Year: 2022

New evidence has emerged that may help support Vietnam’s claims over the Paracel islands in the South China Sea, currently occupied by China. A copy of a birth certificate issued in June 1940 claims that Mai Xuan Quy, a girl, was born at 3 p.m. on Dec. 9, 1939, on Pattle Island to Mai Xuan Tap, a Vietnamese meteorologist and his wife, Nguyen Thi Thang. The paper was witnessed by Nguyen Tang Chuan, a medical doctor, and Do Duc Mui, head of the local radio communication station. As such, it indicates that French Indochina, of which Vietnam was part, had administration of the island and Vietnamese people worked there. That could be significant evidence as claimants to disputed features in the South China Sea may seek to show they were the first to have an official presence there. Pattle is a coral island, part of the Crescent Island group of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. It served as the main base for the colonial-era French Indochinese and later, South Vietnamese occupation of the Paracels. Vietnam, Taiwan and China all claim sovereignty over the entire Paracel archipelago but China has occupied it since 1974. Peaceful life During the 1930s, the French colonial government built some infrastructure including a weather station, a medical facility and a post office on Pattle Island. Mai Xuan Tap, father of Mai Kim Quy, was among the civilians sent there to man the weather station when it was first set up in 1938. He brought with him his wife and two daughters, Mai Thi Phi, then two years old, and a newly born baby, Mai Thi Phuong. The eldest daughter, Mai Thi Phi, who is now 86 and lives in Ho Chi Minh City, said: “Our family lived in Pattle four years, from 1938 to 1941. My sister Mai Kim Quy was born there.” “Unfortunately Quy died in 1942 after we returned to the mainland.” “Our life on Pattle Island was quiet and peaceful. The Vietnamese living there were mainly civil servants working at the weather station, the post office and the hospital,” Phi recalled. “We had never seen any Chinese person on the island during the whole time we were there,” she said. Mai Xuan Tap died in 1983, his wife died much earlier in 1954. After returning to Saigon, the couple had seven more children including three sons and four daughters. The birth certificate of Mai Kim Quy was passed to the eldest son, Mai Xuan Phu, for safekeeping. “My family has donated the birth certificate to the Vietnamese foreign ministry,” said Mai Thi Phi. “The ministry said this is a valuable document that can play an important role in defending the country’s territorial claims in the South China Sea,” she added. The birth certificate issued in June 1940 by the French colonial authority on Pattle Island in the Paracels for Mai Xuan Quy. Credit: Mai Xuan Tap family ‘Useful evidence’ The Paracel archipelago is now occupied and fully controlled by China, with the biggest feature – Woody Island – being extensively developed. China has also carried out land reclamations and substantial upgrades of its military infrastructure there, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Yet disputes remain over the islands’ ownership. Contested territorial claims are hard to verify, especially because until the 20th century, there was no permanent military nor civilian presence of any country there.  China, Vietnam and Taiwan all have ample historical documents to back up their claims, including maps, declarations and different materials. Vietnam, which was part of French Indochina, said the troops of Annam (the then-name of colonial Vietnam), and after that, civilian administrators, set up base on the Paracels before anybody else. Mai Xuan Quy’s birth certificate may serve as a historical evidence of physical acts of administration on the Paracel islands, said Bill Hayton, associate fellow in the Asia-Pacific Program at Chatham House, an independent U.K. think tank. “My argument would be that this [the birth certificate] doesn’t swing the argument decisively but it is very useful evidence that Annam was in effective occupation of some of the Paracels at that time,” Hayton said. “If the case ever went to a tribunal of some kind, the Chinese would put forward their own evidence and the judges would decide which case was stronger.” “Such cases aren’t decided by vague claims or printing names on maps but on proving that a state had administrative control over a feature – and registering a birth on the island to a civil servant is quite strong evidence of that,” the British analyst said. His argument, however, is being rejected by some historians who point out that China’s stance would be to stick to historical claims. “The French Government stated at the time that they only occupied the Paracels ‘before any other Power did so’, meaning Japan. This was widely reported in the press,” said Mark Hoskin, an independent researcher and lecturer on China’s maritime history and law. This action was taken because the Japanese had occupied Hainan and implemented a blockade of the Southern Chinese coastline. Japan was threatening France due to the transport of arms via Indochina to China. “So the French occupation of the Paracel islands had strategic and military reasoning, but was not sovereignty related. The French statements themselves negate any potential for a sovereignty claim,” Hoskin added.

The 12-year old Uyghur girl, who now lives in the U.S. state of Virginia, was about seven years old and starting to absorb a bit more knowledge when she first learned about the repression of Uyghurs in their homeland northwestern China’s Xinjiang region. As she got older, her mother would tell her more and more about the back story, bringing it up in the normal course of conversation or if they were in the car and the girl asked a question about her grandparents still in Xinjiang. “I felt really sad,” the girl said about when her parents starting telling her about the crackdown. The girl, who spoke on condition of anonymity and did not want to identify her parents to avoid endangering relatives in Xinjiang, said that the pain hit home with her when schoolmates would talk about where they were from originally. When the girl thought about her family coming from Xinjiang, other questions would arise, such as why her grandmother would never come to visit her family in the U.S. Her voice grows weaker and begins to trail off whenever she is asked about her hometown. “It does affect my voice,” the girl told RFA. “Sometimes if people ask me where I’m from, it’s going to be sometimes difficult because they don’t know much about us [Uyghurs], and because they think that China is like a perfect place. They don’t know about the government and everything.” “They’re going to think you’re crazy, she added. It’s never easy for teenagers and children to discuss tragedies in their families, nor is it easy for parents to broach such topics with their offspring. Mom, who are they? They are military. Uyghurs, who are being persecuted as an ethnic and religious group by the Chinese government, face a common challenge of figuring out how best to talk with young people about the 21st-century atrocities occurring in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. Uyghur children, born and raised in the diaspora, are asking their parents why they can’t see their grandparents, why Uyghurs in Xinjiang face genocide, and why they can’t visit their homeland. Uyghur adults living abroad, frustrated by the inability to stop the atrocities despite widespread and credible reports about right abuses those living in Xinjiang face, say they are unsure about how to discuss the genocide with their children and sometimes falter when asked why it is happening. At least 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are believed to have been held in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017, purportedly to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers. The government has denied repeated allegations from multiple sources that it has tortured people in the camps or mistreated other Muslims living in Xinjiang. The United States and parliaments of several Western countries have declared that China’s repression and maltreatment of the Uyghurs amount to genocide and crimes against humanity. What should they be told? Although children’s questions may seem simple to parents, what they are actually asking is about the history of Uyghurs, Chinese politics, and how to ensure the existence of Uyghurs abroad, said Suriyye Kashgary, co-founder of Ana Care, a Uyghur language school in northern Virginia with about 100 students ranging in age from five to 15 years old. Uyghur boys who have lost at least one parent, raise their hands during a Koran class in a madrasa, or religious school, in Kayseri, Turkey, January 31, 2019. The madrasa that shelters 34 children, including eight who have lost at least one parent, in Kayseri, a central Anatolian city, has received Uyghurs since the 1960s and today hosts the second largest population of Uighur exiles in Turkey. REUTERS/Murad Sezer “They always ask questions like “Why isn’t my grandma here? Why isn’t my grandpa here? Where are my relatives? My grandpa isn’t around. My grandma isn’t around. Where are my relatives?” she said “What I’ve been able to learn is that [many of] the children are a bit confused because some parents answer their kids’ questions, while some parents don’t speak with them in much detail at all,” she said. While some Uyghur parents do not disclose information to their children about the genocide, others do talk about it and take them to local demonstrations against China’s repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. “There are many disagreements over whether it’s OK to explain some things to the children or not,” Kashgary said. “Some people argue that we shouldn’t let [the genocide] negatively impact their psyches, that children shouldn’t be sad about these things, and that they shouldn’t live under such stress from a young age.” At her school, Kashgary expects teachers to be comprehensive, balanced, and vigilant as they work with the children, given the teachers’ need to be well-informed on a range of topics, she told RFA. Uyghurs in the diaspora, who are indirect victims of China’s genocide, have been demanding justice by exposing the oppression of their families to others, including to the media. But as a collective group of genocide victims, they have not been able to fully shield their children from the emotional suffering and negative psychological influences of the ongoing atrocities targeting Uyghurs. Zubayra Shamseden, four of whose family members were killed or tortured by the Chinese government as part of the Ghulja Massacre in 1997, and who has relatives currently being held in internment camps in Xinjiang, works as China’s outreach coordinator for the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project and as a Uyghur human rights activist. “When it comes to the Uyghur genocide, it’s a fact that it is tearing up and impacting the lives of Uyghurs on the outside in the diaspora as well,” she said. “It’s not just adults — the shadows of the Uyghur genocide are affecting children and teenagers.” Shamseden says that Uyghurs in the diaspora are dealing with a kind of emotional genocide and that trying to hide the genocide from the children will not solve the issue….