (US$8,300 to $13,900) per case.

Following the raid, police reported seizing vehicles, a house and a company building valued at about 30 million baht (US$831,500).

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news outlet.

Robert Silvers has served as undersecretary for strategy, policy and plans at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, since 2021. In early March, he met with members of the Uyghur diaspora community in northern Virginia to discuss the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and the Chinese government’s transnational repression of Uyghurs abroad.

In an interview with RFA Uyghur Service Director Alim Seytoff, Silvers discussed how the DHS is enforcing the act, signed into law in December 2021. The law prohibits imports of raw material and products or components made by forced labor in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region into the United States.  

Silvers also efforts to combat transnational repression and accusations by Beijing that the U.S. government has fabricated the genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the use of Uyghur forced labor there. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: You recently visited the Uyghur American community in northern Virginia. What was your message to them? 

Silvers: There’s a significant Uyghur diaspora community out in Fairfax, Virginia, about a 40 to 45-minute drive from here, and it was incredibly inspiring and significant to me to be invited into the community by the Uyghur American Association to meet with them, hear their concerns directly, share the work that we are doing in our department to protect them every day. 

And my message was, this is a community that needs our protection and deserves our protection. The story of the Uyghur people must be told because there are forces in the People’s Republic of China that do not want that story to be told. They are taking active measures to silence that story, to cleanse that story. We will not allow that here in the United States. 

RFA: Transnational repression is a big concern for the Uyghur American community. What measures has the Department of Homeland Security taken to protect Uyghur Americans from China’s transnational repression? 

Silvers: What we’ve seen more and more from autocratic regimes like China, Russia, Iran and others is increasing effort not just to repress people in their own countries, but to reach out to diaspora communities abroad to repress and intimidate people there, including in the United States,  and especially vulnerable populations like the Uyghur community. 

What we’ve done at the Department of Homeland Security is we’ve identified this as a problem that offends our American values, our rights to freedom of expression and religion and more. And we are taking steps to protect communities from transnational repression. 

For example, last year we launched a vulnerable community cybersecurity program where communities like the Uyghurs can come in and get advice at no charge on how to protect themselves from cybersecurity threats from foreign governments that may seek to hack their phones or conduct digital surveillance on them. That’s really important to us. 

We also have been leaning very strongly on Interpol, the international law enforcement association, to make sure that its law enforcement processes are not abused by authoritarian regimes like China that would seek to use legitimate law enforcement channels to crackdown on dissidents, human rights activists and the like, which has been a major problem. We are Interpol’s biggest donor, so we have made clear that this is a very high priority for us. At our urging, Interpol has made some significant reforms, which is good to see, but more needs to be done. 

RFA: We have seen over the past year Chinese agents coming from China harassing and threatening some of the Uyghur Americans here in the U.S. We increasingly see individuals and certain groups that openly attack prominent Uyghur leaders and legitimate Uyghur organizations. What is the DHS doing about this? 

Silvers: If there are any individuals that are engaged in illegal transnational repression practices, we will use every law enforcement tool at our disposal to disrupt them and to protect vulnerable communities. If there are agents of foreign governments who are doing that in violation of their visa restrictions, that could be a cause of investigation. 

We work closely with the FBI [and] with state and local law enforcement to make sure that any agent of transnational repression, whether they be a direct agent of a foreign government or an intermediary, are investigated and disrupted and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. 

RFA: If a Uyghur receives a message from a Chinese agent on WhatsApp or Signal, saying that China is holding one of their relatives and that they need to do something for the agent, then how can that person report the incident to the FBI or to the Department of Homeland Security? Who receives the type of protection you’re talking about? 

Silvers: We have field offices around the country where community members can reach out and report that information to us as soon as possible so that we can help protect them and investigate. You mentioned threats to punish family members who reside back in the home country. Some people call them exit bans, [others] call them hostage taking. It’s an alarming and inhumane practice. 

When I’ve met with members of the Uyghur American community here, or other diaspora Uyghur communities in European cities and the like, I hear heartbreaking stories of family members of theirs who are being effectively imprisoned, not allowed to leave China because of what their activist relatives have [done] with their lives in the United States or Europe. Our administration has been very direct with the Chinese government about the importance of allowing people to come together with their family and leave the country if they want to. This is going to continue to be an ongoing focus of ours. 

RFA: DHS has been implementing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act for nearly two years, confiscating many products made by Uyghur forced labor. But we still see some products here that the Chinese government produced in Xinjiang, such as red dates from Xinjiang being sold in Asian markets. Some of the dates have been produced by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps — a state-owned enterprise and paramilitary organization in the region that has been sanctioned by the U.S. government. What challenges does DHS face in implementing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act?

Silvers: Our enforcement of this landmark new law has been strong. We have detained over $2.6 billion of cargo in less than two years under this act — thousands of shipments of tomatoes, cotton products, apparel, polysilicon, aluminum and metals, automotive parts and agricultural products. Our work is certainly not done. 

Supply chains are incredibly complex. You will often have six, seven, eight tiers down the supply chain that need to be investigated to determine if some component or subcomponent may be coming from Xinjiang province. That requires a lot of work on our part, and also on the part of importers and American companies that want to do the right thing. There are challenges in understanding the downstream provenance, but clearly our enforcement of this law is impacting supply chains. It is moving through supply chains.

You see company after company that is revisiting its willingness to have a footprint in Uyghur regions in China. You see companies looking to diversify their supply chains to lower risk sources. You see companies for the first time having really meaningful supply chain due diligence so that they can get to the bottom of what is coming into their products before they ship them to the United States. 

It is unprecedented the improvement in supply chains that we have seen since we started enforcing this law here at the Department of Homeland Security two years ago. There is a lot more work to do. But make no mistake, the community knows they have to know their supply chains and that we have zero tolerance for the importation of products made with forced labor, including forced labor by Uyghurs in Xinjiang.  

RFA: The Chinese government is using Uyghur forced labor to produce many different products that are exported to the U.S. But because of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, China is trying to diversify its own supply chains by using third countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and Malaysia to export their products to the U.S. How is DHS dealing with this?

Silvers: Some of the movement of supply chains is actually quite welcome. If companies are moving operations out of Xinjiang to other countries around the world where there is more integrity and reliability to the supply chain, it is easier to validate that it’s clean from a forced labor perspective. Yes, that’s a welcome development. 

Another story altogether is something we call transshipment, which is where to conceal the true provenance of goods. Those goods are simply routed around through other countries and then sent to the United States. That we will not tolerate. We have made transshipment an enforcement priority, and we actively investigate and bring enforcement action. Any time we see evidence of transshipment, including through countries like those you mentioned. 

I will note that if you go to our data, our enforcement data on our forced labor enforcement, we’ve made that publicly available so the world can see many of the shipments that are detained are actually not originating in China. They are originating in other countries — a lot of them in Southeast Asia. But because there are illicit, supply chains feed into those, and so we are all over it from an enforcement perspective. 

RFA: The online Chinese retailers Shein and Temu ship about 1 million packages to the U.S. daily. Last year, a Bloomberg reporter purchased some clothing from Shein, then through testing found that the cotton came from Xinjiang. How is DHS ensuring that the retailers comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act? 

Silvers: I’ll just say I’m not going to address any particular company. We don’t talk about particular companies, particular investigations of the like. Let me be clear. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act applies to any imports into this country, including fast-fashion imports. When we have evidence that any product coming in is tainted by forced labor, we’re going to bring enforcement. 

We believe that the longstanding exception to our customs law called the de minimis exemption is a source of concern, and that we need to work together with Congress on what should be done to address it under the de minimis exemption. Shipments worth less than $800 are subject to less data collection, and that makes it harder to conduct investigative activities. We are very concerned that the use of de minimis can undermine our enforcement of forced labor laws as well as laws prohibiting the importation of fentanyl or counterfeit items, or any other number of contraband items. This is something we’re quite attuned to, and we are looking at potential solutions. You should expect them to come in that regard. 

RFA: The Chinese government has accused the U.S. government of fabricating the Uyghur genocide and Uyghur forced labor issue, calling them the “lies of the 21st century.” China also says the U.S. and allied Western countries don’t want China to rise. That is the narrative they are selling to Muslim countries and others. It’s hostile to the U.S., so what’s your response to this? 

Silvers: Perpetrators of genocide and atrocities often lie and say that those things didn’t happen. I come from a Jewish-American family. I understand the history of genocide and human rights atrocities that can be targeted at a population. I see a similar history when I talk to members of the Uyghur American community. 

When I was at that event in Fairfax, Virginia, I spoke with three women who had been in Uyghur internment camps. There’s no denying the extensive evidence of human rights violations and forced labor. We in the United States government, we at the Department of Homeland Security, will not keep silent on this.  

Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

North Koreans reacted in shock when they learned that their “socialist brethren” in Cuba established official relations with capitalistic South Korea, residents in the North told Radio Free Asia.

Seoul and Havana announced the move on Feb. 14, when their respective representatives to the United Nations in New York sent each other diplomatic notes acknowledging that the two countries would restore formal relations, which were stopped when Fidel Castro and the communists took control of the Caribbean island nation in 1959.

Since 1960, Cuba and North Korea have boasted of their  “close brotherly ties.” 

But the North Korean government has not yet announced Havana’s move to its citizens.  

The news trickled into North Korea from China and is now spreading by word of mouth, shocking all who hear it, a resident of the central northern province of Ryanggang told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.  

He said he had heard the news several weeks ago from someone who had come from China, and he implied he kept to himself.

(It is common in North Korea for even married couples to not openly discuss potentially sensitive topics because it could be used against them if they ever wind up being interrogated by the authorities). 

“A few days ago, my wife heard the news,” he said. “She was really upset and worried about what our country will be like in the future.”

The man said that his wife was worried that North Korea was becoming isolated as more countries that it considers to be its closest allies set up new embassies in Seoul.

North Korean propaganda up until this point praised the story of Cuba, which the resident said had been depicted as steadfast in its fight against imperialism despite being “firmly and directly under the nose” of the United States, referring to the U.S. embargo of the country.

“Who wouldn’t be surprised that such a country has established diplomatic relations with South Korea?” he said.

Some elderly people have fond memories of Castro visiting Pyongyang in 1986 to receive a gift of 100,000 automatic rifles along with tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, and how genuinely thankful he seemed when he discussed the exchange in a public address in a 20,000 seat stadium where he stood alongside then-leader Kim Il Sung, the resident said.

From then, high-level delegations, as well as exchange students, went back and forth between the two countries, he said. “There is even a school named after Kim Il Sung in Cuba. A lot of sugar from Cuba was also brought into North Korea.”

Another source, a resident of the northeastern province of North Hamgyong said that he could not believe that Cuba and South Korea established relations, especially because North Korean authorities had harshly criticized Hungary when it became the first Soviet-bloc country to forge ties with Seoul in 1989, announcing the decision at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

The act was strongly denounced in North Korean media as a “betrayal of socialism,” and Pyongyang lowered diplomatic relations with Budapest to just the ambassador level that year.

“It was the same [in 1992] when China and Vietnam each established diplomatic relations with South Korea,” the North Hamgyong resident said. “The authorities openly criticized China for giving up socialist principles for money.”

North Korea was especially angry at Vietnam, he said, as Pyongyang had sent soldiers to fight on the side of communist North Vietnam and many North Koreans had died in the war.

“The graves of the North Korean soldiers in Vietnam were relocated to North Korea,” he said.

The lack of official criticism of Cuba is perplexing, he said. “I think that the authorities are afraid of residents finding out that Cuba, the last socialist bastion in Latin America, has established diplomatic relations with South Korea.”  

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong.

Residents of a village in northern Xayaburi province have complained that a Chinese-owned cassava processing plant is dumping polluted water into the Mekong River, turning it black and smelly.

Residents of Nam Xong village in Pak Lay district told Radio Free Asia that they haven’t been able to fish in the river and the village sometimes has a foul odor.

The processing plant run by Laos-Jinsui Ecological Technology Co., Ltd., releases wastewater into the river during a two-hour period on most days, residents said. 

“The factory is located a little bit far from the Mekong but they have set up a direct pipeline for the wastewater,” one resident told RFA. “It has been years that I have seen this problem, but no relevant authorities have come to solve it.”

The factory has recently built some ponds to clean wastewater before it is released into the Mekong, which has reduced some of the bad odor, another village resident said.

Acting district Gov. Bounlhaiy Vongdala told state-owned Lao National Radio on Friday that he has appointed a committee to follow up on the complaints.

An initial inspection found no pipeline from the factory to the river and determined that the dark-colored water in the river was likely due to a leakage from the factory’s ponds, he said.

A factory employee said plant officials are working to prevent wastewater from leaking into the river in the future.

“It is just a small problem,” he said. “The relevant offices in the district understand the factory’s situation and everything is good now.”

RFA contacted the Pak Lay district office for comment on the complaints but a relevant official refused to answer any questions on Monday.

Villagers who live near other cassava processing factories elsewhere in Laos have also reported issues with odor and wastewater.

Cassava is used in a number of food products, including sweeteners, flour and animal feed. The edible, starchy, tuberous cassava root is also sometimes turned into biofuel for power generation. 

Translated by Phouvong. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.