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Category: World

Flickering dreams of democracy

Editor01 mins

Cambodia is set to open two weeks of campaigning for local Commune Council elections on June 5. Prime Minister Hun Sen has urged authorities to remain neutral during the race, but politicians are wary after months of violence and harassment directed against aspiring candidates from parties other than the strongman’s Cambodian People’s Party. Cambodians also recall the previous local elections in 2017, where a strong showing by the main opposition party prompted Hun Sen, who has ruled the country since 1985, to ban the party and arrest its leader, a move that allowed his party to sweep all seats in parliamentary voting the following year.

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President Biden warns China over invasion threat, drawing parallel with Ukraine

Editor08 mins

U.S. President Joe Biden warned on Monday that China is ‘flirting with danger’ with its ongoing threat to annex democratic Taiwan, saying the U.S. is “committed” to defending the island in the event of a Chinese invasion. Speaking during a visit to Tokyo, Biden was asked if Washington was willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan, replying: “Yes. That’s the commitment we made.” Biden said such an invasion would mirror Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We agreed with the One China policy, we signed on to it… but the idea that it can be taken by force is just not appropriate, it would dislocate the entire region and would be another action similar to Ukraine,” Biden said. Biden warned that Beijing was “flirting with danger right now by flying so close and all the maneuvers undertaken,” in a reference to repeated sorties flown by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) jets in the island’s Air Defense Exclusion Zone (ADIZ), as well as naval exercises and other displays of strength in the Taiwan Strait. In a joint statement, Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that their basic positions on Taiwan remained unchanged. While Washington lacks formal diplomatic ties with Taipei, it is bound under the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) to ensure the island has the means to defend itself, and to be prepared to “resist any resort to force … that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan,” the law says. Slavic people living in Taiwan display posters and a Ukraine flag during a rally at the Free Square in front of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, May 8, 2022. Credit: AFP. ‘No room for compromise’ The law says that the U.S. should also resist “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes.” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin hit back, warning that “no one should underestimate the firm resolve, staunch will and strong ability of the Chinese people in defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity.” “China has no room for compromise or concession,” Wang told a regular news briefing in Beijing. Taiwan foreign ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou welcomed Biden’s comments. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomes and expresses its sincerest thanks for the reiteration by President Biden and the U.S. government of its rock-solid commitment to Taiwan,” Ou said. She said Taiwan will continue to boost its own capability to defend itself against a potential invasion, and deepen cooperation with like-minded countries like the U.S. and Japan to strengthen regional stability. Ding Shu-Fan, honorary professor at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, said Biden’s statement was of a piece with an earlier promise from former president George W. Bush in 2001, who said Washington would do “whatever it takes” to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack. ‘Strategic ambiguity’ Alexander Huang, international affairs director at Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang, also welcomed Biden’s comments, but said it was unlikely they represented a departure from the “strategic ambiguity” practiced by Washington for decades in a bid to prevent either a Chinese invasion or a formal declaration of independence from Taiwan. “President Biden’s comments came as he took questions from reporters,” Huang said. “When the U.S. wants to revise its current policy of strategic ambiguity and take a publicly known stance, or change its policies on China or Taiwan, it is unlikely to do it at this kind of function.” Su Tse-yun, an associate researcher at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told this station that countries in the Asia-Pacific region have started to need more clarity, and with a greater sense of urgency, on Washington’s likely strategy in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “In this context, Biden’s announcement is constructive, clear, and unwavering,” Su told RFA. Taiwan is a democratic country governed under the aegis of the Republic of China founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1911. Its government has controlled the islands of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu since Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT regime lost the civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949. Taiwan issues Republic of China passports to its 23 million citizens, who have never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and who have no wish to give up their democratic way of life for “unification” under Beijing’s plan, according to opinion polls in recent years. Beijing, for its part, insists that its diplomatic partners sever ties with Taipei, and has blocked the country’s membership in international organizations like the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO). Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

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Biden unveils US Info-Pacific economic plan after summits in Japan, South Korea

Editor09 mins

U.S. President Joe Biden wound up his visit to South Korea and Japan Monday with the announcement of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), drawing more Southeast Asian involvement than previously anticipated. A statement by the White House said the U.S.-led regional economic initiative includes a dozen initial partners: Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam; together representing 40% of the world’s GDP. Earlier this month, diplomatic sources said that only two of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – Singapore and the Philippines – were expected to be among the initial countries joining negotiations under IPEF. One of the reasons for hesitancy is the U.S. Indo-Pacific plans are considered to be designed to counter China’s rising influence in the region, and ASEAN countries, especially small- and medium-sized, may wish to stay neutral. It appears that the situation has changed after the special U.S.-ASEAN summit in Washington in mid-May, with Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam also signing up.  “The U.S. is finally re-engaging economically in the Indo-Pacific region,” said Norah Huang, associate research fellow at Prospect Foundation, a Taiwanese think tank. “The delay says there have been difficulties of the political climate back home and in this part of the world,” she said.  Indo-Pacific economic power Details remain vague but it is understood that IPEF is not a free-trade agreement, but an economic cooperation seeking to establish trade rules across “four pillars” – trade resiliency, infrastructure, decarbonization and anti-corruption. The White House said it will “enable the United States and our allies to decide on rules of the road that ensure American workers, small businesses, and ranchers can compete in the Indo-Pacific.” With U.S. direct investment in the region totaled more than U.S. $969 billion in 2020, the U.S. “is an Indo-Pacific economic power, and expanding U.S. economic leadership in the region is good for American workers and businesses — as well as for the people of the region.” China has been critical of the U.S. involvement in the region. On Sunday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said “the so-called ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’ is bound to fail.” Speaking in Guangzhou after talks with visiting Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. Wang said the strategy “is causing more and more vigilance and concern” because it is “attempting to erase the name “Asia-Pacific” and the effective regional cooperation architecture in the region.” IPEF “should promote openness and cooperation instead of creating geopolitical confrontation,” Wang said. The U.S. is “politicizing, weaponizing and ideologizing economic issues and using economic means to coerce regional countries to choose sides between China and the United States,” according to the Chinese Foreign Minister. Regional reaction Regional economic powers Singapore and Malaysia were the first to welcome the IPEF.  Malaysian International Trade and Industry Minister Mohamed Azmin Ali tweeted on Monday that IPEF “serves as an impetus for economic diplomacy between USA and the Indo-Pacific region.” “I am optimistic that this cooperation acknowledges that our economic policy interests in the region are intertwined, and deepening economic engagement among partners is crucial for continued growth, peace, and prosperity.” Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong last week said that he encouraged more ASEAN participation in the IPEF which he said “needs to be inclusive and provide tangible benefits.” “To get India and Indonesia signed up will be important to up the game and could serve as catalyst for hesitant actors to come off fence,” said Norah Huang from the Taiwanese Prospect Foundation. Staunch U.S. allies South Korea and Japan, which President Biden has visited since Saturday, both supported the IPEF as “they clearly support any U.S. engagement within the region,” said Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies, International Christian University in Tokyo. Before the IPEF launch, Biden held a meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, their first formal face-to-face.  Quad meeting On Tuesday, the U.S. President will attend a summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with leaders of Japan, India and Australia. The meeting will “focus on a rules-based order, enhancing infrastructure and connectivity in the region and in general, providing public goods to the broader region,” said Nagy. “The leaders will also discuss security in the maritime environment, primarily secured through cooperation within the Quad, as well as peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” the analyst said. Taiwan has not been invited to IPEF, a decision called “regrettable” by Taipei. “As an important economy that plays a crucial role in the global supply chain, Taiwan is definitely qualified for inclusion in the IPEF,” the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry said in a statement. In Tokyo on Monday, however, President Biden said he would be willing to use force to defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese attack. “We agree with a one-China policy. We’ve signed on to it and all the intended agreements made from there. But the idea that, that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, is just not, is just not appropriate,” Biden said in Tokyo, adding that it was his expectation that such an event would not happen or be attempted, Reuters news agency reported. China swiftly expressed its “strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition” in comments by Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “On issues concerning China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and other core interests, there is no room for compromise,” Wang told a daily briefing in Beijing.

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China pushes the ‘Sinicization of religion’ in Xinjiang, targeting Uyghurs

Editor024 mins

When Erkin Tuniyaz, chairman of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), visited the largest mosque in Urumqi before the Eid al-Fitr holy day marking the end of Ramadan, he used the opportunity to promote Beijing’s policy of assimilation of non-Chinese people in its far western resgions. “According to the arrangements and invitation of the autonomous region party committee, we must hold absolutely tight to the plan for Sinicizing the Islamic religion in Xinjiang and actively take the lead in fitting the Islamic religion into socialist society,” he said at the Noghay Mosque, as quoted in an April 30 article by Xinjiang Daily.   Though the 19th-century mosque is technically open, the complex is cordoned off with fences and barbed wire. In recent years, Chinese authorities removed the Arabic shahada, or testament of faith from above the entrance gate to the building — the largest mosque in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) — also known as the Tatar Mosque. They also installed a security checkpoint next to the gate where Muslim worshippers must pass facial recognition scanners to verify their identities as uniformed guards look on. A few days before Erkin made his statement, XUAR Party Secretary Ma Xingrui commented on China’s political strategy in the region, reemphasizing the concepts of “the shared sense of belonging of the Chinese nation” and “ethnic fusion” in an April article in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Ma proposed strengthening assimilative policies in the XUAR along with the further tightening of the CCP’s religious policy by Sinicizing Islam. Sinification policies and debates long predate the 1949 Communist Party seized of power, said a recent study in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, which defined it as “ the process by which all non-Han or non-Sinitic people who entered the Chinese realm, no matter whether as conquerors or conquered, eventually were inevitably assimilated as Chinese.” But under the decade-long rule of CCP chief Xi Jinping, coercive assimilation has picked up pace—not only in Xinjiang, but also in Tibet< Inner Mongolia and other areas populated by minorities. The drive to erase differences among the cultures is enforced in Xinjiang by a vast high-tech mass surveillance system, heavy-handed grassroots policing and mass internment camps that have target a significant number of the 12 million Uyghurs. The Sinicization of religion in the XUAR takes aim at the Islamic aspects of the Uyghur identity—a policy whose heavy-handed imposition that some Western governments say constitutes genocide under international law. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet will travel to Urumqi and Kashgar (Kashi), during a May 23-28 visit to China, the first by a U.N. human rights chief since 2005. Her trip has raised questions about her freedom of movement through the region, with many Uyghur groups and rights experts warning her that Beijing will put on a staged tour and use it for propaganda against its critics. Xi first put forward the concept at the Communist Party’s 19th People’s Congress on Oct. 18, 2017. At the time, Chen Quanguo, then party secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, was stepping up what’s become a well-documented campaign of oppression against the Uyghurs as part of a forced assimilation effort. Chen and his successor Ma Xingrui, who was appointed XUAR party secretary in late 2021, executed state policies concerning the “Sinicization of religion” and “creating awareness of the shared sense of belonging to the Chinese nation.” During a recent inspection of the XUAR, Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the CCP and chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, issued a special directive regarding the “resolute advancement of the Sinicization of Islam in Xinjiang.” The Chinese government has vigorously implemented its policy not only for Muslims in Xinjiang, but also for Tibetan Buddhists, Christians, Protestants and others throughout the country, demanding that the religious groups adhere to and support the CCP’s rule and ideology. For Muslims, the policy means being forced to renounce their Islamic faith, according to testimony given by Uyghur survivors of detention camps in Xinjiang. Authorities have forced Uyghurs to eat pork, which is forbidden in Islam, have gathered and burned copies of the Quran, and have restricted the wearing of beards for men and of long clothing and headscarves for women. Uyghur names such as “Muhammad,” “Ayishe,” and “Muhajid” have been forbidden and, in cases where those names have been given to children, the authorities have implemented very strict policies to change them. Applying for passports and traveling abroad have been reasons for detention in camps, which means that Uyghurs have lost their right to go on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are expected to make at least once during their lifetime. While China’s legal guarantee of religious freedom are touted in propaganda, and said to be composed according to Western standards, “it exists simply on paper,” said Nury Turkel, vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). “This is a means of deceiving people, of [China] trying to portray its own system as perfect.”   A banner reading ‘Love the Party, Love the Country’ in the Chinese and Uyghur languages hangs from a mosque near Kashgar Yengisheher county, Kashgar prefecture, in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, March 20, 2021. Credit: Associated Press ‘Eradication of Islam’ Chinese authorities have detained more than 1,000 imams and clerics for their association with religious teaching and community leadership since 2014, according to a May 2021 report titled “Islam Dispossessed: China’s Persecution of Uyghur Imams and Religious Figures” issued by the U.S.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). “The Sinicization of Islam is the eradication of Islam,” Turghanjan Alawudun, vice chair of the executive committee of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and a Uyghur religion scholar, said. In 2016, Chinese authorities began demolishing mosques and old cemeteries in the XUAR, with the destruction reaching a climax in 2018. Since about 2017, up to 16,000 mosques, or roughly 65%, of all mosques have…

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Weeks of COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai takes toll on residents’ mental health

Editor010 mins

The weeks-long COVID-19 lockdown in China has taken a huge mental health toll, with more than 40 percent of the city’s 26 million residents reporting symptoms of depression in a recent poll. Shanghai residents have been battling food shortages, barriers to medical treatment, repeated mass, compulsory PCR and antigen testing, as well as the constant threat of being sent off to an isolation camp or makeshift hospital, having their pets killed and their homes ransacked by “disinfection” teams, or being welded inside their homes by local officials keen to hit the right quotas in the service of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy. A poll of more than 1,000 Shanghai residents conducted by the @Zhaoluming Weibo account found that more than 400 of them reported having experienced a “depressed mood” during lockdown. A resident of downtown Shanghai surnamed Wang said he believes the true number of depressed people could be much higher. “Forty percent? I would say more like 80 percent,” Wang said. “Everyone has a sense of resentment and their psychology isn’t quite normal, whole communities shut up like animals in a zoo.” Photo illustration by RFA; Reuters Qiu Jianzhen, director of the outpatient department of psychological counseling and treatment at the Shanghai Mental Health Center, said in a recent interview with state broadcaster CCTV that the number of calls to the center’s psychological hotline had nearly tripled in the past month to more than 3,000. Eighty percent of callers cited the pandemic as an issue for their mental health, Qiu said. “If you need to see a doctor or call an ambulance, the neighborhood committee needs to sign off with a certificate and a letter of commitment,” Wang told RFA. “There is a lot of anger about that, because what if it’s urgent?” “Most of the people who live in my compound are temporary workers, so if they can’t work, they get no wages,” he said. “Even if they lift the lockdown, who will compensate us for the loss of more than a month’s income?” “How can the small company bosses do that … when they are going bankrupt themselves?” Visible toll Wang lives in a low-income district of Puxi with his family, and was mostly worried about how to feed his kids when lockdown came. Photo illustration by RFA; Reuters “Adults can maybe get by on frozen food, but I was worried about the kids not having any milk or any fruit,” Wang said. “We would try to make a 950 ml bottle of milk last a few days, but then what would we do after that?” And it’s not just the economically marginalized who are suffering. Wang said the burden on working parents will likely increase now that people are gradually returning to work. “My former colleague was complaining that now they have to try to grab food, keep up with antigen and PCR testing, talk to their kids’ teachers, all while taking part in meetings via video call,” he said. “She’s going crazy.” Wang said the toll taken on people’s well-being was very visible in his neighborhood. “There were people who jumped off the top of the building in the residential neighborhood next to us, and I saw news of people jumping from buildings, not just in text, but video clips, which have a psychological impact in themselves,” Wang said. “It’s hard not to be depressed in such circumstances,” he said. A white-collar worker surnamed Li, who works for a large foreign company, said he has sought out psychological counseling during lockdown despite not having financial worries. “It’s like being incarcerated for one or two months,” Li said. “Loss of freedom over a long period of time will give rise to a lot of negative emotions, the most prominent of which is anger.” Photo illustration by RFA; Reuters ‘I totally lost control’ A resident of Jing’an district surnamed Sun said she had a mental breakdown over the authorities’ chaotic handling of mass COVID-19 tests, after she started to show symptoms on May 1, but was left without a PCR test despite requesting one. “On the night of May 6, I went totally crazy, calling the emergency services many times,” Sun said. “I totally lost control.” “If the ambulance hadn’t come, I would have run out right there … and started spreading the virus.” Eventually, Sun and her symptomatic family were taken to an isolation facility, but she suspects the delay in testing them was due to a political attempt to massage new case figures. She pointed to repeated complaints on social media that officials appeared to hand out test results and change them at will. “There were people testing positives and they said they were negative, and people testing negative who they said were positive,” Sun said. In universities students have complained of unclean food and lack of support for their mental health. A psychology lecturer surnamed Chen said one woman had to spend thousands of yuan to escape the city by private taxi after being stuck in a situation of food scarcity while suffering from anorexia nervosa. “She couldn’t eat, and her mental state was very bad,” he said. “She had a relapse [of anorexia] after being stuck inside the dorm building since early March.” Serene, an international school counselor, said many of her students have gone back to their parental homes, while mental health problems have doubled among those who remained. “It’s mostly about conflicts with parents, but since the pandemic also about difficulties with distance-learning,” she said. “There is also the lack of interaction with peers and lack of social support.” “One of my students was having difficulty with interpersonal communication, but he had bravely begun to take the first steps before the pandemic, and had formed some relationships,” she said. “But when the pandemic came … he told me he feared he would never make friends again.” Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

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Cambodia’s commune campaign to test country’s electoral integrity

Editor011 mins

Cambodia will launch a two-week election campaign for local commune councils Saturday, a contest for grassroots bodies that won’t tip the scales of power in a country autocratic Prime Minister Hun Sen has ruled for nearly four decades, but also seen as a measure of electoral integrity. The limited power of commune councils––who vote on behalf of their constituents in the 2024 elections for the Cambodian Senate––hasn’t dampened anticipation ahead of the June 5 election in a country that has endured a five-year crackdown on civil liberties and other freedoms by Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). The CPP, the only party large enough to field candidates nationwide, is expected to win a landslide victory, enjoying the power of incumbency and patronage in what Hun Sun has effectively turned into a one-party state at the national level. “Commune elections in Cambodia have always been a low stakes affair for the ruling party because of how much control they have in rural areas at the local level,” said Sophal Ear, an author and policy analyst who teaches at Arizona State University. “And this next commune election is no different but even more extreme in how much control there is at the national level,” he added. But election watchers are looking at the contest between the CPP and 16 other parties for 11,622 seats in 1,652 rural and urban precincts to find out how much support the opposition Candlelight Party can win in the atmosphere and after months of harassment from the ruling party. “Civic and political space in Cambodia has receded and regressed due to what is effectively all-intrusive single-party rule,” said Vitit Muntarbhorn, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Cambodia. “The outlook for human rights and democracy in the country remains disconcerting on many fronts, especially in the lead up to the commune elections,” he told RFA. The Candlelight Party has risen from the ashes of the main opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), whose strong showing in previous communal elections in 2017 prompted Hun Sen have the party dissolved, paving the way for his CPP to win all 125 parliamentary seats in 2018. The Candlelight Party was founded in 1995 by Hun Sen’s political rival Sam Rainsy, who is now living in exile facing a raft of charges his supporters sat are designed to keep him out of politics. Candlelight, which merged with another party to form the CNRP in 2012 but is not subject to the opposition ban, is now the second largest political party in Cambodia and the largest opposition party. The party has been gaining steam over the past year. With its rise has come what Candlelight officials say are made up accusations that the party has used fake names for candidates and has put forward candidates in violation of Cambodian election laws. Several Candlelight Party activists have been jailed on allegations of submitting false documents to run in the communal elections. In February, authorities in the northwestern province of Battambang ordered the Candlelight Party to remove a sign from a citizen’s house, even though national officials pledged a free and fair campaign, without political and partisan discrimination. On April 9, Prak Seyha — a party youth leader for Phnom Penh’s Kambol district — was attacked and beaten by a mob. That same day, Choeun Sarim, a party candidate for Phnom Penh’s Chhbar Ampov district, was killed in traffic while traveling by motorbike from southern Cambodia’s Takeo province to the capital, Phnom Penh. His wife said he had been threatened and assaulted prior to his death, which she said was caused by a blow from behind. On April 11, Khorn Tun, a Candlelight Party activist and a commune candidate in Tabaung Khmom province’s Ponhea Krek district — was attacked by unidentified men who threw rocks at her home. Flags and marches The Candlelight Party has sent flags, about 3 million leaflets and party uniforms to its supporters around the country, the party’s vice president Thach Setha told RFA’s Khmer Service. The party plans to march through the streets of Phnom Penh with thousands of supporters on Saturday in an effort to drum up more support. “We urge all activists and supporters to participate in our march to express their support for the Candlelight Party and to show up for a chance,” he said. The ruling party has also been active in shipping out materials for the campaign, but will not hold massive rallies, CPP spokesman Sok Ey San told RFA. “Activists will visit voters’ houses to inform them about the party’s political platform,” he said, adding that the most active days will be the first and last days of the campaign period. The country’s third largest party, the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia, a royalist party known as Funcinpec, plans to hold a rally with the party president and about 1,000 supporters in Kandal province in the south, the party’s spokesman Ngouen Raden told RFA. “In each province, working groups will meet voters at their houses,” he said. The National Election Commission (NEC) on Tuesday urged the parties to comply with measures intended to keep the campaigns peaceful and nonviolent. It also asked authorities at all levels to remain neutral and impartial, allowing all candidates access to public places. The NEC is working with authorities to coordinate marches planned by party supporters so that confrontation can be avoided, the commission’s spokesman, Hang Puthea, told RFA. “Until now, there are no negative issues reported yet. I have observed that each party has already prepared for the election campaign tomorrow at 6 a.m.,” he said. The Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (Comfrel) has deployed 20 monitors to follow campaigns in Phnom Penh and other areas, Kang Savan, a monitor for the NGO, told RFA. Despite the trappings of a healthy campaign, the contest fails to meet basic definitions of democracy, said Ear. “Managed democracy–if you even call it that–in Cambodia is about giving people little…

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Elderly and sick die of COVID-19 complications in North Korean capital

Editor09 mins

North Korean authorities are mobilizing medical students in the capital of Pyongyang to help in hospitals suddenly overwhelmed with cases of COVID-19, sources in the country told RFA. Even so, deaths continue to rise due to lack of proper care and from counterfeit medicines as treatment options remain limited in the impoverished and isolated country. After more than two years of denying any North Korean had contracted the coronavirus, the country finally announced its first cases and deaths last week, saying the Omicron variant had begun to spread among participants of a large-scale military parade in late April. The long-term denial means doctors in the capital’s many hospitals are not up to speed on how to treat coronavirus, a Pyongyang resident told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “As a result, some elderly people infected with Omicron and people with chronic diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes died because they did not receive proper treatment,” said the source. “In addition, there are a number of people who have died due to side effects from medicines they purchased on their own without proper prescriptions,” the source said. Pyongyang, with 2.9 million residents living relatively closely to one another, has been hit the hardest by the pandemic. “They declared an emergency and mobilized doctors from each hospital in the city, then they even began mobilizing med students,” a Pyongyang resident told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “All residents in the city are subject to intensive medical screenings. They must check their temperature and report any abnormal symptoms twice a day,” the source said. The demand for fever reducers and antibiotics has greatly increased. Many people travel from pharmacy to pharmacy in search of acetaminophen, ibuprofen and amoxicillin, said the source. Antibiotics have no effect on viral diseases like COVID-19. “Authorities began to release wartime emergency medicines and have placed uniformed military doctors at pharmacies to prevent stealing. So now it is possible to buy necessary medicines,” said the source. As home to most of the country’s privileged elites, Pyongyang has superior health care facilities than exist in the provinces. In the city of Hamhung, in the eastern province of South Hamgyong, people had been crowding hospitals weeks before the declared emergency, complaining of coronavirus symptoms, a medical source there told RFA. “There are provincial hospitals and city hospitals, as well as health institutions and facilities in provincial cities like Hamhung. However, in the case of county-level hospitals, there are only a few beds with poor medical equipment and facilities, and inexperienced doctors,” the second source said. “I am worried about whether they can cope with it. It will be of great help if the authorities receive aid from the U.N. or medicines made in South Korea, which are effective and safe,” the source said. About 2.2 million people have been hit by outbreaks of fever, 65 of whom have died, according to data based on reports from North Korean state media published by 38 North, a site that provides analysis on the country and is run by the U.S.-based think tank the Stimson Center. Around 1.5 million are reported to have made recoveries, while 754,800 are undergoing treatment. The country has only a handful of confirmed COVID-19 cases, which 38 North attributed to insufficient testing capabilities. Data published on the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center showed North Korea with only one confirmed COVID-19 case and six deaths as of Friday evening. Accurate reporting The numbers provided by state media are likely accurate, Ahn Kyungsoo, head of dprkhealth.org, a South Korea-based website that tracks North Korea’s healthcare situation. But Ahn said that not all “fever” cases are necessarily coronavirus. “In the middle of April is when seasons change in Korea. The North Korean authorities have released statistics since the end of April. There are inevitably a lot of people who develop fevers that time of the year due to the change of seasons…. And the main symptoms… are almost the same as those of cold patients who get ill in-between seasons,” he said. “The cumulative number of people with fever that the North Korean authorities are talking about is not an individual person with a confirmed case of COVID-19. Their definition of ‘cured’ does not mean the full recovery from COVID-19, but only that fever symptoms have disappeared. These are the people who have been released from quarantine,” he said, adding that test kits in North Korea are scarce, and tallies can only be kept by observing symptoms like fever, body aches, coughing and sore throats. Ahn said that even with a lot of help from the international community in the form of donated vaccines, North Koreans would still have trouble inoculating everyone because of a lack of cold storage and an inability to quickly transport vaccines to most parts of the country. “Also, it takes time for the vaccine to take effect after one is vaccinated. From the perspective of North Korea, it will take quite a while even if they get the vaccine tomorrow. So, I think getting as many oral treatments as possible would be more advantageous than the vaccine.” Translated by Claire Lee and Leejin J. Chung

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Myanmar junta tribunal sentences 7 youths to death in Yangon

Editor04 mins

Myanmar’s junta condemned seven youths to death this week in the Yangon region, with a secret military tribunal finding them guilty of murder, a state-run Myanmar’s junta condemned seven youths to death this week in the Yangon newspaper said. The seven, all from all from Hlaingtharyar township in the country’s largest city Yangon Region, were ruled guilty of taking part in the March 6 murder of a ward official suspected of being a police informer and sentenced to death on Wednesday under Section 54 of the Anti-Terrorism Law. As of March 11, military tribunals in the Yangon region had sentenced more than 150 people to death or life imprisonment, RFA reporting has revealed. No executions have yet been reported by the military regime that overthrew Myanmar’s elcted government on Feb. 1, 2022. The seven were identified as Ye Min Naing, Soe Moe, Thant Zin, Daewa, San Shay, Athay Lay and Aye Aye Min. Another youth, Htet Myat Naing, Yangon’s North Dagon township, was also sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison under Section 50(j) of the Anti-Terrorism Law for having links to and collecting money for terrorist organizations. An underground youth activist in Yangon said the military is imposing harsh punishments on young people to discourage them from participating in resistance movements against the junta, the junta newspaper said. “The deliberate arrests of young people and such harsh sentences are attempts to intimidate the youth not to be involved in the revolution. No matter what they do, young people are already determined to march on with this,” he told RFA. Lawyers have argued that the sentences imposed by military tribunals handing down highest sentences on the youth are unjust and punishable. Military spokesman Maj Gen Zaw Min Tun said the government was not targeting young people but was prosecuting violators of the law. According to Thai-based rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners Burma, a total of 10,707 people were arrested and 1072 of them were imprisoned between Feb 1, 2021 to May 19, 2022, among them 72 have been sentenced to death including 2 children. And another 41 are sentenced to death in absentia. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written by Paul Eckert.

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Vietnam ethnic minority activist jailed for 4 years for reporting abuse allegations

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An ethnic Ede Montagnard minority activist was sentenced to four years in prison on Friday for submitting three reports about human rights violations in Vietnam to “reactionary forces” overseas, another activist who followed his trial said. A court in Cu Kuin district, Dak Lak province, sentenced Y Wo Nie on the charge of “abusing the rights to freedom and democracy” under Article 331 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, said activist Vo Ngoc Luc, who followed the trial developments as they were broadcast over a local loudspeaker. The article prohibits citizens from abusing “the rights to freedom and democracy to violate the State’s interests and the legitimate rights and interests of organizations and individuals.” Rights groups have criticized the statute as providing authorities widespread latitude to crack down on any criticism of the government. Nie participated in several online training courses held by “reactionary forces.” The classes included lessons on religious faith, Vietnam Civil Law, international human rights law, the Montagnard experience in Vietnam, and how to document human rights abuses, according to the online news outlet Congly, the mouthpiece of the Supreme People’s Court of Vietnam. “Learning about human rights is very good — that’s what I told security officers whom I met this morning,” Luc said. “You cannot convict [people] for taking online courses on human rights.” Prosecutors failed to provide evidence to support a second accusation against Nie for “providing false information,” Luc said. “They were all general and ambiguous accusations,” he said. “Saying the sentence was too heavy is wrong,” Luc added. “I would say it was groundless. If we lived in a civilized world, then the court would declare his innocence, set him free right at the trial, and the investigation agency would apologize him.” In its indictment, the Cu Kuin People’s Procuracy said that in 2020 Nie collected distorting and false information and composed three reports on human rights violations and sent them to “reactionary forces overseas” via the WhatsApp instant messaging service. The indictment also said Nie met with the delegates from the U.S. Embassy and Consulate General in Vietnam when they visited the Gia Lai province in June 2020. The judges concluded that Nie’s acts had affected social safety and order, political security and government administrative agencies’ activities, undermining confidence in the regime and at home and abroad. When Nie was arrested in September 2020, Cu Kuin police officers said that they seized “many materials with false content and images slandering, insulting and defaming the prestige and dignity of the party, state, local authorities, the public security forces in Cu Kuin district and in Dak Lak province.” Prior to the September 2020 arrest, Nie received a nine-year jail term for “sabotaging the national unity policy.” In recent decades, many ethnic minority groups in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, including the Montagnards, have been persecuted for their religious beliefs and seen their land confiscated without adequate compensation. The crackdowns tend to ramp up on the groups when they try to fight back and report these human rights abuses, activists said. Translated by Anna Vu for RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

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UN rights chief’s office announces dates of China visit, including Xinjiang

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The U.N.’s human rights chief on Monday will begin a six-day official visit to China, including to the far-western Xinjiang region where widespread abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities at the hands of Chinese authorities are said to have occurred. The trip is the culmination of years of effort by exiled Uyghurs to draw international attention to what they and independent researchers have said is a network of detention camps in Xinjiang. While groups representing the community welcomed the announcement of the trip, they also expressed concern the team led by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet will be kept from seeing the true picture of what is taking place in the region, including allegations of Uyghurs being used as forced labor at Chinese factories. Bachelet’s May 23-28 visit will mark the first to China by a U.N. high commissioner for human rights since 2005. She plans to meet with high-level government levels, academics, and representatives from civil society groups and businesses during stops in Guangzhou — the capital of southern China’s Guangdong province where she plans to deliver a lecture to students at Guangzhou University — and in the Xinjiang cities of Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) and Kashgar (Kashi), the press release said. Bachelet, a former Chilean president, first announced that her office was seeking unfettered access to Xinjiang in September 2018, shortly after she took over her current role. But the trip was delayed over questions about her freedom of movement through the region. Bachelet plans to issue a statement and hold a press conference at the end of the visit on May 28. An advance team from her office arrived in China on April 25. They were quarantined in Guangzhou according to China’s COVID-19 protocols but met virtually with officials during that time. They later held in-person meetings and visits in Guangzhou and traveled to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S.’s top diplomat to the U.N., has joined with Uyghur advocacy groups and other human rights organizations in calling for China to give Bachelet unfettered access to Xinjiang to gather evidence of what’s taking place there. China is accused of having incarcerated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang in mass detention camps, subjecting some to torture and other abuses. The United States and the legislatures of several Western countries have found that China’s mistreatment of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang constitute genocide and crimes against humanity. Beijing has rejected all such claims as politically motivated attacks on its security and development policies in the vast western region. Beijing has called for a “friendly” visit by the U.N. rights official. “We have repeatedly stated and expected that Commissioner Bachelet’s visit should be completely impartial with unfettered access to the concentration camps in the region,” Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) in Germany, told RFA. “Our current position is still the same; however, we’re deeply concerned because her trip seems to be not based on the expectations of the international community and wishes of Uyghur people but rather on China’s arrangements from our observations and the press statements of both U.N. and Chinese government,” he said. “If the trip is made under such circumstances, then China will take full advantage of Bachelet’s visit to whitewash the Uyghur genocide.” Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, gives a press conference in Iran’s capital Tehran, May 18, 2022. Credit: AFP ‘A light to be shone’ Washington-based Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) on Friday repeated the demands outlined by some 200 rights organizations that sent an open letter to Bachelet in March, calling for transparency in the visit, unfettered access to the region, and the publication of an overdue human rights report on Xinjiang. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, WUC, CFU and Uyghur Human Rights Project were among the groups that signed the letter. They all have repeatedly raised alarm to Bachelet’s office about extreme measures taken by Chinese authorities since 2017 to eradicate the religion, culture and languages of Xinjiang’s ethnic groups. A visit without unfettered access would support China’s long-standing narrative that there are no human rights violations occurring in the XUAR, CFU said. “Commissioner Bachelet has delayed the release of her office’s report and her visit, extending the suffering of the Uyghur people and our wait for a light to be shone on China’s genocidal crimes in the largest global forum on Earth,” CFU’s executive director Rushan Abbas said in a statement. News of the dates for Bachelet’s visit came two days after Geneva-based watchdog organization UN Watch demanded that Alena Douhan, a U.N. Human Rights Council official, return a U.S. $200,000 contribution she received from the Chinese government in 2021. Douhan, a Belarussian former professor of international law and U.N. special rapporteur focused on the negative effect of unilateral sanctions, received the money, according to disclosures in a U.N. filing, as she lent U.N. legitimacy to Chinese disinformation, including a regime-sponsored propaganda virtual event with the banner, “Xinjiang is a Wonderful Land,” UN Watch said in a statement on May 18. Douhan appeared on the program in which Chen Xu, China’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, said that people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang live “a life of happiness.” The event also featured XUAR chairman Erkin Tuniyaz, who accused the U.S and other Western countries of concocting a “smear that the Xinjiang government deprives local ethnic workers’ fundamental rights.” “It is clear that China is now willing to pay unprecedented sums of money to influence Alena Douhan’s U.N. human rights office, in wake of last year’s decision by the U.S., EU, U.K. and Canada to announce sanctions on China for its persecution of the Uyghurs,” Hillel Neuer, UN Watch’s executive director, said in the statement. “A U.N. human rights investigator accepting money from China’s abuser regime would be like the Chicago Police Department receiving subsidies from…

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