inside news from Asia

8-29-19   “Reports that China was building internment camps and persecuting the Uyghurs seemed unbelievable … I was very eager to go to Xinjiang because I wanted to explore for myself what is going on there.  But after visiting I found that much of what we hear in the West about China is not actually ‘fake news.’”

Jazexhi said that after arriving he was given tours of the XUAR capital Urumqi, as well as the regional cities of Aksu (in Chinese, Akesu) and Kashgar (Kashi), during which he and other visitors were told by handlers that the region historically belonged to China, while Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslims who live there are the descendants of “invaders” whose culture is subordinate to that of Han Chinese.
  “This official narrative was very shocking to us, and we could see it put into practice when we visited the mass detention centers … that our Chinese friends call vocational training institutes, but which we saw to be a kind of hell,” he said.  https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/scholar-08292019164346.html
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9-1-2019   As the Chinese government pursues a “strike hard” security campaign aimed overwhelmingly at minorities in Xinjiang, the use of prisons is throwing into doubt even China’s limited protections of defendants’ rights.

Courts in Xinjiang – where largely Muslim minorities, including Uighurs and Kazakhs, make up more than half of the population – sentenced a total of 230,000 people to prison or other punishments in 2017 and 2018, significantly more than in any other period on record in decades for the region.  During 2017 alone Xinjiang courts sentenced almost 87,000 defendants, 10 times more than in the previous year, to prison terms of five years or longer. Arrests increased eightfold; prosecutions fivefold.

Experts, rights advocates and exiled Uighur activists said that Chinese officials have swept aside rudimentary protections in their push.  The police, prosecutors and judges in the region are working in unison to ram through convictions, serving the Communist Party’s campaign to eradicate unrest and convert the largely Muslim minorities into loyalists of the Party.

Arrests, the critics said, are often based on flimsy or exaggerated charges, and trials are perfunctory, with guilty judgments overwhelmingly likely.  Once sentenced, prisoners face potential abuses and hard labour in overcrowded, isolated facilities....

Arrests and indictments in areas run by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps – a quasi-military administration overseeing areas with an 85 per cent Han population – rose modestly or remained flat in 2017.  “Uighurs have generally borne the worst” of security campaigns since the late 1990s, Dr Roberts said.  “It can be assumed that they were targeted inordinately in the arrests that have taken place since 2017.”

The expanding population in prisons raises questions about Xinjiang officials’ recent avowals that most of the inmates in re-education camps--a separate system of incarceration--have been released....Unlike the re-education camps, imprisonment requires a court process, however swift and crude, including a guilty judgment and a penal sentence. The prisons are more closely guarded than the re-education camps, and inmates are also expected to undergo indoctrination.

Recent data confirms findings last year by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, that 1 in 5 arrests in China in 2017 took place in Xinjiang.  That year, prosecutors in Xinjiang approved 227,261 arrests, more than eight times as many as a year earlier, according to a recently released official regional yearbook. In 2018 they approved an additional 114,023 arrests, an annual report from the regional prosecution office said.  The total number of arrests over these two years was more than 70 per cent higher than the cumulative total for the entire previous 10 years.

Few defendants are released as innocent. Xinjiang courts finished hearing 147,272 criminal cases in 2017, a more than fourfold increase from a year earlier, according to a yearbook of Chinese law.  Last year the courts heard 74,348 cases.  They declared just 22 people not guilty....

Reports from Radio Free Asia, a Washington-based news service whose Uighur-language service has reported extensively on Xinjiang, have described trains full of detainees shipped from the region to prisons in other parts of China.   https://www.nst.com.my/world/2019/09/517874/xinjiang-jails-fill-bursting-china-imprisons-thousands-muslims

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8-28-19   Lieutenant Colonel Than Htike from the Northern Command based in northern Myanmar’s Kachin state filed the complaint against Reverend Hkalam Samson, president of the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC), in Myitkyina Township Court on Monday, the religious leader told RFA’s Myanmar Service.

He filed the defamation lawsuit based on a live broadcast in which Hkalam Samson, who has faced persecution in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar because of his Christian faith, told Trump that oppression and torture were still common in the country.   https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/myanmar-army-sues-kachin-pastor-08282019170236.html

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8-23-19    

“The rollout of the ID cards reflects the Chinese government’s use of personal information as a tool of social control,” ICT said, adding, “In Tibet today, even moderate and mild expressions of Tibetan national identity, religion and culture can be classified as ‘splittist’ and therefore ‘criminal.’”   https://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/controls-08232019152941.html
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The punishment meted out by a court in Kazakhstan to activist

Serikzhan Bilash, who works to release ethnic Kazakhs from internment camps in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is part of a bid by Kazakh authorities to placate Beijing, he recently told RFA.
Bilash, who faced seven years imprisonment for “inter-ethnic incitement” after calling for an “information Jihad” against China’s policies in the XUAR, accepted a plea bargain during his trial in his hometown of Almaty on Aug. 16 that restricts his activism in exchange for his freedom.   https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/bargain-08222019170107.html
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8-21-19   Miners and their families living near a uranium mine in North Korea are suffering from a range of illnesses and birth defects blamed on exposure to radiation, with government authorities rotating workers every few years and locking up whistleblowers in mental wards, sources in the country say....

  “And local residents are forced to eat radioactive food and drink radioactive water,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.  “In Tongam village, the miners and their families suffer from incurable diseases or various types of cancer.  In particular, many people die of liver cancer,” the source said.

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A gas truck waits for customs clearance to supply Chinese LPG gas to North Korea. 

 RFA

July 31, 2019     “Chinese liquefied gas vehicles bound for North Korea are waiting in line at the customs checkpoint these days,” said a Chinese citizen source of Korean descent from Hunchun.

“I doubt that the Chinese authorities are faithfully carrying out UNSC sanctions on North Korea,” the source said.  “The Quanhe Customs office, near the border between North Korea, China and Russia is lined with gas vehicles headed for North Korea every day,” said the source.  “The name of the [gas] company is written on the sides of the tankers both in Chinese and Korean,” said the source, who believed that this indicated that several small gas companies were working together to get the fuel into North Korea.

“[All the trucks] have either Changchun or Yanbian [Korean Autonomous Prefecture] license plates.  It seems like the gas companies here in [China’s] northeast are jointly supplying gas to North Korea.  All the LPG going through the Quanhe checkpoint is sent to the Baekho Trading Company, located in [North Korea’s] Rason Special Economic Zone,” the source said.  https://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/nk-lpg-china-07312019142310.html

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