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Category: Middle East

Anti-junta militia members escape from prison in Myanmar’s Bago region

Editor03 mins

Myanmar police and troops are searching for nine People’s Defense Force members who were among 10 that escaped from a prison in Myanmar’s Bago region, the junta said Friday. Its information group said that nine men and one woman escaped from Taungoo Prison. One was shot dead by guards. The jailbreak took place Thursday afternoon after the prisoners were taken from their cells to go on trial, according to a People’s Defense Force member who declined to be named. “Ten prisoners were brought to court in the prison and they grabbed guns from the prison guard who came along with them and ran away,” he said.  “They breached the prison walls and fought [against their pursuers].” One prisoner was shot dead as the two sides exchanged fire, the PDF member confirmed. RFA asked to speak with the nine prisoners still at liberty but the defense force declined, citing the need to protect them. A prison guard was also believed to have been killed, according to Tun Kyi, a member of the Former Political Prisoners Society. “Some of the junta-affiliated Pyu Saw Htee were working together with the prison authorities to provide security, but we could say that this operation was successful,” he said. “A sergeant was reportedly killed. A revolver and a G3 rifle were taken.” Nearly 22,500 political activists have been arrested since the February 2021 coup according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, another group of former political prisoners, operating from Thailand. More than 18,000 are still being held in prisons across Myanmar. Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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Republicans pummel top officials over China policy at Senate hearing

Editor06 mins

Republicans ripped into Cabinet officials during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on efforts to enhance U.S. security measures and the nation’s ability to compete with China. Three Cabinet members defended President Joe Biden’s budgetary request. The presence Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a rare triple act, showed the importance of China policy for the White House. Biden administration officials have asked members of Congress for $842 billion in defense spending for the next fiscal year, in part to deter the threat of a potential military conflict with China. This year’s budgetary request is 3.2% more than the one made last year, and approximately 13% higher than the year before that. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, said during the hearing that the president’s budget was inadequate to counter the threat from China, however. He said the proposed budget did not include enough funding for the Navy or other branches of the military. Overall, the budget proposal was a sign of the president’s weak approach to China, said Graham. He used an expletive to describe his assessment of the president’s policy: “This idea that we have a strong China policy is a bunch of [expletive].” Secretary of State Antony Blinken [left] speaks with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., before a Senate Appropriations hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, May 16, 2023. Credit: Associated Press Another Republican member of the committee, Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, said during the hearing that he has been disappointed in the president’s record on trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In contrast, Moran said, China has been aggressively pursuing trade agreements and gaining a competitive advantage. Tensions between the U.S. and China have escalated in recent months, as both the witnesses at the hearing and the Republicans on the committee agreed. Austin described China’s “bullying and its provocations” in the Indo-Pacific region. U.S. military leaders are now trying to beef up their forces in order to defend Taiwan, if it becomes necessary, and to defend the island nation against the Chinese military.  “The United States will soon provide significant additional security assistance to Taiwan,” he said. Earlier this month, as Reuters reported, Biden White House officials had agreed to send $500 million worth of weapons aid to Taiwan. Competition with China Commerce Secretary Raimondo said the president’s proposed budget includes resources that are “critical for national security.” She warned about the danger from Beijing, saying that, “China is doubling down on its competitiveness with the U.S.” Senate Democrats on the spending panel sought to use the threat to frame the broader budget debate in Washington, as the White House and congressional Republicans remain at an impasse in negotiations to raise the nation’s debt limit. Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, met again Tuesday to negotiate an extension without success. According to estimates, the U.S. government could run out of money to pay its bills in two weeks. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, a Democrat for Washington state, warned that steep budget cuts of the kind House Republicans are pushing, even if they wouldn’t come from the Pentagon, would hand China an edge as it tries to supplant the United States as the dominant world power. “China is not debating whether to pay its debt or wreck its economy,” Murray said.

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Cyclone Mocha inflicts heavy damage on Myanmar’s Rakhine state

Editor012 mins

Cyclone Mocha may have been less deadly than predicted, but it inflicted heavy damage on Myanmar’s Rakhine state, including the capital of Sittwe.  On Monday, a day after the storm slammed into the coast, images from the city and surrounding area showed flattened homes, roads blocked by fallen electricity pylons, splintered remains of trees and widespread flooding. Power was cut off to Sittwe, a city of about 150,000. “Ninety percent of Sittwe township … is damaged or under debris,” aid and relief groups told Radio Free Asia.  A precise death toll was hard to nail down. At least 30 people are believed dead, based on reports by local media and residents of the affected regions. Myanmar’s junta had said three people died, while the shadow National Unity Government – made up of opponents of the junta – put the figure at 18. Those figures are far lower than feared. Cyclone Nargis, which hit the same area in 2008, left nearly 140,000 dead or missing. The storm hit the coast on Sunday with sustained winds reaching over 220 kilometers per hour (137 mph). “Buildings have been badly damaged,” said a woman who lives in the Sittwe’s Lanmadaw (South) ward, asking not to be identified. “The monastery in front of my house is completely destroyed. Not one house is left undamaged.” The low-lying areas of Sittwe were inundated with flooding, she said, leaving residents to contend with brackish and, in some places, chest-deep water from the Bay of Bengal. “Piles of mud have been left inside the buildings,” she said. “Since there is no electricity, we haven’t been able to clean them … The roof of my house is almost gone and there is water downstairs. We don’t know what to do to clean them up.” Local residents stand on a broken bridge at the Khaung Dote Khar Rohingya refugee camp in Sittwe, Myanmar, Monday, May 15, 2023, after cyclone Mocha made a landfall. Credit: AFP A Sittwe firefighter told RFA that floodwaters in the city were “still as high as 1.5 meters (5 feet) in the low-lying areas” and that evacuated residents were waiting for word from the Rakhine state government to return to their homes. Impact in Bangladesh Meanwhile, in neighboring Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar to the west, some 1.2 million Rohingyas living in refugee camps after fleeing a military offensive in Rakhine state in 2017 remained largely unscathed by the cyclone, despite earlier fears that the mostly unprotected camps lay directly in the storm’s crosshairs. But while no casualties were reported in the aftermath of the cyclone, Rohingya refugees told RFA that thousands of homes were damaged in the sprawling camps due to strong winds, landslides, and flooding. “About 500 homes were damaged in our camp alone,” said Aung Myaing, a refugee at the Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar. “About 10,000 homes in all refugee camps combined have been damaged. Some houses have been completely destroyed while others have been partially damaged.” He said camp residents are in need of bamboo and tarps to help shore up the damage. RFA-affiliated BenarNews reported that Mocha had destroyed more than 2,800 shelters, learning centers, health centers and other infrastructure in refugee camps in the neighboring sub-districts of Teknaf and Ukhia, citing Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, refugee relief and repatriation commissioner. He noted that landslides were also reported at 120 spots in the Rohingya camps. Rahman said there were no casualties because “we relocated them at an appropriate time.” ‘Trail of devastation’ In a flash update on Monday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance called Mocha “one of the strongest cyclones ever to hit the country” and said the storm had left a “trail of devastation” in Rakhine state, which is also home to tens of thousands of people displaced by conflict in the aftermath of the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat. “Few houses have escaped damage in Sittwe and there is widespread destruction of flimsy bamboo longhouses in displacement camps,” UNOCHA said. “Health, relief items, shelter, and water, sanitation, and hygiene needs are already being reported. Explosive ordnance risks are high in conflict-affected rural areas where landmines may have been shifted during flooding and where people have been on the move to safer areas.” A downed tree lies on a building in Sittwe, Myanmar, Monday, May 15, 2023. Credit: Citizen journalist Damage to telecommunications towers has severely hampered the flow of information in Rakhine, while water and power services were disrupted throughout the day on Monday, forcing residents to rely on generators for electricity. Relief efforts underway UNOCHA said humanitarian partners are starting assessments to confirm the magnitude of the damage in Sittwe and the Rakhine townships of Pauktaw, Rathedaung, Maungdaw, Ponnagyun, and Kyauktaw. It called for “an urgent injection of funds” to respond to the impact of Mocha and subsequent flooding in the region. In a response to emailed questions from RFA, the World Food Program said it is “mobilizing emergency food and nutrition assistance to 800,000 people affected by the cyclone, many of them already displaced by conflict.” Before the cyclone, the U.N. had estimated 6 million people were “already in humanitarian need” in Rakhine state, and the regions of Chin, Magway and Sagaing. Collectively, the states host 1.2 million displaced people, prompting OCHA to warn of “a nightmare scenario.” However, Mocha had weakened by Sunday evening and moved toward Myanmar’s northwest, where it was downgraded to a depression on Monday over the country’s Sagaing region. RFA was able to document the deaths of at least a dozen people. They included a 30-year-old woman from Rakhine’s Ramree township, two men in their 20s in Ayeyarwady region’s Yegyi township and Rakhine’s Toungup township, and four men of unknown ages in Rakhine’s Kyauktaw township.  Others killed included a resident of Sittwe, a man in his 50s from Mandalay region’s Pyin Oo Lwin township, a young couple from the Shan state city of Tachileik, and a 70-year-old woman from Magway region’s Sinphyukyun township. Attempts by RFA to contact…

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Repeated raids force more than 3,500 villagers to flee Sagaing region township

Editor03 mins

Junta raids over the past five days have forced more than 3,500 villagers to flee their homes in Khin-U township, locals told RFA Thursday. They said troops started burning homes in eight villages, including Koke Tet, Yone Pin and Thin Paung, on May 7. A 60-year-old woman from Koke Tet village, who did not want to be named for security reasons, told RFA the displaced people no longer have enough food. “There is nothing at home. Villages were torched,” she said.  “Now people are hiding in the forest. And we are fleeing from place to place as the army is raiding villages and we were not able to take anything from home when we fled.” The number of houses burned by the military is not yet known as locals said they were too afraid to return home while troops were still in the township. Khin-U has come under repeated attack by junta forces since the 2021 coup. Around 70 villages have been attacked by the junta, who burned more than 20,000 homes in the township between Feb. 1, 2021 and April this year, according to the pro-democracy Khin-U Information Group. A 60-year-old man, who also requested anonymity, told RFA he was forced to flee his home in Khin-U township four times over the past two years and he and his fellow villagers are struggling to survive. The situation is similar across Sagaing region. Nearly 750,000 people have fled their homes due to fighting and insecurity since the coup, according to a May 6 statement by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. RFA’s calls to the junta spokesman for Sagaing region, Aye Hlaing, who is also the regional minister for social affairs, went unanswered Thursday. Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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More than 5,000 evacuees in Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady region prepare for cyclone to hit

Editor04 mins

More than 5,000 people have arrived in Labutta township over the past few days, amid warnings that a fierce tropical cyclone is bearing down on Myanmar’s western coast, aid groups helping the evacuees told RFA Wednesday. They said evacuees arrived from the nearby villages of Pyin Sa Lu, Sa Lu Seik and Kwin Pauk and have been put up in monasteries and friends’ homes. One local social assistance group official, who didn’t want to be named for security reasons, told RFA that although monasteries have been providing food it is not enough. “There are places where cyclone evacuees gather to get food [but] there are 400 to 500 evacuees in each monastery or monastic school,” the official said. RFA called the junta spokesperson and social affairs minister for Ayeyarwady region, Maung Maung Than, to ask what was being done to feed and house evacuees and minimize casualties if the cyclone is severe but no one answered. Junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun told regime-controlled newspapers Monday that 118 disaster shelters have been built in Ayeyarwady region and 17 more were under construction. He said relief materials had been arranged for 6,000 people in six townships in the region. According to a report by Myanmar’s Department of Meteorology at 7 a.m. local time Wednesday, a Depression in the Bay of Bengal was likely to turn into a Very Severe Cyclonic Storm by Friday morning. The department forecast the storm would make landfall at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, Kyaukpyu in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state and the northern Rakhine coast. It warned people to beware of strong winds, heavy rain, flash floods and landslides and issued a warning to flights and shipping near the Myanmar coast. A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm which has a diameter of between 200 and 1,000 kilometers (124 to 621 miles) and brings violent winds, torrential rains and high waves. Cyclones are named by the U.N. World Meteorological Organization in order to avoid confusion when there is more than one in the same region simultaneously. If winds reach a certain speed, this storm will be named Cyclone Mocha after a port city in Yemen. Myanmar has been hit hard by severe weather conditions in the past. More than 138,000 people died when Cyclone Nargis hit the country in May 2008.  It was the world’s third most deadly meteorological disaster of its time according to the WMO Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes (1970-2019). About 80,000 people died in Labutta township alone, according to local authorities. Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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Popular Lao activist who criticized government on Facebook shot and killed

Editor04 mins

A 24-year-old Lao activist who championed human rights and posted articles critical of the government was shot and killed in the capital by an unidentified gunman, according to video footage posted on a Facebook page he helped maintain. Jack Anousa, an administrator of a Facebook group that uncovered and denounced human rights abuses in Laos and called for the end of one-party rule, was shot at 10:26 pm on Saturday in the After School Chocolate & Bar shop in Vientiane’s Chanthabury district. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital at 4 am early Sunday, the Facebook page said. Black-and-white security camera footage shows a man wearing a cap coming to the door of the shop and appearing to ask a question of a woman standing in the kitchen area. He briefly closes the door before entering again, stepping inside and firing two shots at Jack, and leaves, prompting two women with him to scream, “Jack, Jack!” Separate color footage from a security camera outside the back door shows the assailant, wearing a gray cap and brown shirt, come to the back door and use a handkerchief to grab the doorknob, presumably to avoid leaving his fingerprints, before asking the question and then stepping inside to fire the gun. No arrests have been made. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, strongly urged the government to investigate and reveal the facts for the public to know. “If they don’t do anything, people will think that state officials have a connection with the case,” he said. “Right now, we can’t say who did the killing.” Robertson said that those who have been critical of the government have paid a heavy price in the past, including getting kidnapped and disappearing. The most prominent example is the case of Sombath Somphone, an activist who was stopped at a police checkpoint in 2012, forced into a white truck and driven away. He hasn’t been seen since then. On his Facebook page, which has over 10,000 followers, Anousa recently posted comments saying that while the government has blamed thick haze on farmers burning forests and farmland, city dwellers have also burned lots of trash and Chinese and Vietnamese companies have burned toxic waste that has polluted the air. Last May, he published a post about how the Lao and Chinese governments helped each other get rich while Lao people have only grown poorer. Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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China’s new rural land transfer scheme sparks fears over heavy-handed enforcement

Editor09 mins

New rules governing the transfer of rural land in China have sparked concerns that the ruling Communist Party may be gearing up for the mass confiscation and reallocation of farmland in the name of “stabilizing the grain supply,” Radio Free Asia has learned. The Ministry of Agriculture announced this week it will roll out a pilot scheme to “standardize” the transfer of rural property rights, as well as “strengthening supervision and management” over the use of rural land in China, which is typically leased to farmers on 30-year “household responsibility” contracts, with the ownership remaining with the government. The move comes after the administration of supreme party leader Xi Jinping made it easier in 2016 for farmers to be bought out of household responsibility leases, to encourage farmers to relocate to urban areas to reduce rural poverty.  China declared in November 2020 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, with analysts attributing the change in statistics to the mass relocation of younger migrant workers to cities, under strong official encouragement. Under the new land rules, officials are expected to “give full play to government leadership” via controversial “agricultural management” enforcement officials, who critics fear will send the country back to Mao-era collective farming and micromanagement of people’s daily lives. Analysts and farmers said that the main point of the additional controls is the tightening of state control over the supply of grain and to facilitate the transfer of rural land away from farmers if needed. Food security The move comes amid an ongoing government campaign to “stabilize the grain supply” and other moves to ensure food security, including revamping moribund Mao-era food co-ops and ordering the construction of state-run canteens. The rules insist on “disciplined transactions” including supervision of contract-signing and “certification,” and could pave the way for the mass reallocation of farmland in future, analysts said. A rural resident of the eastern province of Shandong who gave only the surname Zhang for fear of reprisals said he had recently found that farmers in his hometown now need a permit to farm land already leased to them. “I went back home and the neighbors told me that you now need a permit to till the land,” Zhang said. He blamed the “national food crisis” for the move, saying it effectively means that rural residents can no longer have friends and neighbors take care of their land when they migrate into the cities to look for work. A farmer collects corn in Gaocheng, Hebei province, China. Analysts and farmers say a key goal of the new land rules is to tighten state control over the supply of grain. Credit: Reuters file photo “When my relatives and friends would go to look for work, they would have others till their land for them, with no need for any kind of contract,” Zhang said. “Then, they could just pick it up again immediately if their work ended and they went back to live in the countryside.” “That’s no longer possible due to the serious nature of the national food crisis,” he said. Another major land reform Financial commentator Cai Shenkun said the scope of the pilot scheme is unprecedented. “This is another major land reform [following on from 2016], and it’s worth observing whether the next step will be to roll it out to all rural land governed by household responsibility contracts,” Cai said. “Given the involvement of the agricultural management officials who are now empowered to enforce the law, I think it has something to do with the next step, which will be the confiscation and reallocation of land,” he said. Agricultural management officials are among a slew of local officials empowered in a July 2021 directive to enforce laws and regulations without the involvement of the police. There are growing signs of unease around the new breed of rural “enforcer.” Netease and Sina Weibo’s news channels reported on Wednesday that a team of agricultural management officials seized two truck-loads of live pigs and sent the animals for slaughter on the grounds that quarantine regulations hadn’t been followed. After that, the farmers complained that they had received no money for the carcases, and that the trucks hadn’t been returned to them. Photos of the equipment issued to the “enforcers” showed first-aid kits, mobile phone signal jammers and stab-proof vests. ‘A new devil’ The reports prompted comments complaining of intrusive management of farmers’ lives, and asking if the agricultural enforcers were “a new devil for the New Era,” in a satirical reference to one of supreme leader Xi Jinping’s ideological buzzwords. A farmer from the southwestern province of Sichuan who gave only the surname Sen said the enforcers were also active in his part of the country. “They are bringing in this policy now, which is evil,” Sen said. “The agricultural management teams have so much power.”  “They are descending on the countryside and making life hell for ordinary people with all this rectification.” Cai’s perception of the new rural management teams was similar to Sen’s and to comments seen online by Radio Free Asia, and he likened them to the widely hated urban management enforcement teams, or chengguan, who are often filmed beating up street vendors in the name of civic pride. “Now they are sending these so-called agricultural management teams into countless households, and into the fields,” he said. “They came into being, like the urban management officials before them, because when farmers aren’t cooperating, local township and village officials don’t want to show their faces, or get involved in beating people up or demolishing stuff,” he said.  Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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US case against alleged monkey smuggler is ‘attack on Cambodia,’ his lawyers claim

Editor09 mins

The former head of Cambodia’s Department of Wildlife and Biodiversity should not be held responsible for illegally smuggling research monkeys because he was acting on orders of his government and not in a personal capacity, his lawyers have argued in a U.S. government case against him. Moreover, the U.S. case against Masphal Kry is tantamount to an attack on the Cambodian government, his defense lawyers argued, calling the indictment “a full-on assault on a foreign ministry.” U.S. Justice Department officials said Kry and seven other individuals were running a smuggling operation involving hundreds of long-tail macaques – a primate key for medical studies – poached from the wild in Cambodia and shipped illegally to the U.S. Kry, who has been under house arrest since he was apprehended at New York’s JFK airport in November 2022, made his first court appearance at an evidentiary hearing in Miami on Friday.  Officials in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida have accused Kry of taking monkeys from the national parks and other locations in Cambodia and then falsifying permits, making it seem as though the animals had been raised in a breeding facility – the only legal place where the research primates can be sourced from. The prosecutors accused him of being part of a conspiracy in which monkeys were sold with inaccurate export permits to the U.S. The prosecutors accused Kry and his associates of trying to make it seem as though the monkeys had been bred in captivity, when in fact the monkeys had been caught in the wild. Prosecutors said that Kry and his associates concocted a scheme to sell the monkeys. He and his associates have each been charged with seven counts of smuggling and one count of conspiracy. Masphal Kry, the former head of Cambodia’s Department of Wildlife and Biodiversity. Credit: Masphal Kry Facebook On Friday, a judge, Lisette Reid, considered whether some of the evidence gathered by federal investigators could be admitted at trial. The lawyers argued about the circumstances of Kry’s arrest at Kennedy International Airport in New York in November, and whether information that he provided to an investigator on that day can be admitted. At the airport, Kry was read his Miranda rights (his right to have a lawyer present and to remain silent). But his lawyers said that he does not speak or understand English well enough to have comprehended the full meaning of his rights. If he was not aware of his rights, then the information he shared cannot be admitted. The prosecutors said that he was told of his rights, and that he was given a translation of his rights in the Khmer language. Therefore, they said, the evidence can be admitted.Kry, sitting next to an interpreter, listened intently to their arguments. He wore a dark suit and white socks, with an electronic ankle bracelet – a GPS tracking device – bulging under one of his socks. Outside the courthouse, animal rights activists, holding signs (“End Monkey Smuggling”) and wearing cardboard monkey faces, stood in a line. “Hunters in Cambodia are taking mothers away from their babies,” said Amanda Brody, a senior campaigner for an organization, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), referring to the captured animals. “We’re standing here in solidarity with the monkeys.” Protecting public spaces? Ahead of Friday’s hearing, Kry’s lawyers sought to have the indictment dismissed, arguing that he was following the Cambodian government’s request to obtain monkeys from “public spaces,” places where monkeys are a nuisance for local residents.  In fact, Cambodian officials viewed the capture of the monkeys as a service to the people who live in these areas. Local authorities had wanted the monkeys removed, the lawyers claimed. Kry was fulfilling his duties as a wildlife official and U.S. prosecutors are attempting “to criminalize public acts by a foreign government employee that occurred entirely within that foreign country.” “These public acts are legal under Cambodian law,” said the defense lawyers. Experts say the argument has little credibility as the issue is not whether poaching monkeys is legal under Cambodian domestic law, but that Kry and his conspirators faked import documents to pretend that the provenance of the macaques was legitimate.  This would be illegal under U.S. law and under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which Cambodia has signed. The defense’s argument “epitomizes the Cambodian government’s way of thinking — it’s not illegal if the government says it’s not,” said Ed Newcomer, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife investigator. “[But] Cambodia is a signatory to CITES and, as such, has to follow CITES rules if they want to export their wildlife.” Long-tailed macaques, highly intelligent creatures prized in research for their biological similarity to humans, are protected under international trade law, and their handlers need a permit to ship them to the U.S.  They were added to the endangered species list in 2022 amid increased poaching as demand for the primates surged in the midst of the COVID pandemic. The biggest market is the U.S. From 2000 to 2018, the U.S. imported between 41.7% and 70.1% of the total annual trade, according to a forthcoming article in the International Federation of Tropical Medicine journal.

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Junta air strike in Myanmar’s Magway kills 3, injures 12

Editor04 mins

A junta airstrike in Myanmar’s central Magway region killed three people and injured 12, residents told RFA.  Thursday’s attack destroyed a National Unity Government administrative building in Tilin township’s Laung Bo Lay village, the second deadly attack on an NUG village office this month. “The Public Administration Office was bombed,” said a resident who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “Three People’s Defense Force comrades died on the spot and about 12 other people were injured.” The two men and a woman who died were members of the Yaw Revolutionary Army, based in Tilin township, according to an official from the local defense force, who also declined to be named. He said four men and eight women were injured, including one person in charge of assisting people left homeless by the conflict in Magway region. The official told RFA a jet fighter flew over Laung Bo Lay village at around noon Thursday, dropping three bombs. He said the junta ordered the air strike after being tipped off about the presence of People’s Defense Force members at the office. It cut telephone lines in Tilin and nearby Gangaw township ahead of the attack. After the air strike, troops stationed at the Shwe Htee Hall in Tilin township and the junta-affiliated Pyu Saw Htee militia staged ground attacks on villages in Tilin, according to locals. They said hundreds of residents from 13 villages were forced to flee. The junta has not issued a statement on the incident and calls to the junta’s Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun by RFA went unanswered. Myanmar’s military is increasingly resorting to air attacks as it meets fierce resistance on the ground from People’s Defense Forces and ethnic armies across the country. On April 18, it carried out an air strike on Ma Gyi Kan village in Magway region’s Myaing township, destroying the hospital. Thursday’s air strike comes 10 days after the junta bombed an NUG office in Sagaing region’s Pa Zi Gyi village, killing around 200 people, the deadliest air strike since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup. The junta bombed the Pa Zi Gyi again Thursday but no one was injured in that attack as most people had fled the village. The National Unity Government was formed shortly after the 2021 coup and serves as a parallel government, campaigning for the restoration of democracy. It also carries out local administrative work in areas not under junta control, while its People’s Defense Forces fight junta troops for control of townships across Myanmar. Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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Video of dancer in mosque inflames Uyghur anxieties about China’s attacks on religion

Editor08 mins

A Chinese tourism advertisement portraying a medieval Buddhist fantasy, shot in the prayer hall of Xinjiang’s second-largest mosque, has alarmed diaspora Uyghurs, who call it a desecration.  They say it is particularly incensing during Ramadan, a time when mosques should host prayer and evening fast-breaking.  The promotional video, put out by a local propaganda office, features a bare-armed Uyghur woman as a dancer from “Women’s Kingdom,” a fictional polity whose queen sought to marry the Chinese protagonist of the classic Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West.  She twirls in the otherwise empty Kuchar Grand Mosque. The video, which circulated on Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, emerged amid a tourism campaign to draw Han Chinese to the far-western region of Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uyghur and other Turkic peoples now that COVID-19 travel restrictions have been lifted. There were 35.2 million individual visits to Xinjiang between January and March of this year, resulting in 2.5 billion yuan in tourism revenue, an increase of 36% on the same period last year, according to state media. But Uyghurs say such videos are both offensive and part of a wider attempt to diminish or erase their religion and culture. The video was shared to Facebook by Uyghur activist and reeducation camp survivor Zumret Dawut. It has since been taken down from Douyin. Radio Free Asia could not identify or contact its creators.  “The message [of the video] to the Uyghurs is that we can suppress and even destroy you by assaulting and breaking your dignity through humiliation – we can do anything we want to do,” said Ilshat Hassan, Deputy Executive Chairman of the World Uyghur Congress. Spurious claim The video begins with a Chinese narrator walking up the steps to the mosque. “[When you] open the heavy door of Kuchar Grand Mosque, a beautiful Qiuci woman, concealed by a veil, steps forward, and shares memories of the Woman’s Kingdom with you,” the video’s narrator relates as the woman dances.  Qiuci is the Chinese name for the medieval Buddhist kingdom of Kusen, near the present site of Kuchar. The Chinese words used in the video for Grand Mosque, Da Si, are also used to refer to large Buddhist temples. Nowhere does the film indicate that the setting is a gathering place for Muslims. The mosque, first built in the 16th century and reconstructed after a fire in the 1930s, has never been a site of Buddhist worship. The Chinese Communist Party ties the legitimacy of its rule in the Uyghur region to the spurious claim that Xinjiang has always been a part of China.  To bolster this claim, it has etched episodes from Chinese fiction and historical annals onto Xinjiang’s landscape by altering the presentation of Uyghur sacred spaces.  The Uyghur region’s most prominent shrine is the mausoleum of Afaq Khoja, a 17th century religious and political leader in Kashgar. It has long been marketed to Chinese tourists as the tomb of the “Fragrant Concubine,” who, according to Chinese legend, was Afaq Khoja’s granddaughter, sent as tribute to the Qianlong Emperor. The transformation of the Uyghur region’s most prominent religious sites into tourist attractions, demolition of other mosques and shrines, criminalization of public expressions of Islamic piety, and pervasive surveillance have left Uyghurs with nowhere to observe Ramadan but home.  Non-event A Chinese travel agent in Urumchi contacted by RFA and asked about visiting Xinjiang mosques during Ramadan depicted Islam’s most sacred month as a non-event. There are no religious events bringing Muslims together to break the daytime fast, for instance. “Normally there won’t be these kinds of collective activities at mosques,” she said.  “Many people in Xinjiang are Sinicized, so there aren’t situations like in the Arab world where lots of people gather in one place and make religious observances together. I’ve lived in Xinjiang for many years, and I’ve never seen minority nationalities engaging in those kinds of collective activities,” she said. Meanwhile, tourists wishing to visit mosques like Kashgar’s Id Kah and Kuchar’s Grand Mosque during Ramadan could freely do so, outside of the calls to prayer, the travel agent said. “People who want to fast must do it at home,” the travel agent said.  Asked whether it was possible to visit mosques in Urumchi, the travel agent had a firm response.  “It isn’t possible to visit those places. Because they’re locked. The mosques near the Grand Bazaar are locked too,” she said. “There’s no requirement to pray at mosques, right? People can pray at home, right? Ask questions like this to the relevant government official.” Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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Investigative Journalism Reportika © March 2022 by Ij-Reportika is licensed under CC BY 4.0