For Ahmad Primo, who was arrested by the government for reporting that the 2011 protests were a revolution and then jailed by Islamic State, the idea was tantalizing.

“If I were single, I would go back and join those fighting for the future of Syria,” said Primo, who lives in Norway with his wife and children. “But I have a family and I cannot gamble with their future.”

Primo said his Norwegian passport bars him from returning to Syria, so he will continue working as a researcher for a Norwegian news platform, in addition to running his own Arabic fact-checking platform Verify-Sy.

“It’s not about where we are, it’s about what we’re doing,” he said.

After 54 years of al-Assad family rule, renewed energy has emerged among exiled Syrian journalists to use their skills to support media development and truth-telling back home.

Complex legal and family obligations, security concerns, and sectarian tensions mean permanent return is rarely an option. Some make irregular trips to report and train other journalists, but risk burning their ticket back to Europe without European citizenship.

A few have taken the plunge.

In a Facebook video, Syrian reporter Besher Kanakri stood in front of an airport arrivals sign in Damascus and announced, “I am returning to my homeland after seven years of forced absence.”

After years working for Istanbul-based Syria TV from Germany, he was pleased to be transferred to the Syrian capital.  

“Our country needs us and we must go back to contribute to rebuilding it,” Kanakri told CPJ. “The risks are significant but I still want to return.”

Syria has long been among the world’s deadliest countries for journalists with at least 145 killed since 2011, when al-Assad began to crack down on protesters. CPJ is investigating the cases of hundreds of other missing and killed journalists.

Syria topped CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index, which measures where murderers of journalists are most likely to go free.

Tired of being a refugee reporter

Others are staying put, for now.

Journalist Yahya Alaous, 52, arrived in the German capital Berlin, a renowned hub for Arab intelligentsia, a decade ago and found work reporting on refugee life for German outlets.

But he soon got tired of being stereotyped, particularly after 2017, when the anti-immigrant and far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) rose to prominence as the third-largest party in parliament.

“Every time there was a terrorist attack, I felt I had to defend myself – to explain that we’re not all the same, since many assumed that refugees were the ones coming to Europe and carrying out these attacks,” said Alaous.

“You start to lose patience. I didn’t want to spend my life constantly defending myself for something I had nothing to do with,” he said.

Despite his disillusionment with Berlin, Alaous has prioritized his children’s future and chosen to stay. He mainly writes for Arabic-language media, using contacts back home to report on Syria.

‘Afraid of what might come next’

Security concerns make relocation difficult for many journalists, especially minorities. About 70% of Syrians in the country are Sunni and the remainder are mostly Shia and Ismaili Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Alawites — the community of the al-Assad family.

The new government, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is a Sunni Islamist group with roots in al-Qaeda. HTS has said it supports “Syria for all Syrians” and pledged not to prosecute journalists, but some have reported arrests, assaults, and intimidation in areas like northwest Syria, where the rebels-turned-rulers have been in power since 2017.

Minorities, like Amloud Alamir, are cautious.

“It was an astonishing moment when I woke up and realized the Assad regime had fallen,” said Alamir, who fled to Germany from Syria with her husband after he was imprisoned for his political views.

“I was also afraid of what might come next. I thought there would be chaos, or that radical Islamist militias might take over,” Alamir told CPJ. “We were scared. But we also knew it was a moment to be acknowledged, even if it was too early to celebrate.” 

In April, Alamir visited Syria for the first time in 14 years, on a reporting trip. She found a deeply divided country.

“No one sees me as Amloud,” she said, explaining how she was labeled according to her sectarian identity, even though she doesn’t practice the faith. “It’s not easy.”

Despite her deep longing to return, Alamir believes some painful truths cannot be ignored.

“Stay in Damascus if you want to be happy,” she said. “But if you want to see the reality, you have to go elsewhere, like Latakia,” she said, referring to the coastal province where some 1,300 people were massacred in March.

In Latakia’s al-Sanawbar village, where Alawite civilians were executed in revenge killings against al-Assad’s community and buried in mass graves, she found devastation.

“All the women were in black,” she said. “Everyone had lost someone.”

She visited a church where the faithful said they regarded themselves as Syrians first, rather than Christians. While hoping the new government would treat all citizens equally, they also felt hopeless and were quietly looking for ways to leave, Alamir said.

´We didn’t choose to leave´

Divisions between exiles and those who stayed in Syria add further complications.

“We are no longer seen as Syrian journalists by those inside the country,” said Alaous in Berlin. “They believe we didn’t suffer like they did … Some even see us as traitors because we live abroad, while they endured the hardships.”

“But leaving wasn’t our choice, we were forced to flee,” he insisted.

Carola Richter, a communications professor at the Free University of Berlin, believes the development of domestic Syrian media is critical.

“People want transparency about who’s behind the information to decide whether they can trust it,” she said. “Exiled media targeting Syrians is not the ideal solution.”

The fractured nature of exiled media reflects mistrust among Syrians, divided by social and ideological backgrounds, she said, describing a mix of “hope, enthusiasm, fear, and fatigue” among those considering return.

“Many feel disillusioned with journalism in exile, yet unsure if going back would allow them to truly serve their community or put them at risk. This mix of emotions and conflicting thoughts is intense and still needs to be channeled into a clear direction,” she said.

Summer school in Syria

The online outlet Amal Berlin, staffed by a dozen Syrian exiles, plans to harness some of that energy to train young journalists in reporting and fact-checking at a summer school in Syria.

“The fall of the Assad regime created a necessity for Syrians in exile to do something in Syria,” said Julia Gerlach, a German journalist who set up the Arabic-language platform in 2016 to provide practical information to help Syrians settle in Germany.

Another Syrian journalist, who declined to be named, citing fear of reprisals, told CPJ that he went to Damascus in December to work as a fixer for international media and to run free training workshops, hosted by visiting exiles, for “a new generation of journalists.”

“The lucky Syrians were able to flee and have better life and education, and now it’s time for them to give back,” he said, describing it as his duty to improve journalism standards in Syria.

“We have been struggling with propaganda and disinformation during war and it’s always been hard to get verified news … I’m trying to transfer what I’ve learned from the last decade working with international media outlets to my people,” he said.

“I would love to travel around Syria and give workshops nonstop. It means a lot to me to give to anyone, so imagine how it feels when it’s my people who are receiving.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Lamiya Adilgizi.

The Salvadoran Journalists Association (APES) has raised concerns of alleged watchlists and threats of arrest targeting journalists and human rights defenders.

The document calls on the Salvadoran government to “guarantee the physical integrity and freedom of all journalists and immediately cease any form of persecution, surveillance, or intimidation.”

Read the full statement in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Within days of publication last month, sources close to El Salvador’s attorney general’s office warned that arrest warrants were imminent for seven of the outlet’s journalists. The purported charges – “advocacy of crime” and “unlawful association” – are typically used against alleged gang members. Ten El Faro reporters have now left the country as a precaution.

Just days after the interviews were published, the government escalated the crackdown against both journalists and human rights organizations whose work includes supporting journalists. Ruth López, a prominent lawyer with the human rights group Cristosal, was abruptly arrested and charged with embezzlement. Two other activists remain in custody facing public disorder charges. International organizations have raised alarms over what they describe as the systematic use of the justice system to silence critics.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented years of harassment against the El Faro newsroom, from Pegasus spyware surveillance and baseless money laundering accusations to smear campaigns led by government officials. Today, in the aftermath of the publication of the gang interviews, the pressure has reached unprecedented levels.

In a conversation with CPJ, El Faro Editor-in-Chief Óscar Martínez – recipient of CPJ’s 2016 International Press Freedom Award – reflected on toll of the persecution.

This interview was conducted in Spanish and has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you talk about how you left the country and how you’re doing now?

We published the interview videos on May 1. We knew the material would have an impact, so four of us left the country before publication to ensure it could be shared freely and then return. Each of us went to different places, one to Mexico to engage with the media, I went to the U.S. for meetings and coverage, which turned into a sort of advocacy to protect the newsroom.

After we left, repression escalated: transport business leaders were arrested, one died in prison five days later. Then came arrests of community leaders protesting outside the president’s residence, and the detention of (human rights lawyer) Ruth López. Meanwhile, we kept receiving alerts about surveillance on our staff and pending arrest warrants. So we took three more colleagues out and then another four. Now there are 10 of us outside the country, not formally exiled, but staying out for safety. We’re planning our return.

Can you explain the charges brought against you or your newsroom?

One day after we published the interviews, the head of the State Intelligence Agency accused us on social media of five crimes, including human trafficking and sexual violence. He said, “You don’t throw rocks at someone who has bombs,” like a threat. Not long after, we confirmed through two separate, reliable sources that seven arrest warrants had been drafted against us. They (the sources) didn’t know each other but provided the same information: That we are being accused of “advocacy of crime” and unlawful association. Crimes that were used against criminal groups, so that’s when we decided to get everyone involved in the video out of the country.

How has El Salvador’s state of emergency, which the government says it imposed to combat gang violence, make it especially dangerous for journalists accused of gang ties?

The state of emergency began in March 2022 and brought a series of legal changes. For the first 15 days, authorities don’t need to present you before a judge. You can be arrested based solely on a police or military officer’s intuition. They also eliminated the two-year limit on pretrial detention; now you can remain in prison for five, ten, or even fifteen years without a conviction. There’s total secrecy over proceedings and what they call “mass trials,” where hundreds are charged without individualized evidence.

In practice, it’s even worse: warrantless raids, anonymous judges, ignored release orders, and no prison visits. It’s a police state where the executive decides who’s arrested and for how long. And it all happens without checks or balances, because in El Salvador today, there’s only one power: the president.

What do you think the government aims to achieve by accusing you of being gang members or sympathizers?

It’s a tactic used in other dictatorships, like Cuba or Nicaragua, to turn critics into “non-citizens.” Bukele knows how to tap into fear. He’s pushed the narrative that we defend gangs, even though we’ve covered gang violence long before he entered politics, back when he was running a nightclub.

What we’re doing is questioning criminals who allied with the government — that’s journalism. His persecution of us and the arrest of Ruth López is a message to all he considers visible opposition: the press, civil society, community leaders, environmentalists, and political parties. His message is clear: he’s going to crush us. We’ve received the message. Some of us may get arrested, others may go into exile. That’s Bukele’s plan: destroy us by turning the public against us.

Is there any legal or institutional path you can take to challenge the accusations or seek protection?

No. None.

How would you compare the press environment now to what existed before Bukele took office? What’s changed politically and legally?

Before, there was a public information access law — it worked poorly, but it worked. There were press conferences. The labor ministry wasn’t used to attack the media. There was no state of emergency. If you were charged with a crime, you had a right to a public, open trial and the ability to appeal. There were still independent judges, and the Constitutional Chamber had some diversity. The attorney general’s office had a degree of autonomy.

All of that is gone now. El Salvador was never an easy country for journalism, but it’s never been this bad.

How has all this affected your ability to report and build sources?

Drastically. We’ve lost many sources, especially after it was revealed that Pegasus spyware had infiltrated our phones for 17 months. Nobody wants to talk to journalists who are being surveilled. The government uses polygraphs to question officials about whether they’ve spoken to El Faro. We know that ministries and the presidency specifically ask about this. Some sources who spoke to us are now in prison, one died there, with signs of torture.

Doing journalism is also much more expensive. To meet a source, we might need to rent an Airbnb with underground parking or travel abroad. What once cost a reporter’s [time] now can cost $10,000. Publishing can lead to arrest warrants. We’ve lost talented journalists who left out of legitimate fear and that’s a huge loss for journalism.

How are you coping with all of this, personally and professionally, under so much pressure and risk?

We’re trying to stay calm, to avoid losing perspective or compromising our journalistic rigor. It’s hard, but we’re doing it by relying on our editorial board and years of experience. We’ve had to adapt quickly, shift resources, and do everything we can to make the budget work.

You plan your finances for a year, and then suddenly you have to take 10 journalists out of the country. Then five audits arrive, trying to fine you thousands of dollars for things you’ve already proven you didn’t do. You have to regularly scan all phones for Pegasus. You also need an emergency fund in case you need to evacuate journalists and their families.

We’re focused on staying steady, leaning on our international allies, showing them what’s happening, and asking for one specific thing: time. We know what’s coming: exile or prison. We’re not asking anyone to stop the inevitable, just to help us delay it. As long as we have time, we’ll keep reporting.

How do you think what’s happening to you, to El Faro, and to independent media in El Salvador can serve as a warning or lesson for journalists in other countries, even the United States?

It’s deeply instructive; it cuts to the core of what journalism is. People can do what they want with the information we report, but a lot simply wouldn’t be known if we didn’t exist.

People wouldn’t know that Bukele negotiated with gangs, or that victims of gangs are now imprisoned, or that the prisons chief sold off 41,000 sacks of pandemic food aid for profit. They wouldn’t know that Bukele is expanding his private residence with public funds. We report, what people do with it is their choice. We answer to our readers and our principles, but above all, we report for them.

I also think of journalists like Alma Guillermoprieto and Susan Meiselas. If they hadn’t documented the El Mozote massacre in 1981, standing up to a coordinated campaign that denied it ever happened, there wouldn’t be a trial today. It’s terrible that those trials are only now happening, for the old and the dead, but it’s something. If they hadn’t done it, the world would be worse. And if we don’t do our part now, it will be worse again.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Dánae Vílchez.

Bulavinskaya is one of hundreds of journalists who went into exile after President Aleksandr Lukashenko intensified his jailing and persecution of the press following 2020 protests calling for his ouster. Increasingly, they face the long arm of the state. According to CPJ research, more than 60 journalists in exile are under investigation or facing criminal charges in cases that were opened after they left Belarus, constituting a massive campaign of transnational repression against those who continue to report from abroad.

Journalists are being charged under so-called “special proceedings,” a 2022 addition to the criminal procedure code that allows Belarusian authorities to convict people in absentia. At first, the proceedings were mostly used against dissidents, politicians, and activists; in 2024, authorities began charging journalists in an escalation against the exiled press, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), a trade group operating from abroad since 2021. (Four of BAJ’s own employees face criminal cases according to the organization.)

CPJ spoke with 15 journalists facing criminal cases and found that the legal process typically follows the same pattern: Journalists learn that they are under investigation, or facing charges, when law enforcement officials pay intimidating visits to relatives still in Belarus or when they spot their names on Russia’s online database of wanted suspects, which since a 2010 regional treaty includes Belarusians. (Belarus’s own “wanted” database is not frequently updated.) Journalists’ remaining property in the country is seized pending a trial, which virtually always results in a conviction. The journalists are then sentenced and ordered to pay heavy fines, which serve as a pretext for the full confiscation of their property.

“Having repressed virtually everyone inside the country they could, the authorities have now turned their attention to those abroad,” said Barys Haretski, deputy head of BAJ, in an interview with CPJ. “The authorities have no intention of reducing the number of repressive acts; they want to keep not only those inside the country in fear, but also those who have been forced to emigrate.”

Journalists have little recourse once placed under “special proceedings,” which are nontransparent by design. According to BAJ, journalists are typically unaware of what might have triggered the criminal cases against them until the trial begins. (Bulavinskaya, for example, still does not know the nature of the investigation or any charges against her.) Journalists are represented by government-appointment lawyers who virtually never communicate with them. If they are sentenced to prison, such as three of the 15 CPJ spoke with, they can technically appeal, but it’s practically impossible as most never see a sentencing document, said Haretski. Once sentenced, they have to be extremely cautious about travel. If they enter a country with an extradition treaty with Russia or Belarus, they can be deported to serve their jail time.

CPJ emailed the Belarusian Investigative Committee, the agency in charge of pretrial proceedings, requesting comment on the use of “special proceedings” against journalists but received no response.

Journalism equated with extremism

Journalists facing “special proceedings” are typically charged with extremism. Since Belarus tightened its extremism laws in 2021 in response to nationwide protests, authorities have been steadily using them to erode press freedom by fining and imprisoning independent journalists and blocking outlets labeled as “extremist.”

Freelance journalist Zmitser Lupach, who is in exile in Poland, learned that he was charged with “promoting” extremism, among other criminal charges when acquaintances sent him a photo of himself in a display of accused criminals in Belarus’ northwestern city of Hlybokaye. Later, authorities seized his apartment and a police officer paid a visit to his 81-year-old mother to ask if Lupach was planning to come back to Belarus.

“I can’t imagine how one can equate journalistic work with extremist activity… I cannot explain it by anything other than revenge on the part of the Lukashenko regime,” he told CPJ. “It is impossible to keep silent about this. Because the state, which should protect its citizens regardless of their political beliefs, is behaving like the ultimate criminal.”

Another journalist in exile, Tanya Korovenkova, is facing a criminal case that she suspects is related to her previous work for independent news website Pozirk, which the Interior Ministry declared an “extremist” formation in December. The ministry also published a list of people affiliated with Pozirk that included her name, she told CPJ.

Her property was seized in October. In February, Belarusian KGB officers asked Korovenkova’s relatives about her activities. “I regard such actions against me, as well as against my other journalist colleagues, as persecution for our work,” she said.  

Families impacted

Journalists told CPJ that family members in Belarus are harassed, with sometimes devastating consequences. In December 2023, Iryna Charniauka’s 74-year-old mother was summoned for questioning about her daughter by the Belarusian Investigative Committee; months later, law enforcement officers visited the elderly woman’s home to inform her that the journalist was charged with promoting extremist activity over a July 2023 interview she gave to Belsat TV about the conviction of her husband, journalist Pavel Mazheika. Soon after, Charniauka’s property was seized.

“My mother is an old person, and she ended up in the hospital due to a heart attack and this is the direct consequence of all those things,” Charniauka told CPJ.

She said the legal process has been a black box.

“It is likely that a lawyer was assigned to me, but I don’t know who and I don’t know how to find out. When my colleague journalists had such special proceedings [opened against them], they found out that their government-assigned lawyers admitted their guilt… I cannot go back to Belarus, because I know what will be next,” she said.

Siarhei Skulavets, a former journalist with Belsat TV who is facing an extremism case, told CPJ that in 2024 officers twice searched the homes of his 64-year-old mother and his 85-year-old grandmother.

“Two weeks after the second search, which took place on December 31, my grandmother died. The cause of death was a heart attack. I believe that the law enforcement is indirectly to blame for this, as they inflicted severe trauma on her,” he said, adding that the home he left behind in 2023 was also searched.

“The authorities are waging a war against free speech in the country. Journalists who have not [left the country] are in jail. Law enforcement officers in turn have lost their conscience and are conducting an all-out sweep, destroying people’s lives, their destinies and families,” he said.

Self-censorship in exile

Exiled journalists told CPJ they made the difficult choice to leave in part to continue in the profession, but the use of “special proceedings” has forced them to question the safety of their work.

“Special proceedings and repression against relatives in Belarus are a crucial factor in why the vast majority of independent journalists in exile work anonymously and often refuse to work on camera in order to maintain their anonymity,” Haretski told CPJ.

“Close people with whom I had contact asked me to stop communicating with them,” another journalist facing criminal proceedings told CPJ under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They were very afraid of hurting me and themselves of course [by maintaining communication]. They were induced several times to ‘cooperate,’ in other words, to find out information from me and pass it on to the authorities. …This is a powerful lever of pressure, and of course it hurts a lot, but I hope that it is temporary,” she said.

“I would really like to continue to stay in the profession. But unfortunately, all the things I have built up, year after year, have been taken away from me,” she said.

Another journalist told CPJ under condition of anonymity that law enforcement came to his parents’ workplace before he realized he was on Russia’s wanted list. The journalist said “special proceedings” have succeeded in making exiled journalists think twice about continuing to cover the country they left behind.

“This is repression of journalists, an attempt to stop their activity,” he told CPJ. “And it does work – journalists go into self-censorship mode.”

The long arm of the state: Three exiled journalists facing criminal cases

Olga Loiko, a former editor of now-shuttered news website Tut.by, was sentenced in absentia this year on charges of inciting hatred, tax evasion, organizing a protest, and calling for sanctions. She has not been able to determine the exact sentence.  

“There is no doubt that I and the rest of the Tut.by staff are being persecuted for our journalistic work, for our exceptionally accurate and professional coverage of the events on the eve of and after the 2020 presidential election,” she said. “And the brutality of the persecution … is exclusively because of Lukashenko’s personal trauma, who believes that the West ordered [the protests], paid journalists and opponents, spies, etcetera, because otherwise he would have to believe that Belarusians hate him — and quite massively. And journalists are not the reason, nor the instigators of this hatred.”

Uladzimir Khilmanovich, a freelance journalist and human rights activist, was sentenced last August to five years in prison and a fine of 40,000 Belarusian rubles (US$12,224) on extremism charges. In January, court bailiffs confiscated his TV, washing machine, and refrigerator, and he anticipates that all of his property, including other household appliances, a rural plot of land, and a two-room apartment, will eventually be confiscated.

“The whole judicial system in today’s Belarus is built exclusively on repressiveness and persecution on political grounds for dissent,” he said.

Fyodar Pauluchenka, editor-in-chief of Reform.news, learned he was placed on Russia’s wanted list in March, about six months after his parents and daughter were summoned for interrogation by the Belarusian KGB.

“The authorities are trying to put pressure through my parents on me for my professional activities… They were forced to sign a non-disclosure document, and I cannot find out the details. They are scared,” he said. “This is a common practice of pressure on Belarusian journalists. Fortunately, I don’t have any property in Belarus, otherwise it would be confiscated.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Anna Brakha.

The award-winning Palestinian American journalist and author Sarah Aziza has released a new book, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders, in which she examines her recovery from an eating disorder from which she nearly died in 2019, linking it to the generational trauma experienced as part of her Palestinian family’s history of exile. Aziza was born in the U.S. as a daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees. “I began to recover memories of my Palestinian grandmother that led to a curiosity … about my family’s history in Gaza, in Palestine, the greater Nakba,” says Aziza. “And as a daughter of the diaspora, I hadn’t tied my own story so viscerally to the story of my people.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Amnesty International Hong Kong Overseas (AIHKO), will be led by Hong Kong diaspora activists operating from key international hubs including Australia, Canada, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States, Amnesty said in a statement.

“The gutting of Hong Kong’s civil society has been a tragedy for the city with more than 100 non-profits and media outlets shut down or forced to flee,” the statement said. “We are now ready to intensify our efforts by building new communities of support driven by the Hong Kong diaspora.”

Amnesty said that since pro-democracy protests in 2019, more than 10,000 people, many of them students, have been arrested for protest-related activities. Over 300 people have been arrested for alleged acts of “endangering national security.”

It said that AIHKO is Amnesty International’s first-ever section founded and operated entirely “in exile.”

“Being overseas provides us with a degree of protection, allowing us to speak more freely and engage in advocacy work. We have a responsibility to do more to support those who remain in Hong Kong and continue their vital efforts,” Fernando Cheung, AIHKO board member and former Hong Kong legislator, was quoted as saying.

The U.K.-based human rights group was founded in 1961 with particular focus on the plight of political prisoners. Amnesty International’s local office in Hong Kong ceased operations on Oct. 31, 2021.

AIHKO, which is officially registered in Switzerland, will focus on advocating for human rights of Hong Kongers, within Hong Kong and abroad, the statement said.

Hong Kong was once a bastion of free media and expression in Asia, qualities that helped make it an international financial center and a regional hub for journalism and civil society groups.

But demonstrations in 2019 against Beijing’s encroachment on Hong Kong’s freedoms led to the passage of a national security law in 2020 that stifled dissent, making life increasingly precarious for independent groups that criticized China.

Radio Free Asia closed in its Hong Kong bureau in March 2024, saying the city’s recently amended national security law, also known as “Article 23,” had raised safety concerns for its reporters and staff members.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

On April 3, Lung Ngon Monastery in Gade county (Gande in Chinese), Golog prefecture, Qinghai province, issued a statement confirming that its abbot, Tulku Hungkar Dorje, 56, had died in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City on March 29 due to poor health. The monastery’s statement gave no further details. His followers say he had been missing for eight months.

(Citizen photo)

Chinese authorities’ forbid the monastery and local residents from holding public memorial services and prayers for the abbot, underscoring the sensitivity of his death, three sources from the region told Radio Free Asia on Wednesday. The sources requested anonymity because they feared reprisals.

The Central Tibetan Administration - the exiled government based in Dharamsala, India - and human rights groups contend that Tulku Hungkar Dorje was arrested from his hotel room in Ho Chi Minh City on March 25 in a joint operation by local police and Chinese government agents. He was reportedly transferred to Chinese custody on March 28, where he mysteriously died the same day, they added.

“(This raises) serious concerns about cross-border security cooperation, transnational repression, and human rights violations that demand immediate and thorough investigation, as well as accountability from both Vietnamese and Chinese authorities,” Tenzin Lekshay, spokesperson for the CTA, said.

(Citizen photo)

Tulku Hungkar Dorje was a renowned religious teacher, philanthropist, and educator. He disappeared last August after he called at a public teaching that July for the preservation of Tibetan language and culture.

Rights groups say that Tulku Hungkar Dorje was also subjected to multiple rounds of interrogations before his disappearance after he did not fully comply with Beijing’s wish to host the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama, Gyaltsen Norbu, at his monastery.

He was also accused of failing to implement Chinese government policies in schools he had established for children of Tibetan nomadic families in Golog, sources in the region said. He had also composed a long-life prayer for Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, whom China regards as a separatist, they added. (The Dalai Lama actually advocates for a “Middle Way” that accepts Tibet’s status as a part of China and urges greater cultural, religious, and language rights and freedoms under the provisions of China’s own constitution).

Escape to Vietnam

Faced with mounting pressure from the Chinese government, Tulku Hungkar Dorje fled to Vietnam, where he was reportedly in hiding since September 2024 until the Chinese authorities arrested him in late March with the help of the Vietnamese government, Tibetan rights groups said, citing sources familiar with the matter in the region.

Lhamo Tashi, president of Dhomay Cholka Association, a non-governmental organization representing Tibetans from the historical Amdo region of Tibet, said: “Given the grave nature of these events, we call for an independent international investigation into the circumstances of Tulku Hungkar Dorje’s death. Such an investigation must be conducted transparently, in accordance with international legal standards, and with full access for neutral observers in Vietnam.”

The Vietnamese and the Chinese government did not immediately respond to RFA’s requests for comment.

(Citizen photo)

Beyond Tibet, Tulku Hungkar Dorje has a large following of Buddhist disciples across the world, including in the United States, Russia, Australia, Canada, and Vietnam. In Vietnam, his followers at the Longchen Nyingthig Center issued a short note lamenting his passing.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism in Vietnam, with the establishment of multiple Dharma meditation centers, pagodas and even the world’s largest Tibetan Buddhist Prayer Wheel that is located at Don Duong District, Lam Dong Province in southern Vietnam.

Experts say the visits by Tibetan Buddhist leaders in Vietnam are tolerated, sometimes even promoted. That’s an unusual exception to communist party intolerance of religious groups that are not state-sanctioned and is perhaps meant to counter criticism of that policy. However, experts say Vietnam avoids any publicity around Buddhist leaders who are under the scrutiny of the Chinese government to avoid diplomatic problems with Beijing.

Suspicions of foul play

Ju Tenkyong, director of the Amnye Machen Institute, a Dharamsala-based Tibetan center for advanced studies, said that earlier this month, five Tibetan Buddhist monks from Golog’s Lung Ngon Monastery and six Chinese government officials traveled to Vietnam to retrieve Tulku Hungkar Dorje’s body, which is reportedly at Vinmec Central Park International Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.

However, the five monks were barred from participating in an emergency meeting that was convened on April 5 at the Chinese Embassy in Vietnam, where only the six Chinese officials were allowed, he said. Nor were they allowed to view the body, despite being initially told they could do so, he added.

“The officials demanded that the monks sign documents confirming Tulku’s death, but the monks refused, saying they could not sign until they had seen his body. The fact that the body was not shown to the monks and disciples raises serious suspicions of foul play,” Tenkyong told RFA.

(Citizen photo)

The Tibetan government-in-exile also called for the body of Tulku Hungkar Dorje to be immediately handed over to Lung Ngon Monastery to allow for proper last rites to be performed as per Tibetan Buddhist traditions.

“It is noteworthy that the suspicious death of Tulku Hungkar Dorje represents a troubling escalation in China’s systematic targeting of influential Tibetan figures who promote Tibetan culture, language, and identity,” said CTA spokesperson Lekshay. “His case highlights the ongoing suppression of human rights in Tibet, where people live under constant fear of arrest for the slightest expression of Tibetan identity.”

Chinese authorities closely scrutinize prominent Tibetan Buddhist lamas and businessmen involved in philanthropy, as well as poets, writers, and religious teachers who advocate for the preservation and promotion of Tibetan language and culture. Such figures often face strict surveillance and are vulnerable to arbitrary detentions and long prison terms.

Photos thrown to the ground

The local sources who spoke to RFA on Wednesday said officials in Gade County, where the monastery is located, have instructed local township and village leaders to strictly prohibit Tibetans from sharing any images or information related to Tulku Hungkar Dorje online.

“Initially, the government told Lung Ngon Monastery they could hold memorial services, but fearing large public gatherings, they suddenly imposed restrictions,” said one of the three sources.

Since April 2, authorities from Golog Prefecture and Gade County have been jointly conducting strict inspections at the monastery and surrounding villages, with police patrolling these areas day and night, the sources said.

“When the monastery school attempted to display Tulku’s photo and hold memorial services, Chinese officials arrived, threw the photos on the ground and forcibly prohibited any religious activities,” another of the sources said.

In its 2025 Annual Report, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended that both China and Vietnam be designated as a ‘Countries of Particular Concern’ for engaging in systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.

USCIRF said religious freedom in Vietnam remained poor in 2024, with the Vietnamese government continuing to wield its 2018 Law on Belief and Religion to strictly control religious affairs through state-sponsored religious organizations.

Edited by Mat Pennington

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Tibetan.

In the case of Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the former Florida congressmember who passed away on March 3, 2025, aged 70, there are two further factors at play. First, there is the fact that he died at a time in which the great majority of his obituaries, because of the power structure of the media industry and its overwhelming deference to the US’s two duopoly parties, will be long on lionizing and short on criticism. Second, there is the fact that Diaz-Balart evidently did not himself buy into this notion, at least if his reactions to the deaths of his political adversaries such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are anything to go by. Indeed, he said shortly after the death of Fidel Castro: “The brain of evil, of that tyranny, and of, really, the movement throughout this hemisphere against democracy, against the rule of law, in favor of terrorism, in support of narco-trafficking… that brain and coordinator has died.” Following the death of Hugo Chavez, he said: “Hugo Chavez was a puppet of Fidel Castro.”

And so it falls to an independent journalist writing in alternative media to provide some balance and critical analysis of Diaz-Balart’s political career. But I do have some special insight into the man’s life and politics. Diaz-Balart’s family knew my mother’s family in Cuba and then in Miami after both left the island following the 1959 overthrow of Fulgencio Batista. I interned for a short time at his office in Washington, which ironically had the effect of turning me into an anti-imperialist, so disgusted I was with the hypocrisy, double-standards and shameless self-interestedness of his foreign policy stances.

It was when I asked one of his staffers why Diaz-Balart didn’t advocate for an “embargo” against Saudi Arabia, on the same grounds on which he advocates one against Cuba and with the same condition that it be lifted only when its ruler (an absolute monarch, no less) agrees to hold “free and fair” elections, that I had an epiphany that has stayed with me and influenced my political trajectory ever since. Hearing his dissembling and derisory answer (that “the alternative would be worse”) made me realize the most central truth about US foreign policy: that Washington’s sole criterion for its treatment of other countries is not their democratic credentials, their human rights record, their good governance or lack thereof, or the integrity of their institutions, but rather the extent to which they are obedient to US geostrategic and, especially, US economic interests. What else could explain Washington’s obsequious treatment of the Saudi Wahhabiist state? And how could it be a coincidence that the US had privileged access to its oil reserves and made money for its military industrial complex via lucrative arms contracts?

Following travels through Latin America, graduate studies in international affairs, immersion in the work of figures such as Saul Landau and Greg Grandin, and growing involvement in activism and writing about the region, this realization evolved into a deeper understanding of the US’s role on the world stage. Far from Diaz-Balart’s notion of a benevolent United States standing up for the “American values” of democracy, the rule of law, and so on, the so-called ‘shining city on the hill’ is, in fact, a ruthless rogue state that constantly intervenes in other countries’ affairs and constantly flouts international law. And it not only sides with and actively props up, but sometimes even installs, some of the worst governments throughout the globe. Indeed, far from supporting democracy, the US has overthrown countless democratically-elected governments not to its liking. This has been especially pronounced in the US’s so-called “backyard,” which Grandin has described in his book of the same name as “Empire’s Workshop.”

The fact that Diaz-Balart made a career out of collaborating with this rogue state in waging a decades-long economic war against his own country and, by extension, his own people will stand as the most salient thing about his political life and legacy. Shortly after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed a number of punitive measures on Cuba. These have been progressively increased by subsequent US administrations of both parties ever since. Together they have come to be known as the “embargo” against Cuba though are more accurately described as an economic blockade because they penalize third countries. Though President Barack Obama reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2016, the blockade has nonetheless remained in place. His successors to the White House, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, rolled back many of his reforms and, in the case of Trump, strengthened the blockade by enacting further coercive measures.

Diaz-Balart was elected to congress in 1989 and is best known for serving as the author of much of the legislation that codified the blockade into law. The fact that he did this while making out that it was all done for the good of the Cuban people makes it all the more despicable. After all, the Cuban-American exile brigade frequently invokes the suffering of the Cubans left in Cuba as justification for the blockade. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, another Cuban-American exile hardliner who also served as a congressmember representing a district in South Florida, spelled it out in her statement about Diaz-Balart’s death: “The oppressed people of Cuba had no greater advocate for their freedom than Lincoln [Diaz-Balart].”

Yet it is the blockade itself that has been the primary cause of their suffering. According to UN figures, it has caused over $160 billion of damage to the Cuban economy. The Center for International Policy, meanwhile, has stated that the blockade has “created a situation of scarcity and uncertainty that has affected all aspects of Cuban society.” Though no hard data exists on the number of deaths caused by the blockade, a 1997 study by the American Association for World Health concluded, as The Los Angeles Times put it, that it “has significantly increased suffering and deaths in the Caribbean nation.” Needless to say, Diaz-Balart also supported the same kind of measures against Nicaragua and Venezuela, which have imposed on those countries’ people similar levels of suffering and hardship.

Because the blockade is based on unilateral coercive measures rather than multilateral sanctions, it is illegal under international law. It also violates international law because it is a form of collective punishment that harms Cuba’s civilian population rather than ostensible targets in the government. As a result, the blockade stands in the opprobrium of the international community, with practically every country in the world other than the US and its proxy state, Israel, voting in favor of a UN resolution condemning it. The measure has passed with the vast majority of UN General Assembly members’ support every year since the vote was first held in 1992.

The blockade outlaws almost all direct trade between Cuba and the US with minor exemptions for medicine, some foodstuffs, and humanitarian goods. Diaz-Balart not only opposed these exemptions but advocated for what he termed a “secondary boycott,” which would have meant that any company that invested in Cuba would have been disallowed from doing business in the US as well. Of course, the Cuban-American exile brigade propaganda response to this is the notion that “Cuba can trade with the rest of the world.” Left unsaid is the fact that the blockade penalizes third countries for trading with Cuba. The State Department has prosecuted and fined several European banks for violating the terms of the embargo. The French bank Société Générale was fined a whopping $1.3 billion in 2018!

This practice massively disincentivizes other countries and their companies from doing any type of business with Cuba. Diaz-Balart openly stated during his time in congress that another major purpose of the blockade is to keep hard currency out of the hands of the Cuban government. This difficulty in accessing the four currencies accepted for international trade on the global market (the US dollar, the Pound sterling, the euro and the Japanese yen) also makes it very difficult for the Cuban government to trade with other nations.

If the blockade isn’t meant to alleviate the suffering of the Cuban people, then what is its purpose? For Diaz-Balart, its purpose was twofold. First, it formed part of the vendetta that he held against the revolution and its leaders. Diaz-Balart, like so many leaders of South Florida’s Cuban-American exile community, came from a family that was close to the US-backed Batista government and formed part of Cuba’s internal quisling class who served as proxies of US economic imperialism. Diaz-Balart’s father was deputy minister of the interior in Batista’s government and was later elected to the Cuban Senate in 1958 on a pro-Batista platform but was unable to take his seat due to the revolution the following year.

Though a central part of Cuban-American exile folklore is the idea that “Free Cuba” “fell” to Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, the reality is that Batista was himself a dictator who had come to power via a coup in 1952. His fascist government operated a secret police force that tortured and murdered political opponents. The estimate of 20,000 dead is the figure often touted as the total number of his victims but even CIA documents say this is likely a massive undercount as it, according to a 1963 CIA memorandum declassified in 2005, “includes only a relatively small number killed in actual military encounters.” The document adds: “The [Batista] regime’s campaign of terror got out of control and the government in Havana probably had no clear idea of how many killings the police and army forces were committing.”

Batista also allowed the mafia to control large swaths of the economy in exchange for bribes. When the 26th of July Movement toppled his government in 1959, he was so unpopular that an opinion poll held at the time showed that 86 percent of Cubans supported the revolution. The above cited CIA memorandum likewise states that “the anti-Batista forces… by mid-1958 had the support of 80 to 90 percent of the population.” So Diaz-Balart’s support for the blockade was motivated by a wish for revenge not just against the revolutionary leaders themselves but against the people who remained in Cuba for the crime of supporting the overthrow of the US-backed dictator to which his family owed its power and privilege and their support for Fidel Castro and the revolution he led.

Support for the revolution has remained substantial throughout the decades and Castro remained a popular figure until his death in 2016. Even documents published by the State Department’s Office of the Historian have conceded that “substantial numbers still support [the revolution] with enthusiasm” and that before his death Castro retained “widespread support among the poorer classes, particularly in the countryside.” Though it is purely speculation, I suspect that Diaz-Balart knew this full well all along, as do his brother and Ros-Lehtinen.

The second reason Diaz-Balart supported the blockade was because it creates leverage for the US to impose its will on the island. In the case that the Cuban government falls, so goes the logic, the US would be able to dictate how Cuba should be organized both politically and economically. Diaz-Balart made no secret of this, stating openly that his vision of a “free” Cuba would mean both “free elections” and “free markets.” Of course, for a small Caribbean country like Cuba with a history of US domination, so-called “free markets” would translate into a surrender of its economic sovereignty to an imperial hegemon. Indeed, before the revolution Cuba’s economy had been divvied up to US corporations with much of the profit leaving the country to line the pockets of US-based shareholders. This was one of the major grievances against the Batista dictatorship held by the majority of the Cuban population at the time and articulated by the revolutionary leaders.

In terms of “free elections,” if the Cuban Communist Party or some other socialist party ran in the election and won in spite of Washington trying to rig it (as it most certainly would), does anyone seriously think that the Cuban-American exile hardliners or the US government would accept the result? And how could an election in Cuba be “free and fair” if the US continues to channel millions of dollars per year (so far over $200 million overall) into opposition groups intent on destroying the social gains of the revolution and handing Cuba’s economy back to the US and its domestic quislings? Indeed, what the Cuban-American exile brigade want is not a return to democracy but rather a return to their position of power, whether it be under a US-backed dictatorship or a US-rigged sham liberal democratic system.

Like the Diaz-Balart family, many of the South Florida-based Cuban-American exiles themselves come from this collaborationist bourgeoisie that served as the US’s proxy administrators of empire and wish to reestablish their class privilege in a “liberated,” that is to say, capitalist and US-dominated, Cuba. And though such people claim that they were persecuted and driven out of the country by the revolutionary government, the reality is that many left voluntarily because they were despised by the great majority of Cuban people for their association with the US-backed Batista and would be again if they returned.

In addition to his vindictiveness, Diaz-Balart’s support for the blockade was also deeply hypocritical. At the very same time he sanctimoniously bloviated about Cuba’s supposed deservingness of this treatment, he was not only turning a blind eye but actively working to enable some of the world’s worst human rights violators. For example, he not only never once introduced any measure condemning Israel’s occupation, displacement, denial of rights, and humiliation of the Palestinian people, but shamelessly took campaign contributions from the hardline Zionist special interest group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and staunchly supported its agenda in his congressional votes.

AIPAC posted on X shortly following his death: “We mourn the passing of former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart who was a stalwart supporter of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Rep. Diaz-Balart was a strong ally of the pro-Israel community and we extend our condolences to his family.” Diaz-Balart’s supporters would surely respond that Israel is a “democracy.” But Israel can hardly be considered a “democracy” when it is practicing ethnic apartheid not just according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the late Jimmy Carter but even according to its former attorney-general and the former head of Mossad.

Diaz-Balart also never signed any resolution condemning human rights violations in Colombia during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe. On the contrary, in 2008 Diaz-Balart said in a statement: “The United States Congress must stand in solidarity with President Alvaro Uribe… Colombia is our strongest ally in the region.” His brother Mario Diaz-Balart, also a congress member representing a South Florida district, was present at a ceremony where Uribe was awarded with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. During Uribe’s presidency, Colombia had what many including NACLA have described as “the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere.”

Uribe’s so-called “counter-narcotics” campaigns, for example, saw government-allied paramilitary death squads displace rural populations and murder union activists, social leaders, or whoever else stood in the way of powerful multinational corporations and wealthy landowners. For several years during Uribe’s presidency and for some years afterwards, Colombia held the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists. Colombia’s population of internally displaced persons, meanwhile, currently stands at about 7 million people. The number surged during Uribe’s presidency as a direct result of this paramilitary activity. Human Rights Watch stated in 2005: “In the last three years alone, nearly 5 percent of Colombia’s 43 million people has been forcibly displaced.” (Uribe’s time in office began in 2002.)

Diaz-Balart’s relationship with Uribe, in fact, perfectly demonstrates his extreme hypocrisy regarding two accusations he hurled at the Cuban government: support for narco-trafficking and terrorism. In the case of narco-trafficking, declassified US intelligence documents say that Uribe collaborated with the Medellin Cartel and that the organization financed his campaign for the Colombian Senate. In terms of terrorism, the Parapolitics scandal revealed ties between dozens of Uribe’s political allies (including his cousin Mario Uribe) and right-wing paramilitary organizations such as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which the US government itself designates as a terrorist organization.

This was at the very time that Diaz-Balart was one of the major advocates of the US listing Cuba as a state-sponsor of terrorism. The basis for this included dubious claims about ties to Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) along with vague allusions to Cuban cooperation with Iran, another supposed state-sponsor of terrorism. Leaving aside the credibility of these assertions, in addition to his association with Uribe, Diaz-Balart himself frequently associated with and advocated for people who easily meet the US’s own definition of the word ‘terrorist’.

Along with the aforementioned fellow Cuban-American exile hardline congressmember Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Diaz-Balart condemned efforts of the FBI to work cooperatively with Cuban authorities to bring the mastermind of the Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 bombing and the 1997 Havana hotel bombings, Luis Posada-Carriles, to justice.  In the early 2000s, they even tried to get Panama’s then-President Mireya Moscoso to release Posada-Carriles after he was captured by Cuban intelligence. Diaz-Balart also lobbied for the release of Orlando Bosch, Posada-Carriles’ co-conspirator in the airline bombing. Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen can hardly credibly present themselves as champions of the Cuban people when a total of 3,478 Cubans have been killed in US-sponsored terrorist attacks, with a further 2,099 wounded.

The duo has also had extensive links to the Nicaraguan “Contra” paramilitary organization, which waged a dirty war against the Sandinista government (that ousted the US-backed Samoza dictatorship in 1979) and perceived sympathizers. Ros-Lehtinen hosted a number of former Contra members at her Miami office in 2008. Diaz-Balart, meanwhile, led efforts to get Otto Reich appointed as the George W. Bush administration’s assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. Reich reported to Oliver North when he was in charge of funding the Contras (later exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal) and, according to The New York Times, “was in charge of a covert program during the Reagan administration to generate public support in the United States for the anti-Sandinista rebels, known as the contras.”

Of course, Diaz-Balart’s supporters will surely claim that he had a democratic mandate to do all of the things I have enumerated above since he was elected many times to represent his constituents. But this argument has a number of problems. Leaving aside the US’s own dubious democratic credentials and status as a dollarocracy, there is the issue that the Cubans who left Cuba to live in the US are not representative of the Cuban people who remain in Cuba – that is, those who are actually affected by the blockade. For reasons enumerated above, many of the émigrés bear the same grudge against the revolutionary government and, in turn, the Cubans in Cuba who support it. And obviously, those who left the island are likely to be those who are most critical of the government.

But there is another, more subtle factor at play. Cuban exiles imported to South Florida not just their language and customs but also their clientelistic political culture. Batistaites such as Diaz-Balart hold many positions of political power in South Florida, not just in congress but even more so at the local level, as well as many positions of economic power. Failing to toe the line by pronouncing one’s fidelity to the political stances of this Batistaite political and economic elite can mean social ostracization, retaliatory repercussions, job loss, or other economic consequences.

Since I have criticized other obituaries for being too one-sided, perhaps I should add some balance to my own. Diaz-Balart admittedly did have some redeeming qualities. He appeared by all accounts to have been a dutiful public servant to his constituents, making sure that he had many staff devoted to case work from residents of his congressional district. He also declined to side with his party’s hardline nativist wing and remained a champion of immigrants after his defection from the Democratic Party in 1985 and throughout his time in congress.

Whether he would have cozied up to the xenophobic MAGA movement that currently dominates his party remains an open question. But if the actions of his brother Mario and his political protégé Marco Rubio are anything to go by, it doesn’t look good. Rubio ultimately accepted a position in Trump’s cabinet as secretary of state (where he will, no doubt, push for ever greater coercive measures against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela). His brother, meanwhile, reportedly brushed off suggestions that a second Trump administration would lead to deportations of some of his constituents – which, needless to say, is exactly what has happened.

Either way, these mitigating factors will never be able to mask the stench of his role working with the government of a hostile foreign state to immiserate the very people whose wellbeing he claimed to be motivated by. Though I extend my condolences to his family and friends, I personally will shed more tears for the victims of the illegal economic warfare he made a career of supporting and the victims of the terrorists who he spent that career defending.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Bolton.

But now, Anna Kwok, Frances Hui and Joey Siu are all in exile in the United States, with no idea of when they will be able to return. Each has a bounty of HK$1 million (US$128,500) on their heads from the Hong Kong government, which has vowed to pursue them for the rest of their lives.

Kwok, executive director of international advocacy group the Hong Kong Democracy Council, was 26 when she was placed on the Hong Kong authorities' wanted list in July 2023.

Hong Kong Chief executive John Lee warned her and others on the list that they would be “pursued for life,” urging them “to give themselves up as soon as possible.”

Hui, the first Hong Kong democracy activist to receive asylum in the United States, and Siu, policy adviser to the London-based rights group Hong Kong Watch, were added to the list in December 2023.

(RFA)

All three women were educated in Hong Kong from elementary school onwards, including classes in Liberal Studies, the former critical-thinking and citizenship program for Hong Kong schoolchildren. The ruling Communist Party has blamed it for waves of youth-led pro-democracy protests since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover from Britain.

Since Beijing imposed two national security laws banning public opposition and dissent in the city, blaming “hostile foreign forces” for the protests, hundreds of thousands have voted with their feet amid plummeting human rights rankings, shrinking press freedom and widespread government propaganda in schools.

Some fled to the United Kingdom on the British National Overseas, or BNO, visa program. Others have made their homes anew in the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany.

(RFA)

Many are continuing their activism and lobbying activists, yet struggle with exile in some way, worrying about loved ones back home while facing threats to their personal safety from supporters of Beijing overseas.

The changes have happened fast, and turned around the lives of many young Hong Kongers.

Yet Kwok, Hui and Siu can trace their political development as far back as their school days, and continue to carry the message of the protests to policymakers in the United States and beyond.

Even at a young age, Hui was keenly political, joining the activist movement Scholarism, which organized a mass protest led by then-high schooler Joshua Wong against a Beijing-backed program of " patriotic education" planned for the city’s schools.

“The movement against patriotic education happened when I was in Form 4 [age 15], and it was a personal issue for me, because if it happened, I would be brainwashed like a lab rat,” Hui said. “I felt that I could speak out because the leader [Joshua Wong] was also still in school uniform.”

“He ushered in an era where schoolchildren took part in political movements,” she said. “Soon after that, the Umbrella movement happened, and I decided to join Scholarism.”

“Then I went to study journalism in the United States ... which was also part of my work towards freedom and democracy,” Hui said.

‘Strong sense of justice’

As a girl, Siu saw herself as a potential high-school teacher.

“I was lively and outgoing as a kid, with a strong sense of justice,” Siu told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview, adding that she frequently volunteered for positions of responsibility like prefect, monitor and counselor while in school.

But part of her always felt she didn’t belong.

“I was born in the U.S. and didn’t go back to Hong Kong until I was in elementary school,” she said. “My relationship with my parents wasn’t close because I didn’t live with them as a child ... I was looked after by my grandparents.”

(Courtesy Joey Siu)

“My upbringing was pretty strict,” she said. “I was only allowed to watch the 6.30 evening news on TVB while we ate dinner, but I wasn’t allowed to watch any TV the rest of the time.”

“I wasn’t allowed to read anything that wasn’t on the school curriculum, including comics and novels; I was only allowed to read newspapers,” she said.

Kwok, by contrast, was always something of a rebel.

“I’ve always been someone who likes to challenge existing frameworks, ever since I was a child,” she said. “In high school, I often talked back to my teachers, and would also speak out enthusiastically and ask questions about current affairs.”

(Courtesy Anna Kwok)

“I also loved to try new things, or rather my family gave me a lot of opportunities to try different things, like rhythmic swimming, Chinese music, and playing the piano,” she said.

Complex world

Hui, meanwhile, described herself as “very noisy” in school.

“I don’t like to be boxed in by frameworks,” she said. " I used to like boy stuff; I was popular and had a lot of different interests."

Yet her upbringing was strongly Catholic, and her family’s world revolved around the church.

“It wasn’t until I joined Scholarism in 2014 that I actually met people outside of the Catholic community,” she said. “That’s when I realized how complex the real world actually is.”

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All three women are now firmly regarded as subversive by their government, and by extension, the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Their generation is unique in that it received a liberal education from a young age, but also lived through the early stages of Beijing’s patriotic education program in schools and universities.

“Kindergartens and primary schools gradually started to offer classes about China, and study tours to Beijing,” Kwok said. “They were constantly indoctrinating us that we were Chinese and should be proud of our identity as Chinese.”

“But at the same time, I was seeing a lot of negative news about China, including the [banned] Sudan Red food dye, and about the tofu buildings in Sichuan [that led to the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in the 2008 quake],” she said. “It made me realize that ... Hong Kong was different from China.”

(Courtesy Anna Kwok)

“When I was in junior high school, people starting talking about the identity of Hong Kong people, and I realized that Hong Konger was the identity that I could relate to,” she said.

Yet Kwok doesn’t see herself as particularly influenced by Western ideas.

“Western education has had a definite impact on me, but only in the sense that it made us realize that critical thinking is an essential skill for anyone, and that human rights, freedom and democracy are all necessary to work for the sustainable development of society,” she said.

Around the same time, Siu was getting similar information about China from Hong Kong’s still freewheeling press.

“All my knowledge of politics and current affairs came from the few free newspapers I got in the lobby of my apartment building when I was in school,” she said. “I learned that infant formula in China was laced with melamine, and that they cut corners when it came to building.”

“Later, I saw that the Hong Kong government was ignoring ... demands for democracy from its people,” she said. “I’ve known since I was a child that neither the Chinese nor the Hong Kong government is a friend to people of Hong Kong.”

Learning about Tiananmen Massacre

Meanwhile, Hui was glued to a weekend political discussion show that ran live on Radio Television Hong Kong called “City Forum.”

“When I was 10, it was the 20th anniversary of the [1989] Tiananmen massacre, and all the TV stations made anniversary specials, which were a shock to me,” she said. “I never thought there would be such brutal suppression just across the border from Hong Kong, which was still fighting for freedom and democracy, and that some people had lost their lives.”

(Courtesy of Frances Hui)

“Those students [in 1989] were just fighting for the right to vote, and for the freedom that should have been their birthright,” she said. “They weren’t brainwashed to do that; it was just something that it was natural for them to pursue.”

Back then, none of them realized how big a role they would come to play in their city’s history.

Kwok dreamed of becoming an artist and filmmaker, while Siu thought she might like to teach Liberal Studies, and Hui was thinking about journalism, or maybe accountancy.

But the 2014 Umbrella Movement -- protests in which demonstrators used umbrellas to protect themselves -- changed them, without their realizing it at the time.

“Back in 2014 I was studying ... in Norway, and the Umbrella Movement started, and I felt very guilty because a friend of mine got caught in a tear gas attack and I wasn’t even there,” Kwok said. “So I organized a seminar in Norway to tell the outside world about what was happening in Hong Kong.”

“The same thing happened again in 2019, when all of [the protests] were happening ... I was a overseas, so that time I went to a seminar,” she said. “Basically, there was no way I was going to carry on as if nothing was happening.”

Transnational repression

Life as an activist in exile isn’t easy, however.

All three women bemoaned dwindling attendance at overseas protests, as Hong Kongers start to feel the pinch of their government’s “long-arm” law enforcement, in the form of threats to loved ones and financial assets back home.

Sometimes, they wonder if it’s worth it, and whether they should take a break from lobbying to live their lives more fully.

(RFA)

All of them miss Hong Kong terribly, the city’s hustle and bustle, its Cantonese culture, and their friends and family, with whom they have cut off ties for their own protection.

“It’s been four years and two months since I left Hong Kong,” Siu said. “Before I got on the plane ... I was afraid that this would be my final good-bye.”

“When they put out the arrest warrants, I was so sad not to able to celebrate my grandma’s birthday with her, yet I couldn’t call and tell her not to worry about me,” she said.

Yet none of the three women has any regrets about the way things turned out.

“The government is so scared of three young women in their 20s because what we say is right,” Hui said.

Siu added: “Everything we do is done to make Hong Kong a better place.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Ha Syut for RFA Cantonese.

We go to Damascus for an update on the state of affairs in Syria after the surprise collapse of the long-reigning Assad regime, with BBC Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab. She is reporting in Syria for the first time in over a decade, after she was forced to flee the country in 2013. She relays the “sense of freedom and joy” now present on the streets of Damascus, where ordinary Syrians, for the first time in generations, “feel that they are liberated and they are proud of where they are today.” Current estimates put the number of forced disappearances under the Assad government at 300,000 likely tortured in prisons and buried in mass graves. We discuss Syria’s new transitional government, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and whether it can fulfill its promises of inclusion and accountability for all Syrians. “There’s no way for peace and stability to happen in Syria without a prosecution, without a legal system that will hold those who have blood on their hands accountable, for the sake of reconciliation in the country,” says Sinjab.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

More than three years later, the two journalists run the agency from exile in the United States. To get out the news, they rely on the reporting of 15 female journalists hired in 10 provinces to replace the staff who fled. As the Taliban has become increasingly hostile to women journalists and the exile press, the newsroom takes extreme security precautions. Zoom meetings take place with a strict “cameras off” policy so that the women won’t be compromised if they recognize each other on the street.

In June, CPJ interviewed Karimi and Siddiqi in Columbia, Missouri, where they were attending a safety training for journalists in exile at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. During the interview, both men checked their phones often, explaining the importance of remaining available at all times for their reporters.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you describe the atmosphere for the press immediately after the Taliban takeover?

Karimi: When the Taliban took over, our hope collapsed overnight. We were working journalists for eight years before the takeover and we used our journalism against extremist Taliban ideology. Our work aimed to promote democratic values and human rights in our country by creating a newsroom and outlet for female journalists. Eight years of such work was evidence enough for the Taliban to attack us. 

Siddiqi: Social norms in Afghanistan regarding women’s rights are very sensitive and this was the main reason we had to flee. When you are talking about women’s rights in Afghanistan, you are not only facing danger from the Taliban, but also from others in the country who adhere to such radical beliefs.

I remember when we were working in Herat, our office was in a very safe location, but even our neighbors would question why so many women were entering the building. They assumed there was some ethical wrongdoing. Since our work highlighted women’s issues, we were in danger from the Taliban and the pervasive misogyny in the society at large.

The Afghanistan Women’s News Agency is one of just a handful of women-focused outlets covering Afghanistan, like Rukshana Media and Zan Times. What led you to found it in 2016?

Karimi: Siddiqi and I both taught at Herat University. As a professor of journalism, I witnessed my female students struggle and face a lack of resources and opportunities every day. The disparity between them and my male students was blatantly obvious. Lack of access to media equipment, gender inequality in the newsroom, harassment and discrimination was a daily reality for these women.

In light of this, I decided to create a safe environment for my female students to publish their stories, [to] access media equipment and the internet eight years before the Taliban takeover. Although the Taliban was not yet in power, the extremist ideology had already begun to spread rapidly.

Families were understandably concerned when their daughters went to school or the newsroom, but when we established this newsroom solely for women, almost all female journalists across Herat came to work there. As a professor, I had the trust of these women’s families. That’s why I, as a man, was able to set up this space and reassure the families that it was safe.

Part of your staff is in exile, but you still have many female journalists based in Afghanistan. What’s their experience like?

Karimi: All of our female reporters on the ground have to remain anonymous for their safety as per our contract. Their names are never published with their stories. There are currently 15 female journalists working with us, spread across 10 provinces. Some of them are our former interns whom we hired permanently and some of them are currently interns who receive training through Zoom, so that they can be the next generation of female reporters. All of them are actively reporting, even interns, as they learn and are simultaneously paid for their work.

Siddiqi: It’s important to add that our reporters know each other by name only. Our reporters have never met or seen each other’s faces since we require them to turn their cameras off during virtual meetings. We are extremely strict about our security protocols in order to ensure that if one of our reporters faces Taliban retaliation, their colleagues will remain safe. Our reporters know that even a minor mistake can put our whole newsroom in danger.

It is obvious that these women are well aware of the danger that comes with being journalists. Why are they still in the country and choosing to report despite these risks?

Siddiqi: From my understanding and through my conversations with them, there are two main reasons. One, these women are wholly committed to their work. When I am talking with them, I learn that they work more than eight hours a day because they love their job. They all know the impact that they are making in the current environment. Two, financial security is also a huge part of their choice to report. It is rare for women to work and receive salaries in the country under the Taliban. AWNA pays its journalists and this provides them with some level of control and financial independence.

Karimi: These female journalists know that the stakes are very high. Many times I have told them that their security is our priority. We don’t want any report or story that puts their safety at risk, but they still don’t prioritize themselves. They prioritize their reporting. Nobody can stop them from making their voices heard even in the most repressive atmosphere.

What is it like for you when your reporters are so far away while you are in exile?

Karimi: To be honest, I am not comfortable. Sometimes I think something bad has happened to a colleague. Trying to minimize their risk is one of our strategies and biggest challenges. I am very concerned every single day.

Have any of the female journalists working for AWNA had dangerous encounters with the Taliban?

Siddiqi: Just a few days ago, one of our female reporters called me from Kabul while she was attempting to report on a business exhibition. Upon entering the venue, she was detained by the Taliban. In the commotion of a large crowd, she somehow managed to hide herself and escaped without facing arrest.

I called her after that and I reiterated that this cannot be the norm. I told her that we cannot lose her and that without her, there would be no reporting. My colleague replied that she tries her best and knows all the newsroom security protocols. But even for non-political events, this is the risk and the reality for female journalists in the country.

How has reporting from exile shaped your view of the future of the media in Afghanistan? 

Karimi: In my opinion, the lack of free and independent media in the country has created a need for reliable media in exile to combat Taliban propaganda and control. There is a lack of female-run media. We have bypassed the Taliban firewall by providing information from exile to empower people within the country, especially women.

Siddiqi: There are so many Afghan women who are students, photographers, activists, and writers, as well as journalists who can no longer publicize their work on their own channels due to safety concerns. Many of them have found a place in AWNA in order to share their work and add value to the media atmosphere. These are all citizens and female journalists. There are thousands of women who have something to share, journalists by training or not, who are acting as citizen journalists. They have something to show and we are dedicated to uplifting it.

Do you both hope to return to your country if things change?

Siddiqi: I chose to leave my parents, siblings, everything in order to escape the regime.

Life is not easy for me here. I left my memories and emotions in Afghanistan. Everyday these memories disturb me. I was educated and began my career in Afghanistan and I believe I owe my country.

Karimi: Of course I hope to go back to my country. Right now, I feel that I have three lives as an exiled journalist: The first is the life I left behind in Afghanistan, which includes most of my family. Half of my mind and heart remains there. My second life is this one in exile where I am forced to rebuild my personal and professional life from scratch. My third life revolves around how to keep my colleagues safe and to honor their mission as female journalists. I am constantly navigating these three lives and it is a devastating reality.

What is your hope for Afghan women journalists in the future?

Siddiqi: There is no hope bigger than Afghan women having their basic human rights and access to education. If there is no education for women, there is no understanding of their reality and rights. If there is no understanding in a society, there is no justice. If there is no justice, we are no longer in a human society, but in a jungle. The Taliban has shut off all the doors that were once available for Afghan women and together, we are trying to pry them open.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Ananya Bhasin.

We continue to look at the attacks on civil society in Azerbaijan leading up to the COP29 U.N. climate summit. The government’s crackdown has included the arrests of local journalists, including several with the independent outlet Abzas Media. Since November of last year, at least six of their reporters have been arrested on trumped-up charges of smuggling foreign currency into the country. Leyla Mustafayeva, the outlet’s acting editor-in-chief, speaking from Berlin, lays out how there has been a “total crackdown on Azerbaijani media” over the last year.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

At the far end of a quiet garden courtyard in Chiang Mai, home to a small "village" of exiled Chinese writers and intellectuals, is a communal study room with books lining the walls.

Veteran investigative journalist Dai Qing, 83, once one of the Chinese Communist Party's most influential critics, is often there, reading and writing as she enjoys a quiet life of contemplation in Thailand -- as well as working on her forthcoming book, "Notes on History."

Dai, a former reporter for the party's Guangming Daily, was an early and prominent critic of China's flagship Three Gorges Dam project, publishing a book Yangtze! Yangtze! arguing against the move.

She also served time in Beijing's notorious Qincheng Prison for supporting the students during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Now part of a community of exiled Chinese writers and researchers in the northern Thai resort town, Dai spoke to RFA Mandarin -- after her daily swim -- about what led her there:

RFA: Why Chiang Mai?

Dai Qing: I should say that Chiang Mai wasn't actually my choice. I've always lived in big cities, ever since I was a child. When they asked me where I was from, I said I was Chinese. For example, I was born in the wartime capital Chongqing, and later I worked in a Beijing high school. I have always been in big cities. I really don't like big cities, I don't like the bustle and prosperity -- I like the quiet: trees and grass, blue sky and white clouds.

When we set up this courtyard, it was as a small community of friends. We all shared the same values ​​and common hobbies, like reading. We set up a research center and invited people from foreign universities with an interest in China to come. We have so many people here who can talk to them, share our experiences, and they can stay here too.

RFA: How many homes are here?

Dai Qing: Today, there are 31 houses that were designed by [independent writer] Ye Fu. Many of the people here are his friends, and they just sort of came here. It costs less than one-fifth of the price of a place in Beijing, right? But they don't all live here. Some are rented out. Who do they rent to? That's another question. People who are dissatisfied with the Chinese education system, who want to bring their children here to study and enroll in the British education system. We rent houses to them. There are several families like that. You can see that the most lively ones are full of kids.

RFA: Did they come before or after the COVID years?

Dai Qing: Some came before and some came after, so there are basically two groups. The first group is people who are dissatisfied with China's education system and come here to have their children attend school. The second group is Ye Fu, Tang Yun, and Wang Ji, all people who have suffered political discrimination and oppression in China and can't go back.

RFA: So you came here because you were dissatisfied with Chinese politics?

Dai Qing: It's not that simple. It's just that ... before Hu Yaobang's death in 1989, civil society in China hadn't achieved a modern transformation, but it was actually much more relaxed than it is now. We could do a lot of things. Then Hu Yaobang died, and 58 days later, the crackdown continued, until it became what it is today.

RFA: What happened to you in 1989?

Dai Qing: Well, I was a journalist, so of course I was in contact with people from all walks of life. I told [1989 student leader] Chai Ling, do you think that just because you're a good student of Chairman Mao that you can gather a bunch of heroes just by raising your arms, and be a leader? That's not how things are. I kept telling them that they kept resisting and calling for democracy and demanding concessions even though the leaders had already made concessions. I told them it wasn't right. I was trying to bring about peace, and they wound up putting me in Qincheng.

RFA: When you left China, did the police warn you not to give interviews, or make other demands?

Dai Qing: The police actually let me leave in 2023 because I had so many friends and relatives in the United States, and I wanted to go visit them now that my daughter had retired. She retired on her 55th birthday in 2023. I felt that I was in the later stages of my life, and I made an agreement with them that I wouldn't give interviews or take part in activism, and they let me leave. 

Then, when I went to various universities, everyone wanted to talk to me, but it had to be in closed-door meetings. Participants weren't allowed to record audio or take photos or video with their phones. No one was allowed to publicize it. When I got back to Hong Kong and then to Beijing, the police were very happy. As far as they were concerned, I'd stuck to the deal.

Later I asked ... their boss who came to visit me whether he knew what I'd done back in the 1980s. He said they hadn't bothered to research it. But they know now.

RFA: How are you getting along here in Chiang Mai?

Dai Qing: Actually it's a question of "three noes and two don'ts" – that's the way I describe my situation right now. I have no pension, no social security and no medical insurance, which is the “three noes” part. The “two don'ts” are: don't get sick, and don't hire help. I do all of the housework myself.

RFA: Do you still follow what's going on back in China, culturally, economically and politically?

Dai Qing: Not so much. I care in the sense that I want to know what’s going on. For example, the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee was delayed for so long, then it sent out a message about how the private economy and the state-owned economy will be handled. I stay abreast of these things, but I won't be there on the front line any more, pointing out issues and criticizing the government. Not any more. There are a lot of young people who are doing that now. I just plan to stick to what I can do, and take it easy in the time I have left.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Qian Lang for RFA Mandarin.

“If I had not been a refugee, I may be sitting on a high throne in Lhasa, Tibet,” the Tibetan spiritual leader told over 100 Tibetans and other well-wishers gathered at the Dalai Lama Library and Learning Center in Ithaca, New York.

“By coming into exile, I had an opportunity to travel around the world explaining the essence of Buddhism to a wider audience, building a human-to-human connection that has proved to be beneficial and connect with many people globally,” he said.

“People around the world today feel a deep sense of closeness and unity with Tibet and Tibetans,” said the 89-year-old spiritual leader during his first visit to the center that was established by the Namgyal Monastery.

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The center, which opened to the public in September 2023, includes a digital audio archive with 40,000 hours of the Dalai Lama’s teachings, about 4,000 books with translations of ancient texts on the evolution of Buddhist thought, and Buddhist artifacts from India and Tibet.  

Clad in the finest Tibetan attire and holding white silk ceremonial scarves, Tibetans of all ages stood in long rows in the center’s premises to welcome the Dalai Lama.

The roughly 100-strong Tibetan community in Ithaca had spent weeks helping with the preparations at the center. 

“We all took turns to volunteer at the center over the past month, doing everything from gardening to cleaning to hoisting prayer flags and other chores with the intention of making the center as beautiful and as clean and as ready as possible to receive His Holiness,’ said Tenzin Tsokyi, a resident. 

Oneness of humanity

In his address on Friday, the Dalai Lama reaffirmed his commitment to serving the Tibetan people and promoting the Buddhist tradition, and emphasized the importance of preserving their religious and cultural heritage.

“Everyone has done their best, and I encourage you to keep doing so,” he told those gathered at the center. 

“I was born in Amdo and have had good relationships with people since my childhood,” he said. “And now, even as I am aging, I have built relationships with people from all over the world. 

“Under the concept of oneness of humanity, I have received compassion and care from others,” he said. “No matter where I go in the three provinces of Tibet, I never waver in my belief in our shared humanity.” 

The Dalai Lama, who celebrated his 89th birthday last month, has been in the United States since late June for medical treatment.

After undergoing successful knee surgery at a top New York hospital, the Dalai Lama has been recovering and undergoing physical therapy in Syracuse, New York. Dr. David Mayman, chief of the adult reconstruction and joint replacement who performed the surgery, on June 28 said the Dalai Lama was progressing positively. 

On Aug. 22, more than 10,000 Tibetans, Mongolians and people of Himalayan communities based in North America are scheduled to offer a collective long life prayer offering to the Dalai Lama at the UBS Arena in New York. 

The following day, the Dalai Lama is scheduled to depart for India via Switzerland. 

The Dalai Lama arrived in New York on June 23, marking his first visit to the United States in over seven years and his first overseas trip since November 2018. 

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi and Tashi Wangchuk. Edited by Tenzin Pema and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dolkar and Nordhey Dolma for RFA Tibetan.

“Grave injustices are the hallmark of the Taliban’s rule,” CPJ’s Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi said on Wednesday. “The Taliban’s ruthless crackdown has pushed the few remaining media outlets in Afghanistan to the brink. The international community must stand with the Afghan people, and foreign governments should streamline resettlement processes and support journalists in exile so they can continue their work.”

Over the last year, the Taliban have detained at least 16 Afghan and foreign journalists, shut four radio and TV stations, banned a popular London-based broadcaster, and suspended the licenses of 14 media outlets. At least one of the detained journalists was severely beaten.

The Taliban have also banned the broadcast of women’s voices and announced a plan to restrict access to Facebook in Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s intelligence agency, the General Directorate of Intelligence, alongside the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice have been at the forefront of the ongoing media crackdown.

The hostile media environment has driven hundreds of Afghan journalists to flee to neighboring countries where many are stuck in legal limbo, without the right to work or clear prospects of resettlement. At least one Afghan journalist was injured in a shooting in Pakistan.

CPJ’s text messages to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid requesting comment did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

As French police cordoned off major roads outside key venues on Friday evening ahead of the opening ceremony along the River Seine, Liu Feilong and Qian Yun joined the eager crowd.

But instead of cheering, they held up a placard in support of the democratic island of Taiwan, which is targeted by Chinese military incursions on a near-daily basis.

The slogan on the placard was partly aimed at Liu Shaye, China’s outspoken ambassador to France who recently described Taiwan's democratically elected government as "a rebel regime" that could be toppled by China at any time.

"Liu Shaye and the Chinese Communist Party are the real rebel regime," the placard said.

The Chinese government's propaganda machine has kicked into high gear to ensure favorable coverage at this year's Olympics, with Chinese athletes ordered not to talk to journalists not sanctioned by senior officials.

But there is one group of Chinese nationals who sometimes slip through the cracks -- activists and dissidents in exile.

Liu and Qian's protest went largely unnoticed amid the throngs of sports fans on the Parisian streets on the opening night of the Games.

Fleeing persecution in China

But for some activists in exile, who also protested during a visit to Paris by Chinese President Xi Jinping in May, such actions are becoming a way of life.

Two hours earlier, Liu and Qian turned up outside the Chinese embassy in Paris and held up a Chinese national flag, not out of patriotic support for Chinese athletes, but in protest over human rights issues.

On their version of the flag, the group of five gold stars had a black skull scrawled on it.

"I just want to express my hope that the Chinese government will care about human rights," Qian told RFA Mandarin.

Neither Liu nor Qian is a stranger to political persecution in China.

Qian, who fled China in 2021 and is now in his early thirties, was kicked out of junior high school for expressing doubts about the official view of history. He and his family were harassed and targeted by police and local government officials, who labeled him "mentally ill" in 2014, putting him at risk of detention at any time.

He called on the Chinese government to "stop engaging in this kind of persecution." 

"The way they labeled me as mentally ill was too casual," said Qian, who cited the 2018 case of Dong Yaoqiong, forcibly detained in a psychiatric facility in the central province of Hunan after she splashed black ink over a poster of Xi Jinping for a social media video protest.

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‘Long-arm’ law enforcement

Liu, who hails from the southern province of Guangdong and wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Guangdong Youth" in Chinese and English, said he also left China in 2021, in the hope of living in greater freedom in the Netherlands.

"Freedom that different voices and different political views are expressed, free from fear, and without having to worry about being held accountable or investigated," he said.

But even in a free country, some risks remain, with overseas dissidents and activists frequently reporting surveillance and harassment by supporters and agents of the Chinese state, even on foreign soil.

In May, a close associate of Liu's had first-hand experience of Beijing's "long-arm" law enforcement methods.

"[Fellow activist] Chen Kui and I protested against Xi Jinping's visit to Paris," he said. "The next day, state security police in China paid a visit to his friends and relatives and threatened them."

Similar treatment was meted out to another overseas activist known by his nickname Jiang Bu, said Liu, adding that he himself has cut off all contact with his folks back home in a bid to protect them.

"The Chinese government really fears this sort of opposition voice," he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wang Yun for RFA Mandarin and Fong Tak Ho for RFA Cantonese.

Nieves, editor of the independent news site El Toque, believes that the message came from agents of Cuban state security because he previously received other threatening messages from “Mabel” and “Franco,” the names used by police officers who interrogated him while he was still in Cuba, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. El Toque is a leading news website covering Cuba, and has angered authorities for its coverage of protest movements and the country’s economic struggles.

“The recent threats made against El Toque editor José Jasán Nieves Cárdenas are troubling,” said CPJ U.S., Canada, and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “It is vital that U.S. authorities ensure that Nieves can work in exile without concern for his safety and thoroughly investigate the source of the threats against him.”

Nieves told CPJ he filed a complaint with the FBI on July 2. The FBI did not immediately respond to CPJ’s email requesting comment on the complaint.  

The threat came as Cuban authorities sought to suppress reporting related to commemorative events ahead of the anniversary of the July 11, 2021 anti-government protests in Cuba.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

The two men co-founded the YouTube-based channel Ethio News in 2020, which had reported extensively on a conflict that broke out between federal forces and the Fano militia in the populous Amhara region in April 2023, a risky move in a country with a history of stifling independent reporting.  

Belay was swept up in a crackdown against the press after the government declared a state of emergency in August 2023 in response to the conflict.

After months in hiding, Belete decided to flee when he heard from a relative that the government had issued a warrant for his arrest. CPJ was unable to confirm whether such an order was issued.

“Freedom of expression in Ethiopia has not only died; it has been buried,” Belete said in his March 15 farewell post on Facebook. “Leaving behind a colleague in a desert detention facility, as well as one’s family and country, to seek asylum, is immensely painful.” (Belaye and others have been released this month after the state of emergency expired.)

Belete’s path into exile is one that has been trod by dozens of other Ethiopian journalists who have been forced to flee harassment and persecution in a country where the government has long maintained a firm grip on the media. Over the decades, CPJ has documented waves of repression and exile tied to reporting on events like protests after the 2005 parliamentary election and censorship of independent media and bloggers ahead of the 2015 vote.

In 2018, the Ethiopian press enjoyed a short-lived honeymoon when all previously detained journalists were released and hundreds of websites unblocked after Abiy Ahmed became prime minister.

But with the 2020 to 2022 civil war between rebels from the Tigray region and the federal government, followed by the Amhara conflict in 2023, CPJ has documented a rapid return to a harsh media environment, characterized by arbitrary detentions and the expulsion of international journalists.

CPJ is aware of at least 54 Ethiopian journalists and media workers who have gone into exile since 2020, and has provided at least 30 of them with emergency assistance. Most of the journalists fled to neighboring African countries, while a few are in Europe and North America. In May and June 2024, CPJ spoke to some of these exiled journalists about their experiences. Most asked CPJ not to reveal how they escaped Ethiopia or their whereabouts and some spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fears for their safety or that of family left behind.

CPJ’s request for comment to government spokesperson Legesse Tulu via messaging app and an email to the office of the prime minister did not receive any response.

Under ‘house arrest’ due to death threats

Guyo Wariyo, a journalist with the satellite broadcaster Oromia Media Network was detained for several weeks in 2020 as the government sought to quell protests over the killing of ethnic Oromo singer Hachalu Hundessa. Authorities sought to link the musician’s assassination with Guyo’s interview with him the previous week, which included questions about the singer’s political opinions.

Following his release, Guyo wanted to get out of the country but leaving was not easy. Guyo said that the first three times he went to Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport, National Intelligence and Security Service agents refused to let him board, saying his name was on a government list of individuals barred from leaving Ethiopia.

Guyo eventually left in late 2020. But, more than three years later, he still feels unsafe.

In exile, Guyo says he has received several death threats from individuals that he believes are affiliated with the Ethiopian government, via social media as well as local and international phone numbers. One of the callers even named the neighborhood where he lives. 

“I can describe my situation as ‘house arrest,’” said Guyo, who rarely goes out or speaks to friends and family back home in case their conversations are monitored.

Transnational repression is a growing risk globally. Ethiopia has long reached across borders to seize refugees and asylum seekers in neighboring Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, and South Sudan, and targeted those further afield, including with spyware.

Journalists who spoke to CPJ said they fear transnational repression, citing the 2023 forcible return of The Voice of Amhara’s Gobeze Sisay from Djibouti to face terrorism charges. He remains in prison, awaiting trial and a potential death penalty.

“We know historically that Ethiopian intelligence have been active in East Africa and there is a history of fleeing people being attacked here in Kenya,” Nduko o’Matigere, Head of Africa Region at PEN International, the global writers’ association that advocates for freedom of expression, told CPJ.

Several of the journalists exiled in Africa told CPJ that they did not feel their host countries could protect them from Ethiopian security agents.

“The shadow of fear and threat is always present,” said one reporter, describing the brief period he lived in East Africa before resettling in the United States.

‘We became very scared’

Woldegiorgis Ghebrehiwet Teklay felt at risk in Kenya, after he fled there in December 2020 following the arrest of a colleague at the now-defunct Awlo Media Center.

As with Guyo, Woldegiorgis’s initial attempt to leave via Addis Ababa failed. Airport security personnel questioned him about his work and ethnicity and accused him of betraying his country with his journalism, before ordering him to return home, to wait for about a week amid investigations.

When Woldegiorgis finally reached the Kenyan capital, he partnered with other exiled Ethiopian journalists to set up Axumite Media. But between November 2021 and February 2022, Axumite was forced to slow down its operations, reducing the frequency of publication and visibility of its journalists as it was hit by financial and security concerns, especially after two men abducted an Ethiopian businessman from his car during Nairobi’s evening rush hour.

“It might be a coincidence but after that  businessman was abducted on the street we became very scared,” said Woldegiorgis who moved to Germany the following year on a scholarship for at-risk academics and relaunched the outlet as Yabele Media.

‘An enemy of the state’

Tesfa-Alem Tekle was reporting for the Nairobi-based Nation Media Group when he had to flee in 2022, after being detained for nearly three months on suspicion of having links with Tigrayan rebels.

He kept contributing to the Nation Media Group’s The EastAfrican weekly newspaper in exile until 2023, when a death threat was slipped under his door.

“Stop disseminating in the media messages which humiliate and tarnish our country and our government’s image,” said the threat, written in Amharic, which CPJ reviewed. “If you continue being an enemy of the state, we warn you for the last time that a once-and-for-all action will be taken against you.”

Tesfa-Alem moved houses, reported the threat to the police, and hoped he would soon be offered safety in another country. But more than two years after going to exile, he remains in limbo, waiting to hear the outcome of his application for resettlement.

Last year, only 158,700 refugees worldwide were resettled in third countries, representing just a fraction of the need, according to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR; that included 2,289 Ethiopians, said UNHCR global spokesperson Olga Sarrado Mur in an email to CPJ. The need is only growing: “UNHCR estimates that almost 3 million refugees will be in need of resettlement in 2025, including over 8,600 originating from Ethiopia,” Sarrado Mur said. 

“Unfortunately, there are very limited resettlement places available worldwide, besides being a life-saving intervention for at-risk refugees,” said Sarrado Mur.

Without a stable source of income, Tesfa-Alem said he was living “in terrible conditions,” with months of overdue rent.

“Stress, lack of freedom of movement, and economic reasons: all these lead me to depression and even considering returning home to face the consequences,” he said, voicing a frustration shared by all of the journalists that spoke to CPJ about the complexities and delays they encountered navigating the asylum system.

‘No Ethiopian security services will knock on my door’

Most of the journalists who spoke to CPJ described great difficulties in returning to journalism. A lucky few have succeeded.

Yayesew Shimelis, founder of the YouTube channel Ethio Forum whose reporting was critical of the Ethiopian government, was arrested multiple times between 2019 and 2022.

In 2021, he was detained for 58 days, one of a dozen journalists and media workers held incommunicado at Awash Sebat, another remote military camp in Ethiopia’s Afar state. The following year, he was abducted by people who broke into his house, blindfolded him, and held him in an unknown location for 11 days.

“My only two options were living in my beloved country without working my beloved job; or leaving my beloved country and working my beloved job,” he told CPJ. 

At Addis Ababa airport in 2023, he said he was interrogated for two hours about his destination and the purpose of his trip. He told officials he was attending a wedding and promised to be back in two weeks. When his flight took off, Yayesaw was overwhelmed with relief and sadness to be “suddenly losing my country.”

“I was crying, literally crying, when the plane took off,” he told CPJ. “People on the plane thought I was going to a funeral.”

In exile, Yayesew feels “free”. He continues to run Ethio Forum and even published a book about Prime Minister Abiy earlier this year.

“Now I am 100% sure that no Ethiopian security services will knock on my door the morning after I publish a critical report,” he said.

But for Belete, only three months on from his escape, such peace remains a distant dream.

He struggles to afford food and rent and worries who he can trust.

“When I left my country, although I was expecting challenges, I was not prepared for how tough it would be,” he told CPJ.

Belete says it’s difficult to report on Ethiopia from abroad and that sometimes he must choose between doing the work he loves and making a living.

“I find myself in a state of profound uncertainty about my future,” said Belete. “I am caught between the aspiration to pursue my journalism career and the necessity of leading an ordinary life to secure my livelihood”.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Africa Program Staff.

On Thursday, May 16, officers with the Belarusian State Security Committee, or KGB, and representatives of the Ministry of Taxes and Duties sealed the apartment of exiled freelance journalist Zmitser Kazakevich after breaking down the door in the northeastern city of Vitebsk, according to media reports and Kazakevich, who spoke to CPJ and Radio Svaboda, the Belarusian service of U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

On Friday, law enforcement officers in the capital, Minsk, searched the apartment of Barys Haretski, the deputy head of the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), in connection to an unspecified criminal case, according to BAJ and Haretski, who spoke to CPJ. It is unclear whether officers seized anything in the apartment, as Haretski left Belarus in 2021 and had no belongings there.

BAJ is an exiled advocacy and trade group that documents press freedom violations and provides support for Belarusian journalists.

“After stifling independent media inside the country, the Belarusian authorities will stop at nothing to put pressure on exiled journalists like Zmitser Kazakevich and on those like Barys Haretski who defend repressed members of the press,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Authorities should immediately reveal any charges filed against Haretski and Kazakevich and stop harassing independent media both inside and outside the country.”

Kazakevich told Radio Svaboda he did not know whether the apartment was searched and that law enforcement officials asked his neighbors if anyone lived in the apartment a day before the raid. The journalist told CPJ he did not know what charges he faced or when they were filed.

“I consider the break-in and sealing of my house in Belarus as revenge. This is an invitation to be executed, which I decline,” Kazakevich told CPJ.

Authorities previously searched Kazakevich’s apartment three times between 2020 and 2021, he told CPJ, including in July 2021. Kazakevich, a freelance journalist who covered the 2020 protests against the disputed reelection of Aleksandr Lukashenko, has been fined and detained in connection to his work and left Belarus in 2021, he told CPJ.

Authorities labeled BAJ as “extremist” in February 2023. Belarusian authorities have obstructed BAJ’s work, raided its offices, and, in 2021, dissolved the organization, prompting its staff to leave the country.

“Searches and criminal proceedings against journalists who have left the country are aimed at intimidating media representatives in general,” Haretski told CPJ. “Authorities cannot influence the independent media, which work from abroad, but they keep reminding them: we are watching you, your every action, every content is monitored. Thus, the authorities force even journalists who have left Belarus to be in fear, to feel persecution and attention of the special services.”

Belarusian authorities recently initiated criminal proceedings against several exiled journalists, according to multiple media reports and BAJ. CPJ is working to determine whether their prosecution is connected to their journalism.

“Independent media still effectively deliver their materials to the audience in Belarus,” Haretski said. “Undoubtedly, this causes anger of the authorities, and they try to pressure people using the means available to them.”

CPJ emailed the Belarusian Investigative Committee, the KGB, and the Ministry of Taxes and Duties for comment but did not receive any response.

Belarus was the world’s third worst jailer of journalists, with at least 28 journalists behind bars on December 1, 2023, when CPJ conducted its most recent prison census.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Jetsun Pema, 84, received the Pearl S. Buck Award, with a medallion and a cash prize of US$25,000, from Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, on Thursday.

Pema, revered by Tibetans as “Amala,” or “Respected Mother,” has built one of the most successful Tibetan educational institutions abroad — the Tibetan Children's Villages, or TCV. The nonprofit organization cares for and educates orphaned, destitute and refugee children from Tibet. Its main facility is in Dharamsala in northern India. 

She is the first Tibetan to receive the award given to women who exemplify the ideals, values and commitments of writer and novelist Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature and a champion of women’s and children’s rights. 

“We had some amazing nominations, and when the nominations for Jetsun Pema came through, it just felt like this is [someone] who exemplifies Pearl Buck and her commitments to people of Asia and the children, and her commitment to education,” college president Sue Ott Rowlands told Radio Free Asia.

Pema was also the first woman elected to a ministerial post in the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, serving as minister for education.

Officially recognized by the Tibetan parliament-in-exile as the “Mother of Tibet,” Pema worked at TCV for over five decades.

She served as president of TCV from 1964 to 2006 and was instrumental in leading the expansion of schools across India and in caring for and educating over 53,000 Tibetan children who had escaped Tibet and were separated from their families, or who were orphaned or from underprivileged families.

After she retired in August 2006, Pema continued to work on various children’s education projects, including the Dalai Lama Institute for Higher Education in Bangalore, India.

“This award acknowledges the efforts of not only myself but everyone who has contributed to this cause, starting from my late elder sister along with many others who have dedicated their lives to the education of Tibetan children,” Pema told RFA Tibetan in an interview. 

Illustrious list

Previous award winners include former Irish President Mary Robinson, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, former First Lady of Egypt Jehan Sadat, former Philippines President Corazon Aquino, U.S. architect, designer and sculptor Maya Lin, and American author Maxine Hong Kingston.

Pema said she would donate her award money to TCV.

“The education we have given to our young people has benefited them greatly and has empowered them … and that is encouraging,” Pema said, addressing a gathering of several hundred people, including former students and Tibetans who had traveled from other parts of the country to be at the award ceremony.

At the event, Pema spoke about the mandate she received from the Dalai Lama to ensure Tibetan children received a good education and care when she took over the work initiated by her late sister, Tsering Dolma Takla. 

Takla, the elder sister of the Dalai Lama, first volunteered in May 1960 to care for over 50 Tibetan children whose parents were working in road construction camps in north India, creating a nursery home for them, which later expanded into a series of over 15 TCV schools across India under Pema’s leadership.

Pema has received several global honors, including the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child in Sweden in 2006, the Maria Montessori Award in Italy in 2010, and a UNESCO Medal in 1999. 

She also received the esteemed Nari Shakti Puraskar award in 2018 from the Indian government, which recognizes women or institutions dedicated to advancing women’s empowerment. 

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi with additional reporting by Passang Dhonden for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan, and by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dorjee Damdul for RFA Tibetan.

PRISTINA -- Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti says he will not suspend a move by the central bank to ban the circulation of the Serbian dinar in parts of the country with Serbian majorities but will accept the forming of an Association of Serb-Majority Municipalities once Belgrade agrees to sign a basic agreement on bilateral relations.

The basic agreement for the normalization of relations with Serbia was reached in February 2023, and includes the formation of the association, which is expected to more adequately represent predominantly ethnic Serb areas in Kosovo.

Kosovo is not a member of the European Union or its common currency area, the eurozone, but it unilaterally adopted the euro in 2002 to help bring monetary stability and to simplify and reduce transaction costs inside and outside the country.

Serbia, which has never acknowledged its former province's 2008 declaration of independence, still pays many ethnic Serbs at institutions in Serb-dominated parts of Kosovo in dinars. Many also hold their pensions and get child allowances in dinars.

"Regarding the Serbian-dinar-versus-euro issue, it is Kosovo's central bank that decides and they have already decided on December 27 last year," Kurti told RFE/RL's Balkan Service in an interview on March 19, arguing that the ban, which came into force on February 1, was meant to fight financial crime and terrorism.

"We have, thanks to them, a new regulation that is going to enhance the integrity of the financial system to fight illicit activities financing terrorism," Kurti said in Pristina on the same day top Serbian and Kosovar negotiators were holding bilateral meeting in Brussels with EU special envoy Miroslav Lajcak.

The Serbian dinar ban was reported to be high on the agenda, although no joint trilateral meeting has been confirmed so far.

The ban ratcheted up already high tensions between Serbia and Kosovo and threatened to scupper efforts by Washington and Brussels to get the dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade back on track.

"The dinar is not banned in Kosovo, but the euro is the only means of payment," Kurti told RFE/RL, echoing the central bank's line that the ban doesn’t stop anyone from accepting money from any country, it just means the money is converted into euros.

Still, the conversion adds a layer of cost and complication to the daily lives of ethnic Serbs still tied to the dinar.

"We cannot allow bagfuls of dinars in cash to enter our country. (It can happen) only through official financial channels with full transparency, who sends money to whom and for what purpose," Kurti said, adding that any disparities on the ground would have time to be smoothed out over the three-month transition period.

"Serbia can send dinars, we will exchange them into euros and Serbs in Kosovo can benefit from that financial aid," Kurti added.

However, the U.S. envoy to the Western Balkans last week warned that the ban had caused problems for some citizens in the region and challenges for the U.S.-Kosovo relationship.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Gabriel Escobar told RFE/RL on March 14 that Kosovo's controversial decision on the dinar was "an issue that we need to address immediately."

Escobar said that the issue had presented challenges in the bilateral relationship, although Washington remains Kosovo's most reliable ally.

The U.S. envoy also said that his proposals for resolving the issue had been rejected by Kurti during their meeting.

"It's not me as prime minister to decide about this thing," Kurti told RFE/RL when asked about why he refused Escobar's solutions.

"We're a democracy where powers and duties are separated. Therefore, I can only help the central bank to affect a smooth transition," Kurti said, declining to elaborate on Escobar's proposals.

"Let those who made the proposals speak," he added, reiterating that he cannot cancel the decision of an independent institution.

"No suspension will come out of talking to me, because the bank is an independent institution," he said, adding that its governor reports only to parliament, not the government.

Asked whether he would at least advise the bank to extend the transition period, Kurti replied: "I cannot also advise the central bank of Kosovo. The governor has his own advisers."

Referring to the basic agreement, Kurti said it was Belgrade that was hampering its implementation.

"I want the normalization of relations and I think that the signing of the basic agreement and its implementation annex can certainly cancel previous violations on one hand and, on the other hand can bring legal certainty for the future.

"The problem is that eight out of 11 articles of the basic agreement have been violated by Belgrade," Kurti said, mentioning a letter sent by Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic to the European Union, in which, according to him, her government said they were withdrawing their pledge to the deal "because they will never recognize independence of Kosovo, never accept Kosovo's membership in the United Nations, and likewise they are not going to respect the territorial integrity of our country."

Referring to the forming of the Association of Serb-Majority Municipalities, which is mentioned in Article 7 of the basic agreement, Kurti reiterated his government's statement from October 27, which blamed Serbia for refusing to sign the document endorsed by the leaders of France, Italy, and Germany.

"What more can I do? We are leaders who are supposed to turn the text that we have agreed upon into signed agreements. Obviously, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic initially said yes to the agreement without intending to sign it and then regretted saying yes, as Mrs. Brnabic's letter explained," Kurti said.

"I believe that whoever mentions an association of Serbian-majority municipalities outside the basic agreement or before it serving Serbia's quest to turn Kosovo into Bosnia," he said, adding that such an association has to be established withing the framework of the Kosovar Constitution.

"In Brussels I said one cannot serve coffee without a cup. If you ask for coffee without a cup, I will show you an empty cup. The cup is the Republic of Kosovo. What is the legal framework of the association? Is it the constitution of the Republic of Kosova or that of Serbia? If I'm there, it's the constitution of the Republic of Kosovo. No coffee without a cup.

"This is crucial to understand. Belgrade wants to put the cart before the horses. It's not possible. There will be no movement as we have seen since February and March last year," he said, adding that he was ready to go to Brussels again together with Vucic.

Referring to the frustration voiced by the United States and the European Union because of the lack of progress toward the Serbian dinar and the municipalities association, Kurti said that while they are indispensable partners, sometimes differences may arise.

"I consider United States an indispensable ally, friend, and partner. But this does not mean that we have an identical stance toward official Belgrade. As the prime minister of Kosovo, I cannot regard Belgrade through the eyes of the State Department...they do not see Belgrade as I see them. We do not have an identical stance. We have a different experience and history," Kurti said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

But those applying for jobs under it face a daunting maze of paperwork, often leading to the murky world of bribes and brokers. For many, the costs and difficulties involved in legal entry push them towards illicit paths into Thailand. 

And when the promises of employment agencies fall through, it’s not Myanmar’s military who step up to resolve the issues, but it is rather Thai labor officials and labor advocacy organizations who step in to untangle the complications, working in conjunction with the National Unity Government, or NUG, Myanmar’s civilian government-in-exile.

Despite a lack of recognition, the NUG has also set up and operated systems to record Myanmar workers’ complaints in three Asian countries that employ high numbers of Myanmar workers. 

In Thailand alone, where there are now as many as 7 million Myanmar nationals, NUG’s Ministry of Labor handles roughly 10 cases a month and up to 200 cases per year. 

Its main functions in Thailand are receiving worker complaints and ensuring regional Thai labor offices take action, and most cases occur when workers are laid off before their contract ends, or when they’re denied compensation, according to the ministry. 

“We liaise with the Thai labor parliamentarian team and then ask them to work with us to support the Burmese migrant workers,” said Naing Htun Oo, head of NUG’s Overseas Labor Department in Thailand, who declined to use this real name for fear of retaliation.

“When we receive a complaint, we inform them that there is a problem with the Burmese migrant workers,” he told Radio Free Asia. 

He added that some employers and employment agencies are eager to resolve the issue and don’t want it taken to higher Thai authorities, but others simply don’t acknowledge the communication they receive from his office. 

“On one hand, the [employment] agencies are not taking responsibility, on the other hand, we haven’t got the legal or entity status in Thailand. It’s very, very challenging.”

Limited capacity

Despite its efforts, the NUG has struggled to establish a strong presence in Thailand’s foreign policy arena, and Naing Htun Oo lamented that the lack of formal recognition has significantly hindered the government in exile’s ability to operate effectively.

He explains that this limitation forces them to spend substantial funds unnecessarily in aiding Burmese migrant workers, often struggling to support large numbers simultaneously.

Surachanee Sriyai, a visiting fellow from the Yusof Ishak Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, notes that with Thailand’s primary interests in border security and oil and gas already addressed in dealings with junta officials and groups at the border, it leaves the NUG with a relatively minor role on the ground. 

She added, however, with the transition to Thailand’s Pheu Thai Party, there is potential to include Myanmar’s non-junta actors in future track 1.5 or track two diplomacy.

“It’s almost as if the NUG is filling in on the supplementary capacity, working in the aspects that the junta do not care for,” she said. “That’s also overall good for the Burmese workers, for sure. But is that good enough for the NUG?”

Safety risks 

The NUG isn’t seeking a foothold in Thailand alone. As Myanmar nationals are regularly sent to other East and Southeast Asian countries for jobs, the government is also working to establish a presence in Malaysia and South Korea. 

But a more pronounced role can come with serious risks. While the NUG’s Ministry of Labor told RFA their colleagues stationed in South Korea were safely able to establish a secure office in the country, their counterparts elsewhere have not fared.

Thuzar Maung served as the NUG’s Overseas Labor officer in Malaysia until her disappearance in July. 

A committed democracy and labor activist residing in Malaysia since 2015, Thuzar Maung, her husband, and their three children were reportedly abducted following confirmation from Malaysian police about a vehicle with counterfeit police license plates leaving their residence.

This incident has led to a palpable sense of caution within the NUG. Since Thuzar Maung’s abduction, the NUG has not appointed a successor for her. 

The situation is not that different for Naing Htun Oo in Thailand. He said despite the volume of workers he assists year-round, he’s received threats from Myanmar embassy staff appointed by the junta. 

“When I receive the complaints from the Burmese migrant workers, even though I’m working and supporting them, I never show my face, I never tell them about my name,” he said. 

Despite these daunting circumstances, the department remains committed to supporting Burmese workers in any possible way, continuously exploring avenues to assist them in-country. 

“We are trying any possible thing to support the Burmese migrant workers in any shape or form that we can,” Naing Htun Oo added.

Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Special for RFA.

The 44-year-old journalist with the independent broadcaster Radio Télé Zip said he was shot at by two armed men on motorbikes who tried to block the road as he was driving home on September 29 in the Croix-des-Bouquets suburb on the northern outskirts of the city.

He believed the assailants were gang members and told CPJ he was later contacted by a member of the feared Mawozo 400 gang, who demanded payment of $1,700 as “protection money.”

Dorvil went into hiding but says he was attacked again on October 9 by half a dozen armed men while he was trying to visit his home.

“They tried to kidnap me. They hit the car and told me to get out. I refused,” he told CPJ in a phone call. He said one of the men fired a bullet through his windshield before he was able to get away.

Both incidents were reported to the police and the local judiciary visited the scene of the crime to speak to Dorvil, according to documents provided by Dorvil.

A witness, Wilmare Etienne, who is Dorvil’s brother-in-law, also provided a notarized statement in which he said that government collusion with the armed gangs had created a “general state of fear” that left Dorvil no option but to leave the country. “There is no guarantee of safety for anyone doing their job as a journalist in Haiti; their life is always in great danger,” Etienne added.

On November 7, Dorvil left the country and sent his family to live with relatives in another part of Haiti. “I can’t go back to Haiti right now. I’ll be killed if they find me,” he told CPJ.

For the last two years, armed gangs have taken control of large parts of the capital, including Croix-des-Bouquets, terrorizing the population with impunity after police and judicial authorities were forced to abandon their posts. In several cases, journalists have been swept up in the gang violence. At least six journalists were killed in Haiti in connection with their work in 2022 and 2023, placing Haiti as the third-worst country on CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index.

In Dorvil’s case, it was not clear whether the attacks were related to his journalism. While his reporting occasionally involved criticism of the gangs, he was never directly threatened because of his coverage.

Dorvil said he began receiving threats from the Mawozo 400 in late 2022 while carrying out construction on his house. “The gangs think journalists are rich and they demand money as a tax on people who live in the neighborhoods under their control,” said Dorvil, who previously worked as a press officer for the Ministry of Public Health. “They need the money to buy guns and pay their members,” he added.

The head of the Mawozo 400 gang, Joseph Wilson, alias Lanmò San Jou, is wanted by the FBI for his alleged role in the kidnapping of a group of Christian missionaries from the U.S. and Canada in October 2021.

Dorvil provided CPJ with a handwritten letter he received from the gang leader in late 2022, accompanied by two bullets. In it, Wilson informed Dorvil that he knew where he lived, and that he and his family would be killed if he did not pay the money.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

He flew straight to Germany, from where he told Radio Free Asia this week he wished to “escape an unjust prison sentence and be reunited with my wife.”

Truyen’s release came just two days before Joe Biden visited Hanoi for talks with senior leaders during which the U.S. president said he repeatedly raised the issue of human rights.

Truyen, 55, was arrested along with many key members of the Brotherhood for Democracy in 2017 on charges of ‘activities aimed at overthrowing the government’ under Article 79 of the penal code.

He told RFA Vietnamese his belief in human dignity and universal human rights sustained him during the six years he spent in prison.

“Most prisoners – especially political prisoners – are deprived of the rights of suspects, defendants and detainees. There are also many legal provisions that are not compatible with the standards in international treaties that Vietnam has joined or signed,” he said.

“Therefore, during my time in detention, I made many petitions demanding improvements in the prison regime through amending laws related to detention currently in effect in Vietnam.”

Truyen said he never did anything to try to overthrow the government and is just a simple human rights activist.

“During my trials I did not see the court present evidence to overthrow the Vietnamese government, but only activities to improve human rights and democracy in Vietnam. The result was a wrongful verdict for all those on trial,” he said.

RFA asked him how he felt about being forced into exile while other activists continued the fight for human rights in Vietnam.

“I value freedom. Being released and living somewhere other than my homeland, Vietnam, is something no one wants, but this is an option to escape an unjust prison sentence and allow me to reunite with my wife,” he said.

“Integrating into a second homeland and adapting to new things in life is something I have to do in the near future.”

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

“We are committed to the media within our cultural frameworks. Private media can continue to be free and independent. They can continue their activities,” Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said at the first news conference two days after the fall of Kabul on August 15, 2021.

Two years later, the Taliban not only has reneged on that pledge, but intensified its crackdown on what was once a vibrant media landscape in Afghanistan.

Here is a look of what happened to Afghan media and journalists since the 2021 takeover:

What is the state of media freedom in Afghanistan?

Since the fall of Kabul, the Taliban have escalated a crackdown on the media in Afghanistan. CPJ has extensively documented cases of censorship, assaults, arbitrary arrests, home searches, and restrictions on female journalists in a bid to muzzle independent reporting.

Despite their public pledge to allow journalists to work freely, Taliban operatives and officials from the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) – the Taliban’s intelligence agency – have assaulted, arbitrarily arrested and detained journalists, while shutting down local news outlets and banning broadcasts of a number of international media from inside the country. Foreign correspondents face visa restrictions to return to Afghanistan to report.

Journalists continue to be arrested for their job. Since August 2021, at least 64 journalists have been detained in Afghanistan in retaliation for their work, according to CPJ’s research. They include Mortaza Behboudi, a co-founder of the independent news site Guiti News, who has been held since January.

Afghan journalists have fled in huge numbers, mostly to neighboring countries like Pakistan and Iran. Many who left are now stuck in legal limbo without clear prospects of resettlement to a third country, and their visas are running out, prompting fears they could be arrested and deported back to Afghanistan.

What trends have emerged in the last two years?

The Taliban have not ceased their efforts to stifle independent reporting, with the GDI emerging as the main driving force behind the crackdown. The few glimmers of hope that CPJ noted in its 2022 special report on Afghanistan’s media crisis are dimming as independent organizations like Ariana News and TOLO News face both political and economic pressures and Taliban intelligence operatives detained at least three journalists they claimed were reporting for Afghan media in exile.

The Taliban are also broadening their target to take aim at social media platforms, enforcing new regulations targeting YouTube channels this year while officials mull a ban on Facebook.

A clampdown on social media would further tighten the space for millions of Afghans to freely access information. The rapid deterioration of the media landscape has led to some Afghan YouTubers taking on the role of citizen journalists, covering issues from politics to everyday lives on their channels.

Meanwhile, the Taliban are seeking to end their international isolation. In recent weeks, they have sent a delegation to Indonesia and held talks with officials from the United States as the group tried to shore up the country’s ailing economy and struggle with one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. with more than half of its 41 million population relying on aid to survive.

A worsening media repression, however, is pushing Afghanistan deeper into isolation from the world, hurting its economy and people’s livelihoods, as CPJ’s Beh Lih Yi writes in an op-ed for Nikkei Asia.

What is CPJ hearing from Afghan journalists?

Even two years after the fall of Kabul, we hear from Afghan journalists on a near-daily basis – both from those who remain inside the country and those who are in exile – on the hostile environment they are facing.

Afghanistan remains one of the top countries for CPJ’s exile support and assistance to journalists. Since 2021, Afghan journalists have become among the largest share of exiled journalists getting support each year from CPJ, and contributed to a jump of 227 percent in CPJ’s overall exile support for journalists during a three-year period from 2020-2022. The support they received included immigration support letters and grants for necessities like rent and food.

We also increasingly received reports from exiled Afghan journalists who were being targeted in immigration-related cases. Afghan journalists who have sought refuge in Pakistan told us they have been arrested and extorted for overstaying their visas, and many are living in hiding and in fear.

What does CPJ recommend to end the Taliban’s media crackdown and help Afghan journalists forced into exile?

There are several actions we can take. Top of the list is to continue urging the international community to pressure the Taliban to respect the rights of the Afghan people and allow the country to return to a democratic path, including by allowing a free press.

The global community and international organizations should use political and diplomatic influence – including travel bans and targeted sanctions – to pressure the Taliban to end their media repression and allow journalists to freely report without fear of reprisal.

Foreign governments should streamline visa and broader resettlement processes, and support exiled journalists in continuing their work, while collaborating with appropriate agencies to extend humanitarian and technical assistance to journalists who remain in Afghanistan.

CPJ is also working with other rights groups to advocate for the implementation of recommendations that include those in its 2022 special report on Afghanistan’s media crisis. (Read CPJ’s complete list of 2022 recommendations here.)  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Beh Lih Yi.

On Tuesday, July 25, Boscán, co-founder of La Posta, and Velásquez, his wife and a journalist with the social media-based outlet, left the country shortly after publishing a report on corruption and drug trafficking allegations involving the brother-in-law of President Guillermo Lasso and members of the Albanian mafia, according to news reports.

In a statement to CPJ, Boscán said that officials with a European intelligence agency contacted La Posta about “a plan of attack” against the outlet’s founders orchestrated by the Albanian mafia. The statement said La Posta’s reporters had also obtained audio files that featured a local Ecuadorian businessman speaking to a member of the Albanian mafia about targeting Boscán in an unspecified attack.

“Ecuadorian authorities must thoroughly investigate the threats against journalists Andersson Boscán and Mónica Velásquez, and ensure they can return to the country safely,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator. “It is outrageous that journalists are fleeing Ecuador amid such widespread threats in response to their work.”

In his statement, Boscán said that Ecuadorian police were aware of the threats made in that recording, but said “they didn’t alert us to the risk we were running.”

“La Posta will continue to do its job, confident that this country deserves the truth and free journalism,” the statement said.

CPJ contacted Ecuadorian Communications Secretary Wendy Reyes for comment via messaging app but did not immediately receive any reply. The outlet’s report said that the president’s brother-in-law did not comment on La Posta’s investigation.

Earlier this year, Ecuadorian journalist Karol Noroña left the country after receiving death threats, and in March, five bombs were mailed to journalists throughout the country, injuring one.

In June, CPJ published a Ecuador on edge, a report examining how political turmoil and a deepening security crisis have put reporters and press freedom at increasing risk.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On Tuesday, July 25, two unidentified men with Cuban accents threatened Jiménez as he was walking home with his two-year-old son in Barcelona, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Jiménez, who also posted about the encounter on Twitter, said that the men shouted at him, “Abraham, we know you are close to your home.” The journalist was not able to see their faces but said he could hear them laughing as they walked away from him and his son. 

“I was so afraid because I was with my son that I didn’t know what to do,” he told CPJ. He wrote on Twitter that the scene reminded him of his life in Cuba. 

Jiménez is a freelance Afro-Cuban journalist, co-founder of the online narrative journalism magazine El Estornudo, and a columnist for The Washington Post. 

He left Cuba in September 2021 following persistent harassment from authorities in retaliation for his critical coverage, and received CPJ’s 2022 International Press Freedom Award for being a prominent outspoken voice within Cuba’s media community. 

“We are concerned by the threatening comments made to Cuban journalist Abraham Jiménez Enoa,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator. “Spanish authorities must conduct a thorough investigation into the threats against Jiménez and his family and make sure they remain safe. It is incumbent upon Spain and other European Union countries to ensure the safety of journalists who are facing threats within their borders.”   

The journalist told CPJ that he did not report the threat to the police because he did not know who his aggressors were. CPJ emailed the Barcelona police for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

Jiménez told CPJ that this was not the first time he has been threatened by individuals with Cuban accents. In March 2022, during a panel in Amsterdam, one Cuban man asked to speak from the audience and tried to discredit him, claiming that everything he said was a lie. 

“When the panel was over, he sought me out and offended me until the event organizers got him off my back,” he said. In June 2023 during Madrid’s Book Fair, a man with a Cuban accent also followed and photographed him.

In October 2020, Cuban authorities detained and interrogated Jiménez over his work. Shortly thereafter, he published a column in The Washington Post titled “If this is my last column here, it’s because I’ve been imprisoned in Cuba,” where he described his interrogation.

More recently, Jiménez has written about racism he has experienced while living in Europe, and also about efforts the Cuban government made to strengthen its national baseball team.

Jiménez was the winner of the 2023 Michael Jacobs Traveling Writing Grant, and was also chosen as one of five young journalists to receive the One Young World award this year. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

In another example of China’s attempts at “long-arm” law enforcement beyond its borders, officials have been calling him from the Cyberspace Administration, the regular police and the state security police.

"Hey everyone, it's Crazy Zhang here – it's been mad the amount of people who have been calling me on the phone in the past few days," Zhang Gong said in a video statement via his Twitter account.

"They have been demanding that I delete all of my music from Twitter, and to delete my Twitter account," Zhang said. "When I asked them why, they said my music is having a negative impact."

"When I asked them on whom, they said they didn't know, but that there was a directive that came down from the central government calling on them to contact me immediately and to demand that I delete everything."

Police warned him that they would begin criminal proceedings if he failed to comply.

But Zhang told Radio Free Asia that he will continue to publish his music on social media despite the threats from officials back home.

Meanwhile, Zhang's wife – who is still in China – has had all of her social media accounts shut down.

"My wife called me last night and said that all of her social media accounts were shut down within a second of each other – WeChat, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, everything," Zhang said.

"She doesn't even have a phone number any more."

‘Wrapped in foam and ice’

The calls started after Zhang posted a video of himself performing a song he wrote during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown, when millions of people were barricaded into their homes and neighborhoods as part of Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy, subjected to daily compulsory testing, and hauled off en masse to out-of-town quarantine camps in the middle of the night.

"In a city of 1.4 billion people, the voices of despair rise and fall," the song, titled "Seven Storey Pagoda" in a reference to the preciousness of human life, goes.

"I see children, bodies wrapped in foam and ice," Zhang sings. 

"I hear cries of help from people trying not to die in a fire," he sings, in an apparent reference to the fatal lockdown fire in Xinjiang's regional capital Urumqi that sparked mass "white paper" protests across China that eventually brought an end to the restrictions of the zero-COVID policy.

"How many human lives are trapped behind ... the iron sheets they just welded into place this afternoon?"

The song also takes aim at official propaganda around Xi's experience of hardship as a younger man.

"He shouldered 200 pounds of wheat for 10 miles through the mountains, yet he wants to lead 1.4 billion to their deaths," Zhang sings.

"If we don't fight, then death is inevitable," the song goes.

‘Locked down’

Zhang also took aim via Twitter at the crackdown on the “white paper” movement, commenting: 

“In the 1960's, a villager accidentally dropped a picture of [China’s leader] on the ground and was beaten to death for it ...... In 2022, a brave young woman held up a blank piece of paper, and her whereabouts are unknown to this day!”

In an earlier protest song, Zhang sings in his trademark husky voice about how everything has been locked down.

"They've locked down the hills, locked down the rivers, locked down the sky and sun," the song, titled "Surrounded" goes.

"Locked down the sheep and cattle, the harvests and grain silos, the cities and the countryside," he sings.

Zhang, 30, told Radio Free Asia that his lyrics only criticized the government indirectly.

"I wrote these lyrics about what's currently going on in China, and maybe I touched on some of [the government's] sore points, but I didn't go all out and name anybody," he said. "People can figure that out for themselves."

Zhang hails from the central province of Henan, then grew up in the eastern province of Shandong, where he majored in classical guitar.

He recently joined the "run movement," an ongoing exodus of Chinese nationals fed up with the excesses of the zero-COVID policy and the economic stagnation that followed in its wake.

"There were so many tragic things happening around me every day, and so much injustice happening to people," Zhang said. "I'm a pretty emotional person, and I kept thinking that this could happen to me at any time, anywhere, and to my family."

"Things have been totally hopeless [in China] in the past few years," he said.

Zhang has now arrived in the United States, where he has applied for political asylum.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

The city's legislature – which has been packed with pro-Beijing members since changes to the electoral system that saw chief executive John Lee "win" an election in which he was the only candidate – voted unanimously last week to slash the number of directly elected seats on District Council from 452 to just 88.

The move comes amid an ongoing crackdown on public dissent and political opposition in Hong Kong, and after millions of voters in Hong Kong delivered a stunning rebuke to Beijing and their own government with a landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates across the city's 18 district councils at the height of the 2019 protest movement.

Lee welcomed the changes to the District Council election rules, which will also ensure that pro-democracy candidates won't be able to run in the next election.

"We must ... completely exclude those anti-China and destabilizing forces from the District Councils," Lee said in a July 8 statement. "This legislative exercise [will] ensure that the District Councils are firmly in the hands of patriots."

Lee said the government is looking for candidates who are "capable, experienced, with relevant skill sets suited to the needs of the districts, and patriotic," although the government has yet to set a date for the district election.

Under the new rules, which took effect on Monday, candidates will have to pass a national security background check and secure at least three nominations from several committees loyal to the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.

More than 20 former District Council members in exile have called on the international community to withdraw official recognition of Hong Kong's Legislative and District Councils, which no longer "legally represent the people of Hong Kong."

Elections for show

The joint letter authored by former Shek Tong Tsui district councilor Sam Yip, who fled the ongoing crackdown to live in Japan, said that the latest legislation has sounded the death knell for any kind of democracy in Hong Kong.

"Under the framework of the Hong Kong government's so-called 'patriots governing Hong Kong' policy, candidates must show their loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party before they can run for election," Yip said. "[They have to] go to these pro-government people to get nominated."

Former Legislative Council member and former District Council member Ted Hui, who is among eight prominent overseas activists wanted by national security police for "collusion with foreign forces," said he, Yip and the other signatories to the letter were "the last democratically elected district councilors."

"Maybe we would never get through the government's review process ... but the public opinion we represented still exists," Hui said. "We may scatter all over the world, but we still want to serve the people of Hong Kong."

"You have to pass the qualification review [examining your loyalty to Beijing] and a political review process," Kwok said. "It's a high threshold."

"The motivation is clear -- it's to cling to the principle that only patriots can rule Hong Kong, and eliminate any of the voices of the so-called 'anti-China chaotic elements' in Hong Kong," he said.

2020 National Security Law

Kwok said it's important to amplify these changes to the rest of the world.

"Many Western democracies may not have a timely understanding of the situation," he said. "Nobody has yet formally discussed the changes to the electoral rules for the Legislative Council and District Council at the United Nations Human Rights Council."

"We have to keep on speaking out and keep the issue alive in the international community," he said.

"This severely weakens the ability of the people of Hong Kong to choose representatives overlooking district affairs," it said, noting that the decision follows the imposition of a draconian national security law on Hong Kong from July 2020.

"These developments raise serious questions about the state of fundamental freedoms, democracy and political pluralism in Hong Kong that were supposed to remain protected until at least 2047 under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 and China’s international commitments," it said.

The Hong Kong government "vehemently rejected" the EU statement and said the bloc was "interfering in Hong Kong matters, which are purely China's internal affairs."

It said there was no mention of democratically elected district councilors in the handover treaty or Hong Kong's mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

It said the elected component under the new rules would still be larger than it was under British rule during the 1980s.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Paul Eckert.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

Mohammad knows firsthand the challenges of exile. In 2019, he made a new life in Spain after fleeing the Syrian civil war with CPJ’s help, and has continued to cover his country from abroad while learning Spanish. “Being forced to leave your country is one of the most difficult moments in life,” he told CPJ in a 2021 interview. But journalists “have a major role to play” in helping the world understand the countries they left.

Mohammad’s story is hardly unique. In 2020, CPJ issued assistance to journalists in exile 63 times, in the form of immigration support letters and grants for necessities like rent and food. Throughout 2022, CPJ provided help 206 times, an increase of 227% over the three-year period.

The spike in support underscores the growing number of journalists fleeing their home countries, and the growing need for assistance. This year to date, CPJ has provided help 71 times to exiled journalists. Journalists from Afghanistan, Iran, and Nicaragua make up the largest shares. (This data solely reflects direct assistance to journalists from CPJ’s Emergencies team, and not other ways the organization supports those in exile through advocacy and other means.)

The total number of journalists in exile is unknown. Some have crossed a border to a neighboring country, and others have traveled thousands of miles. Over the past three years, CPJ has helped journalists who have relocated from Cuba to Spain, from Ethiopia to Kenya, from Myanmar to Thailand, and from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Brazil, France, and Canada. Each journey reflect’s an individual’s life upended; considered together, they show how press freedom’s global decline contributes to the increasing number of people forced to flee their home countries. As the number of exiled journalists grows, viable pathways to safety remain difficult for many to access.

Journalists have unique reasons for leaving their countries. Members of the press hold people in power to account. They have public profiles. When subjects don’t want to be covered, they can make life difficult and dangerous for journalists and their families; politics and corruption are particularly risky beats. Some journalists flee to escape imprisonment or the threat of physical attacks; others worry that they will be killed if they stay.  

To mark World Refugee Day on June 20, here are three takeaways from CPJ’s work with exiled journalists.

1. Journalists are being driven out of countries where press freedom is under attack

While historically people have been driven into exile by wars, many of the journalists CPJ has supported in recent years were forced out not due to armed conflict but because of specific attacks on the press. Prior to the Taliban takeover, CPJ received few exile support requests from Afghan journalists. But since 2021, Afghan journalists fleeing the Taliban’s repressive regime, under which journalists have been beaten and jailed, have represented the largest share of exiled journalists receiving support each year.

CPJ has also helped journalists from Nicaragua, where the government of President Daniel Ortega has engaged in systematic attacks on freedom of expression, forcing out journalists and media workers as part of a mass deportation of political prisoners to the United States in February. Iranian journalists make up another large share of CPJ exile support; the country was listed as the world’s worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s 2022 prison census, amid a crackdown on anti-state protests.

CPJ has also supported journalists from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Venezuela, all places that have seen serious erosions in press freedom.

CPJ has also provided aid to journalists fleeing conflict zones like Iraq and Syria. More than 100 journalists escaped the Syrian civil war with CPJ’s help between 2011 and 2015.

2. Journalists who go into exile need more reliable pathways to safety

Journalists forced to make the stark choice between continuing to report in dangerous environments or leaving home must often decide quickly. In Afghanistan, journalists were sometimes told they had hours to gather precious belongings, pack their bags, and leave their country behind. When a journalist does make the leap, few mechanisms exist to support them.

Members of the press often wait months or even years for visas; in some cases, they are forced to remain in the very country where their lives are imperiled. Other times, journalists move abroad but get stuck in bureaucratic limbo, unable to leave, see their families, or work. Sometimes, journalists who have faced charges or have a criminal history in their home country due to their work face difficulties at international borders, or when applying for asylum or visas.

Emergency visas would allow journalists to quickly and safely relocate, and CPJ has long advocated for their wider availability. In May, the Estonian government heeded the call, announcing a program that will provide 35 emergency visas to journalists each year. A number of other countries, including Canada, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Germany have also taken concrete steps to providing safe refuge for journalists. More countries should follow suit.

Until they do, options for help are limited. The vast majority of journalists who go into exile are often left to navigate and engage with complex immigration bureaucracies on their own, a daunting and arduous process. CPJ has written hundreds of letters of support for journalists to include in immigration applications; these letters typically explain why it’s too dangerous for a journalist to return to their home country. CPJ provided dozens of these letters for Afghan journalists alone over the past two years, underscoring the severe need for assistance in navigating immigration bureaucracies.

3. Exile is a press freedom issue

When a journalist is forced into exile, journalism suffers. Many journalists cease reporting when they relocate, and readers, viewers, and listeners are robbed of the information they need to make informed decisions about their lives.

Challenges persist even for those who find a way to keep reporting from exile. Setting up newsrooms and re-establishing oneself as a journalist in another country can be a costly, confusing process. The very threats and attacks that caused journalists to flee may also follow them into their new country, and the overlapping stressors put a strain on journalists’ mental health. Iranian journalists in particular remain vulnerable in exile. In some cases, like that of exiled Bangladeshi journalist Kanak Sarwar, authorities target a journalist’s family members after the individual has left the country.  

Supporting journalists in exile — whether through direct financial assistance, advocating for safe refuge, or shining a light on their stories to help the public to understand why they needed to flee — remains a crucial focus of CPJ’s work. Exile should be a last resort. But it’s still a chance for freedom, which journalists need to survive and tell the stories that shape our world.

“Maybe you expect I’d complain about exile, but I’m satisfied here because this is my choice,” Iranian blogger and editor Arash Sigarchi, who fled to the United States in 2008, told CPJ that year. “I had two options: one, to stay in Iran and be in prison under torture, and two, to be in exile.”

Data and map by CPJ Emergencies Administrator Anastasia Tkach

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Lucy Westcott.

• I am aware of the digital risks that I face

• I have turned on two-factor authentication for my accounts

• I have the backup codes for each account

• I know how to create a secure password 

• I am using different secure passwords for each account 

• I have a way to store and use my passwords safely 

• I am aware of the steps I need to take to protect myself against phishing

• I have carried out a search of my online data and have taken steps to remove any personal information that I do not want in the public domain

• I know the best and most secure way for me to communicate with others back in my country of origin

• I have spoken with my sources and others about the importance of deleting conversations and other sources of information from their phones in case they are arrested

• I know what personal data is available online regarding my web domain

• I have backed up the content of my website or I have created a mirror of the site

• My site is protected from DDoS attacks

If you need assistance, journalists should contact CPJ via emergencies@cpj.org.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

General guidance

• Journalists should research the tech capacity of those that they feel threatened by. To do this, you can look up the name of the person, group, or authority targeting you alongside keywords, such as spyware, phishing attacks, surveillance, and hacking.

• Know the laws and regulations of the countries you are traveling to or through with regards to encryption and the use of pirated software. Read CPJ’s guide on border crossings and digital safety for more information.

• Stay up to date with the latest news on technology, especially in the region you are from and the region you are now living in. Sign up to tech newsletters which are often put out by major news outlets. Look for news on hacking, changes to laws around surveillance or encryption, as well as developments in business related to technology.

• If you need to visit a government website to look at information and/or download documents and you do not want their website to register your internet protocol (IP) address, use a virtual private network (VPN). This will mask your IP address, including your location data.

Keeping accounts safe from hacking attempts

Journalists may be targeted by hacking attempts on their accounts by governments, government supporters, and others. This may be to obtain information held in the accounts, to use the accounts to publish erroneous information, or to lock journalists out of their accounts. The guidance below explains how best to protect yourself.

Two-factor authentication (2FA)

The best way to secure accounts from being hacked is to turn on 2FA. This is an extra layer of security that takes the form of a code sent to your phone via an app or via SMS. To log into your account you will need your email address, your password, and then the code. Turning on 2FA will prevent others from accessing your account unless they have access to the code.

• All major online services now offer 2FA and you should turn it on for all your accounts, not just email and social media. 

• Use an app like Authy as your form of 2FA. Download the app onto your phones and follow the instructions to set it up. Then go to the online account you want to secure, for example your Gmail account. Go to the settings section of the account, and then to privacy and security, and add two-factor authentication. Choose the app option and follow the instructions to link the app to the account. 

• You won’t be prompted for a code each time you log in, rather only if you sign in from a different device. The service may request the 2FA code from time to time to ensure that the service is working. 

• Each online service that offers 2FA should also offer the option to save a backup code or backup codes. This is a one-time code that you can use should you lose access to your form of 2FA and are unable to log into your account. 

• If you are from a country where the government has a history of orchestrated and successful hacking attacks against journalists, including journalists in exile, then you should consider using a security key as your form of 2FA. This is a device that you insert into your phone or laptop in order to access your account. Examples of keys include Yubikey and Google Titan.

• Consider signing up for Google’s Advanced Protection scheme. This program is designed for journalists and human rights defenders and offers extra protection for your Google services. You will need to have security keys in order to use this service. 

Creating secure passwords

• A secure password is a long password, more than 15 characters. The longer the password, the more difficult it is for an algorithm to crack or for someone to guess.

• A password can be a mixture of numbers, symbols, and letters or a collection of words that have no relation to each other, known as a passphrase. An example of a passphrase is elephanticecreamswimmingtelephone. Passphrases are often easier to remember.

• Do not use personal information, such as your date of birth or pet’s name in your password. This is information about you that can easily be found online and can be used to guess your password.

• Do not reuse passwords on accounts. You should use a different password for each online account. This is because if you use the same password for an online service, for example a food delivery service, as you do for your email account and the online service is hacked, your password will be available online for criminals and others to look at and/or buy. They will then also have the password to your email account.

• Remembering passwords can be challenging. Use a password manager, such as 1Password to create, store, and autofill passwords on websites. You will not have to remember all your passwords, but you will have to create a strong password for your password manager and remember it. If you are not at risk in your home, do not travel frequently, and are not at risk of arrest and detention, then you may want to write your passwords down and keep them somewhere safe. This is safer than using short passwords or reusing passwords.  

Protecting against phishing and spear phishing

Phishing is when you are sent a generic message asking you to do something urgently; for example, to click on a link or download a document. Spear phishing is when the attacker studies the person they want to phish and tailors a message specifically for them. Both these types of messages can be sent via SMS, email, messaging apps, and social media, and the objective is to infect your device with malware.

• Think before clicking on links or downloading documents. Try to verify who has sent you the information. Check to see if this information is available elsewhere, for example on a website.

• Preview attachments in email by using the preview button available in most email services. Alternatively, upload the document to the cloud account linked to the email. This will allow you to view the document but it will not be downloaded onto your device.

• Review the link and check to see if it looks legitimate. To do this, hover your cursor over the link until it fully displays. Do not click on it. Check that the link includes information that matches the sender. For example, if the link comes from a company, it should contain data about the company, such as the name. 

• Be aware that links and documents shared in group chats that have many participants may be attempts to infect users with malware.

• Use a password manager. A password manager will only fill out your passwords on a legitimate website, for example a Gmail login page. It will not fill out your passwords on fake sites designed to steal your account passwords.

Learn more about protecting yourself against phishing with CPJ’s Digital Safety Kit.

Protecting your online personal data

The data you and others put online about yourself can give away information about your location, routine, and can be used to harass you and your family. Take the following steps to be more secure.

• Look yourself up online using all search engines and make a note of anything you feel uncomfortable having in the public domain. You may want to look up family members as well, as they could also be targeted.

• Ideally any data that can be used to locate you, contact you via a means you do not want, or any information that can be used to commit identity theft against you, such as your date of birth, should be kept offline.

• Take steps to remove your personal data online. This could include deleting or hiding content on your own social media accounts as well as on the accounts of others. Review data held in third-party platforms, for example a public database, and see if you are able to remove it.

• Think about what data you share online about yourself and others who may be in exile with you. Be mindful about posting photos and information that could give away your location. This can include tagging locations or sharing images of notable landmarks in the area you are staying in.

• Better protect your location by turning off location data for apps and online services where it is not needed.

For more information on how to protect your data online please read CPJ’s guide to online abuse and protecting personal data.

Communicating with others in your country of origin

Communicating with people, including sources, back in your country of origin could put both them and you at risk. Follow the guidance below to ensure your communications are secure as possible.

• Consider that the person you want to speak to might be under surveillance or may be at risk of arrest and detention. Things to think about include whether their devices are infected with spyware, whether their home phone number is tapped, whether they are under physical surveillance, or whether they will be detained and their devices searched.

• Think about whether you may be targeted by digital surveillance. This can include being subjected to high-level phishing attacks with the aim of infecting your devices with spyware. Research whether your government has a history of using spyware against journalists especially when they are outside of their country of origin.

• Think about what you want to speak about. The more sensitive the conversation, the greater the risk to the person in the country as well as to yourself.

• Use end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Signal, to communicate with others. All content sent via those apps is encrypted, which means it cannot be intercepted. The content is also stored in encrypted form on the server of the company, which means it cannot be legally requested by a government.

• Follow best practices for securing your messaging apps and for communicating with others; for example, by turning on disappearing messages.

• Ensure that the people you speak with back in your country do not store conversations or content shared with you on their phone in case they are detained and their devices are searched. Encourage them to regularly delete content from their phones.

• Be aware that any contact with others that is not encrypted can potentially be accessed by others, including governments and mobile phone providers.

• If you are a journalist in exile from a country where the government has a history of carrying out physical threats outside of their own jurisdiction, then think carefully about what details you are giving away during a conversation. Be cautious about sharing details about your location, daily routine, and people you spend time with.

• Be aware that if you or the person you are speaking with has spyware on their phone, then all forms of communications can be accessed, including calls and messages, even if you are using an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, such as Signal or WhatsApp. This is because the device itself is compromised.

• Users of Apple devices with iOS 16 or devices using the company’s latest software, including phones, laptops, iPads, and the Apple watch, can better protect themselves from spyware by turning on Lockdown Mode. Learn more about how to better protect yourself against spyware in CPJ’s Pegasus spyware safety advisory.

• For those working with sensitive sources, learn more about how to best protect them in CPJ’s guide to better protecting confidential sources.

For more information on securing encrypted messaging apps and for working with sources to manage content on phones, see CPJ’s guide to encrypted communications.

Protecting your website

If you run your own online website or blog and have concerns that it could be targeted by hacking attempts or taken offline, then the following steps will help you best secure it.

• Regularly back up the content on the site in case it is targeted and data is lost. There are two ways to do this. If you are using a hosted service, such as WordPress, export your pages, comments, and posts into a single XML file. Be aware that this will not backup images. The second way to backup content is to create a mirror of the site. You can read more about creating mirrored sites in this guide by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). 

• Ensure that you follow good account security practices for your website, including using a password manager and turning on 2FA. See the section above on keeping accounts safe for more information.

• If you own a web domain, the personal data you used to register the site as well as other details, such as the hosting provider, are likely to be available for others to view online. You can check this by using a service like Whois Look Up. If your details are publicly available, then you should contact the domain service to see if they are able to remove this data. There may be a fee for doing so.

• Protect yoursite from a DDoS attack by registering it with a service such as Project Shield.

• Ensure that your contact management system (CMS) and any plugins that you use on your site are updated regularly.

• Consider whether you want comments enabled on your site. If you do allow comments, it is better to moderate these in advance of them being posted. This will reduce spam as well as offensive commentary. If you feel unable to moderate those comments yourself, it can be helpful to have a colleague or trusted person do so.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Chinese Embassy representatives met with press club chief Maurice Reily last week and voiced their opposition to Penpa Tsering’s scheduled appearance on June 20, requesting that his invitation be revoked.

China has controlled Tibet since it invaded the region in 1949, and rejects any notion of a Tibetan government-in-exile, particularly the legitimacy of the Dalai Lama, who lives in Dharamsala, India. Beijing has also stepped up efforts to erode Tibetan culture, language and religion. 

Speeches given at the National Press Club are broadcast on Australian TV and attended by prominent members of the press, so Beijing may be worried about the wider exposure Penpa Tsering would get..

“China expresses strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to Australia, in disregard of China’s position and concern, allowing him to use the NPC platform to engage in separatist activities,” the newspaper quoted a letter from the embassy to Reily as saying.

“The Chinese side urges the Australian side to see through the nature of the Dalai clique, respect China’s core interests and major concerns, and take concrete actions to remove the negative effects so as to prevent the disruption of the sound development of China-Australia relations and media co-operation.”

Free Speech

Despite Beijing’s pressure, Reilly told local media that there were no plans to cancel the appearance, and tickets remain on sale on the website of the press club. 

He said he told the Chinese Embassy officials that the press club was “an institution for free speech, free media and public debate.”

The National Press Club is a stage where everyone is allowed to share their views, Kyinzom Dhongdue, a human rights activist and a former member of the Tibetan parliament in exile, told Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan Service.

“We all know how China has worked to build its influence and dependence through trade and economic ties with Australia,” she said. “In the last decade we have seen Australia's top educational institution cancel a talk by the Dalai Lama, apparently due to pressure from China. But this time, putting pressure on the National Press Club is unimaginable because the National Press Club stands for Freedom of Speech.”

Karma Singey, the representative for the Dalai Lama in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, said Australia would not cave to Chinese influence.

“Australia is a democratic country so we are confident that Australia will not let the Chinese government expand its influence and undermine Australian institutions,” he said.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Yangdon Demo and Lobsang Gelek for RFA Tibetan.

On April 13, Thai, an independent journalist who posts political commentary on YouTube and has about 119,000 followers, went missing in Bangkok, Thailand, according to multiple news reports.

He had lived in Thailand as a refugee since 2020 and visited the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ office hours before his disappearance, according to those reports and Nguyen Van Hai, a colleague familiar with Thai’s situation and CPJ’s 2013 International Press Freedom Award winner, who communicated with CPJ via email.

On April 16, Vietnamese state media reported that Thai had been arrested while allegedly trying to enter Vietnam and was being held by police in the Huong Son district of central Ha Tinh province.

“Vietnamese authorities must immediately release journalist Duong Van Thai and disclose the exact details of his detention,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Vietnam has a history of targeting journalists living in exile. Thai authorities should thoroughly and transparently investigate the circumstances of his disappearance in Bangkok, and ensure that members of the press are not targeted for their work.”

Those Vietnamese state media reports alleged that Thai was arrested while attempting to illegally enter Vietnam on April 14. CPJ called and emailed Thai after his arrest was announced but did not receive any replies.

On his YouTube channel, Thai recently aired commentary critical of Vietnam’s industrial policy, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, and the country’s finance minister.

In 2019, Vietnamese blogger Truong Duy Nhat was abducted in Thailand; he resurfaced in Vietnam days later and was subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison. Two of Nhat’s associates, who spoke with CPJ on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, said they suspected that he was abducted by Vietnamese agents working in cooperation with Thai authorities. Nhat was seeking refugee status in Thailand at the time of his disappearance.

CPJ emailed Thailand’s Immigration Police and Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security for comment on Thai’s status but did not immediately receive any replies.

Vietnam was one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists, with at least 21 behind bars, when CPJ conducted its annual prison census on December 1, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

As Iranians both inside Iran and in the diaspora organize against the Islamic Republic, a bipartisan collection of over 160 members of the U.S. Congress this week put forward a resolution endorsing an exiled opposition group with a past of hard-line militancy that has been credibly accused of cult-like behavior.

On Thursday, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., held a congressional briefing to introduce House Resolution 100, with the expressed aim of lending support to Iranians protesting for “a democratic, secular, and nonnuclear Republic of Iran.” The introductory speaker at the session was Maryam Rajavi, the head of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian exile group previously listed as a terrorist organization that has been accused of brainwashing and sexual abuse of its members.

“It is no exaggeration to say that perhaps nothing unites Iranians of today than opposition to the MEK and their agenda.”

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

The University of the South Pacific’s vice-chancellor and president, Professor Pal Ahluwalia, was given a rousing welcome at Nadi International Airport today returning to Fiji from exile.

He returned two years after he and wife Sandra Price were detained and deported by the former FijiFirst government for allegedly breaching provisions of the Immigration Act.

“We have arrived in Nadi. What a fabulous reception. USP staff, students and so many well wishers to meet us fills out hearts with joy. Beautiful singing and prayer. Thank you Fiji,” he wrote on Twitter, as the couple were received by USP deputy vice-chancellors and vice-presidents, Professor Jito Vanualailai and Dr Giulio Paunga.

• READ MORE: Professor thrilled over USP return – Fiji to pay $90m university debt
• Other USP saga reports

USP Council Secretariat representative Totivi Bokini-Ratu, Lautoka campus director Pramila Devi, and representatives from the USP Students Association, USP Staff Association and Association of the USP Staff were also at the airport to greet Professor Ahluwalia.

“I’m so humbled to see everyone. It is an absolute joy to be back and an opportunity for us to continue serving USP,” he said in a statement.

We have arrived in Nadi. What a fabulous reception. USP Staff, Students and so many well wishers to meet us fills our hearts with joy. Beautiful singing and prayers. Thank you Fiji.

— Professor Pal Ahluwalia, USP VC (@pal_vcp) February 9, 2023

“The support from staff, students and regional governments has just been incredible.

“It was so beautiful to see how much our staff fought. The fight wasn’t just for me; it was for a bigger cause and I’m just a catalyst for the bigger change they wanted to see.”

Next step for students
Professor Ahluwalia said the next step was to work with his senior management team to ensure they got the best out of their students and the region.

He is expected to visit the USP Pacific TAFE Centre in Namaka and Lautoka campus today with other events and meetings scheduled for the coming week, including a launch of the Alumni Relationship Management Service, and the welcoming of international students.

Professor Ahluwalia and his wife’s controversial exile from Fiji followed months of increased tensions between USP and the previous government over allegations of financial mismanagement and corruption.

With the new People’s Alliance-led coalition government in power after ousting the FijiFirst administration in the 2022 general election, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has vowed to right the wrongs of the past administration.

Last December, he declared that Professor Ahluwalia and Dr Padma Lal, widow of another exiled academic, the late Professor Brij Lal, were free to enter the country.

“I am ready to meet Dr Lal and Professor Ahluwalia personally. I will apologise on behalf of the people of Fiji for the way they were treated,” Rabuka had said.

Working from Samoa
He said prohibition orders against Professor Ahluwalia, Dr Lal and the late Professor Lal, were “unreasonable and inhumane”, and “should never have been made”.

Professor Ahluwalia has been working out of USP’s Samoa campus since 2021, and said he looked forward to working with the coalition government to strengthen the relationship between USP and Fiji.

“As a regional institution, USP will continue to serve its island countries — particularly Fiji — and work hard to shape Pacific futures,” Professor Ahluwalia said.

Meanwhile, USP and the Fijian government are expected to conduct a joint traditional welcome ceremony for Professor Ahluwalia, followed by a thanksgiving service at the Japan-Pacific ICT Multipurpose Theatre, Laucala campus next Tuesday.

Geraldine Panapasa is editor-in-chief of the University of the South Pacific’s journalism newspaper and website Wansolwara News. Republished in collaboration with the USP journalism programme.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Phil Thornton

In the two years since Myanmar’s military seized power from the country’s elected lawmakers it has waged a war of terror against its citizens — members of the Civil Disobedience Movement, artists, poets, actors, politicians, health workers, student leaders, public servants, workers, and journalists.

The military-appointed State Administration Council amended laws to punish anyone critical of its illegal coup or the military. International standards of freedoms — speech, expression, assembly, and association were “criminalised”.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), reported as of 30 January 2023, the military killed 2901 people and arrested another 17,492 (of which 282 were children), with 13,719 people still in detention.

One hundred and forty three people have been sentenced to death and four have been executed since the military’s coup on 1 February 2021. Of those arrested, 176 were journalists and as many as 62 are still in jail or police detention.

The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Myanmar as the world’s second-highest jailers of journalists. Fear of attacks, harassment, intimidation, censorship, detainment, and threats of assassination for their reporting has driven journalists and media workers underground or to try to reach safety in neighbouring countries.

Journalist Ye Htun Oo has been arrested, tortured, received death threats, and is now forced to seek safety outside of Myanmar. Ye Htun spoke to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) of his torture, jailing and why he felt he had no choice, but to leave Myanmar for the insecurity of a journalist in exile.

They came for me in the morning
“I started as a journalist in 2007 but quit after two years because of the difficulty of working under the military. I continued to work, writing stories and poetry. In 2009 I restarted work as a freelance video and documentary maker.”

Ye Htu said making money from journalism in Myanmar had never been easy.

“I was lucky if I made 300,000 kyat a month (about NZ$460) — it was a lot of work, writing, editing, interviewing and filming.”

Ye Htun’s hands, fingers and thin frame twist and turn as he takes time to return to the darkness of the early morning when woken by police and military knocking on his front door.

“It was 2 am, the morning of 9 October 2021. We were all asleep. The knocking on the door was firm but gentle. I opened the door. Men from the police and the military’s special media investigation unit stood there — no uniforms. They’d come to arrest me.”

Ye Htun links the visit of the police and army to his friend’s arrest the day before.

“He had my number on his phone and when questioned told them I was a journalist. I hadn’t written anything for a while. The only reason they arrested me was because I was identified as a journalist — it was enough for them. The military unit has a list of journalists who they want to control, arrest, jail or contain.”

Ye Htun explains how easy it is for journalists to be arrested.

“When they arrest people…if they find a reference to a journalist or a phone number it’s enough to put you on their list.”

After the coup, Ye Htun continued to report.

“I was not being paid, moving around, staying in different places, following the protests. I was taking photos. I took a photo of citizens arresting police and it was published. This causes problems for the people in the photo. It also caused some people to regard me and journalists as informers — we were now in a hard place, not knowing what or who we could photograph. I decided to stop reporting and made the decision to move home. That’s when they came and arrested me.”

In the early morning before sunrise, the police and military removed Ye Htun from his home and family and took him to a detention cell inside a military barracks.

“They took all my equipment — computer, cameras, phone, and hard disks. The men who arrested and took me to the barracks left and others took over. Their tone changed. I was accused of being a PDF (People’s Defence Force militia).

“Ye Htun describes how the ‘politeness’ of his captors soon evaporated, and the danger soon became a brutal reality. They started to beat me with kicks, fists, sticks and rubber batons. They just kept beating me, no questions. I was put in foot chains — ankle braces.”

The beating of Ye Htun would continue for 25 days and the uncertainty and hurt still shows in his eyes, as he drags up the details he’s now determined to share.

“I was interrogated by an army captain who ordered me to show all my articles — there was little to show. They made me kneel on small stones and beat me on the body — never the head as they said, ‘they needed it intact for me to answer their questions’”.

Ye Htun explained it wasn’t just his assigned interrogators who beat or tortured him.

“Drunk soldiers came regularly to spit, insult or threaten me with their guns or knives.”

Scared, feared for his life
Ye Htun is quick to acknowledge he was scared and feared for his life.

“I was terrified. No one knew where I was. I knew my family would be worried. Everyone knows of people being arrested and then their dead, broken bodies, missing vital organs, being returned to grieving families.”

After 25 days of torture, Ye Htun was transferred to a police jail.

“They accused me of sending messages they had ‘faked’ and placed on my phone. I was sentenced to two years jail on 3rd November — I had no lawyer, no representative.”

Ye Htun spoke to political prisoners during his time in jail and concluded many were behind bars on false charges.

“Most political prisoners are there because of fake accusations. There’s no proper rule of law — the military has turned the whole country into a prison.”

Ye Htun served over a year and five months of his sentence and was one of six journalists released in an amnesty from Pyay Jail on 4 January 2023.

Not finished torturing
Any respite Ye Htun or his family received from his release was short-lived, as it became apparent the military was not yet finished torturing him. He was forced to sign a declaration that if he was rearrested he would be expected to serve his existing sentence plus any new ones, and he received death threats.

Soon after his release, the threats to his family were made.

“I was messaged on Facebook and on other social media apps. The messages said, ‘don’t go out alone…keep your family and wife away from us…’ their treats continued every two or three days.”

Ye Htun and his family have good cause to be concerned about the threats made against them. Several pro-military militias have openly declared on social media their intention against those opposed to the military’s control of the country.

A pro-military militia, Thwe Thauk Apwe (Blood Brothers), specialise in violent killings designed to terrorise.

Frontier Magazine reported in May 2022 that Thwe Thauk Apwe had murdered 14 members of the National League of Democracy political party in two weeks. The militia uses social media to boast of its gruesome killings and to threaten its targets — those opposed to military rule — PDF units, members of political parties, CDM members, independent media outlets and journalists.

Ye Htun said fears for his wife and children’s safety forced him to leave Myanmar.

“I couldn’t keep putting them at risk because I’m a journalist. I will continue to work, but I know I can’t do it in Myanmar until this military regime is removed.”

Air strikes target civilians – where’s the UN?
Award-winning documentary maker and artist, Sai Kyaw Khaing, dismayed at the lack of coverage by international and regional media on the impacts of Myanmar’s military aerial strikes on civilian targets, decided to make the arduous trip to the country’s northwest to find out.

In the two years since the military regime took illegal control of the country’s political infrastructure, Myanmar is now engaged in a brutal, countrywide civil war.

Civilian and political opposition to the military coup saw the formation of People Defence Force units under the banner of the National Unity Government established in April 2021 by members of Parliament elected at the 2020 elections and outlawed by the military after its coup.

Thousands of young people took up arms and joined PDF units, trained by Ethnic Armed Organisations, to defend villages and civilians and fight the military regime. The regime vastly outnumbered and outmuscled the PDFs and EAOs with its military hardware — tanks, heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and fighter jets.

Sai Kyaw contacted a number of international media outlets with his plans to travel deep inside the conflict zone to document how displaced people were coping with the airstrikes and burning of their villages and crops.

Sai Kyaw said it was telling that he has yet to receive a single response of interest from any of the media he approached.

“What’s happening in Myanmar is being ignored, unlike the conflict in Ukraine. Most of the international media, if they do report on Myanmar, want an ‘expert’ to front their stories, even better if it’s one of their own, a Westerner.”

Deadly strike impact
Sai Kyaw explains why what is happening on the ground needs to be explained — the impacts of the deadly airstrikes on the lives of unarmed villagers.

“My objective is to talk to local people. How can they plant or harvest their crops during the intense fighting? How can they educate their kids or get medical help?

“Thousands of houses, schools, hospitals, churches, temples, and mosques have been targeted and destroyed — how are the people managing to live?”

Sai Kyaw put up his own money to finance his trip to a neighbouring country where he then made contact with people prepared to help him get to northwestern Myanmar, which was under intense attacks from the military regime.

“It took four days by motorbike on unlit mountain dirt tracks that turned to deep mud when it rained. We also had to avoid numerous military checkpoints, military informers, and spies.”

Sai Kyaw said that after reaching his destination, meeting with villagers, and witnessing their response to the constant artillery and aerial bombardments, their resilience astounded him.

“These people rely on each other, when they’re bombed from their homes, people who still have a house rally around and offer shelter. They don’t have weapons to fight back, but they organise checkpoints managed by men and women.”

Sai Kyaw said being unable to predict when an airstrike would happen took its toll on villagers.

Clinics, schools bombed
“You don’t know when they’re going to attack — day or night — clinics, schools, places of worship — are bombed. These are not military targets — they don’t care who they kill.”

Sai Kyaw witnessed an aerial bombing and has the before and after film footage that shows the destruction. Rows of neat houses, complete with walls intact before the air strike are left after the attack with holes a car could drive through.

“The unpredictable and indiscriminate attacks mean villagers are unable to harvest their crops or plant next season’s rice paddies.”

Sai Kyaw is concerned that the lack of aid getting to the people in need of shelter, clothing, food, and medicine will cause a large-scale humanitarian crisis.

“There’s no sign of international aid getting to the people. If there’s a genuine desire to help the people, international aid groups can do it by making contact with local community groups. It seems some of these big international aid donors are reluctant to move from their city bases in case they upset the military’s SAC [State Administration Council].”

At the time of writing Sai Kyaw Khaing has yet to receive a reply from any of the international media he contacted.

It’s the economy stupid
A veteran Myanmar journalist, Kyaw Kyaw*, covered a wide range of stories for more than 15 years, including business, investment, and trade. He told IFJ he was concerned the ban on independent media, arrests of journalists, gags and access restrictions on sources meant many important stories went unreported.

“The military banning of independent media is a serious threat to our freedom of speech. The military-controlled state media can’t be relied on. It’s well documented, it’s mainly no news or fake news overseen by the military’s Department of Propaganda.”

Kyaw lists the stories that he explains are in critical need of being reported — the cost of consumer goods, the collapse of the local currency, impact on wages, lack of education and health care, brain drain as people flee the country, crops destroyed and unharvested and impact on next year’s yield.

Kyaw is quick to add details to his list.

“People can’t leave the country fast enough. There are more sellers than buyers of cars and houses. Crime is on the rise as workers’ real wages fall below the poverty line. Garment workers earned 4800 kyat, the minimum daily rate before the military’s coup. The kyat was around 1200 to the US dollar — about four dollars. Two years after the coup the kyat is around 2800 — workers’ daily wage has dropped to half, about US$2 a day.”

Kyaw Kyaw’s critique is compelling as he explains the cost of everyday consumer goods and the impact on households.

“Before the coup in 2021, rice cost a household, 32,000 kyat for around 45kg. It is now selling at 65,000 kyat and rising. Cooking oil sold at 3,000 kyat for 1.6kg now sells for over double, 8,000kyat.

“It’s the same with fish, chicken, fuel, and medicine – family planning implants have almost doubled in cost from 25,000 kyat to now selling at 45,000 kyat.”

Humanitarian crisis potential
Kyaw is dismayed that the media outside the country are not covering stories that have a huge impact on people’s daily struggle to feed and care for their families and have the real potential for a massive humanitarian crisis in the near future.

“The focus is on the revolution, tallies of dead soldiers, politics — all important, but journalists and local and international media need to report on the hidden costs of the military’s coup. Local media outlets need to find solutions to better cover these issues.”

Kyaw stresses international governments and institutions — ASEAN, UK, US, China, and India — need to stop talking and take real steps to remove and curb the military’s destruction of the country.

“In two years, they displaced over a million people, destroyed thousands of houses and religious buildings, attacked schools and hospitals — killing students and civilians — what is the UNSC waiting for?”

An independent think tank, the Institute for Strategy and Policy – Myanmar, and the UN agency for refugees confirm Kyaws Kyaw’s claims.The Institute for Strategy and Policy reports “at least 28,419 homes and buildings were torched or destroyed…in the aftermath of the coup between 1 February 2021, and 15 July 2022.”

The UN agency responsible for refugees, the UNHCR, estimates the number of displaced people in Myanmar is a staggering 1,574,400. Since the military coup and up to January 23, the number was 1,244,000 people displaced.

While the world’s media and governments focus their attention and military aid on Ukraine, Myanmar’s people continue to ask why their plight continues to be ignored.

Phil Thornton is a journalist and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in Southeast Asia. This article was first published by the IFJ Asia-Pacific blog and is republished with the author’s permission. Thornton is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

*Name has been changed as requested for security concerns.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The writer, known only as Palgon, was arrested at his home in August 2022 and has been incommunicado ever since. “There is still no information on where he is being held at the moment,” a source inside Tibet told RFA. 

“His family members were also not informed or given proper reasons for his arrest other than Palgon’s contact with people in exile to offer prayers to His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” the source added, insisting on anonymity for security reasons. 

Palgon is from the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China’s southeastern Qinghai province. He was an elementary school teacher in the prefecture’s Pema county, but he later  resigned from his role and continued as an independent writer.

“Palgon usually is very active on social media platforms and audio chat groups where he writes and engages,” another source inside Tibet told RFA. 

Over the last few months, RFA has reported on China’s arrests of monks, writers, young protestors, and other Tibetan figures in a wide-ranging crackdown. Those detained will often be held incommunicado for months before being sentenced.

Dawa Tsering, director of the India-based  Tibet Policy Institute, told RFA that the arrest shows China’s attempts to block Tibetans from communicating with the outside world. 

“The Chinese government does not want the international communities to know about the harsh policies that they have been implementing on Tibetans in terms of religion, culture, and language,” he said. 

Sangay Kyap, a Spain-based researcher at the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, said the detentions of those who contact exiles serve “to disconnect the two, and also an attempt to obstruct the influence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other religious figures inside Tibet whom Tibetans revere”.

RFA contacted police in Pema county and Golog prefecture, but they were not available for comment on this story.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Nawar Nemeh and Malcolm Foster. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Tibetan.

The traffic. I couldn’t hear it. Where the hell was it? The cars? The buses? The hundreds of lorries (trucks)? The white vans? Fast ones weaving in and out? Slow ones not giving a damn? Where was that ever-constant urban din of four-stroke combustion cycles, intaking, compressing, combusting, exhausting? This was like our London of old, at the height of the pandemic. Silent. Void. Weirdly placated. (A time I enjoyed.) What has happened to our noisy, clattery, impulsive capital? Oh. Wait a minute. This was not the capital. This was not us by our hectic busy road. This was me rubbing my eyes in relative countryside, barely awake after my first proper night’s sleep in ages. I had entirely forgotten. We four members of the immediate family had decamped together the day before on a long green train from London to celebrate Christmas with the artist’s family. In short, I was waking up in exile.

Over the next few days, in between catching up on all the news and enjoying the company of some of those important to us, I grew marginally and perhaps ridiculously obsessed with this unbidden concept of exile. It was like learning about Napoleon all over again, whose exile by the way had always been presented to me as punishment but which remained strangely attractive to me. Furthermore, my own life as child felt like being in exile. It had settled down again by the age of about four after a spirited burst of life on the road but I spent most of my following childhood winters and summers in both England and Scotland in a kind of twinship of exiles. I always seemed to be living life one step removed, though never overburdened with predictability. Maybe all of us who never knew our parents have always been exiles.

One day, leaving everyone to the warmth of our hosts, I took a short walk on my own. There was a graveyard nearby and though in a stone-walled enclosure with a kind of grim constellation of exiles within, I saw nothing morbid in paying my respects. Over the past three generations, we Bachs — apart from one sister — have never been buried as we have always preferred cremation. I knew of only one buried relation on my mother’s side, a Shaw, a Skyeman, to boot, who was recently granted the presence of a piper by his now weather-worn Edinburgh grave. This was in honour of successful legal battles with the likes of Lloyd George in a now distant past over the unfair treatment of highland crofters. I had to go all the way back to the nineteenth century in Denmark and a grave near Thisted in Northern Jutland to find a Bach buried. This was when finding the revamped headstone of Danish great-great-grandfather and life-long parliamentarian Jens Bach.

As a result, the concept of burial remained alien to me as I continued walking tentatively through the graveyard, the faintest of drizzles on my back. At one point more than powerfully I came across the final resting place of a group of exiled young Poles killed in WWII while fighting the Nazis during the Nazi occupation of their homeland. E. R. Janovic. (Age 20.) M. Gmiter-Gmitrewicz. (Age 21.) These were my children’s ages. The headstone of arguably the most exiled said only ‘A SOLDIER OF THE POLISH ARMY 1939-1945’ with ‘Known Unto God’ at its foot, close to the dark earth in which this unidentified body was buried. Death really is a grim business, I was remembering, as a family nearby placed flowers on a child’s grave.

The reason for my summers as a young boy in England and my winters in Scotland was because my grandmother owned a hotel just south of the border which was open only from April to September. At the hotel, every guest would arrive in a kind of expectant state of benevolent exile. From my grandmother’s table in the tall wood-panelled dining hall overlooking the North Sea, every day I would study each of the guests’ faces, even their dining skills, and always their sense of detachment. Everyone appeared to be thriving and it helped that the beach was so long and white and golden. (To my younger self it was like a landing strip for all that was good in life.) As for the sea, often inky-blue, occasionally restless, it was like an expression of faith. Of all the people making these annual pilgrimages called holidays, the ones I liked best would visit twice each summer. That way I could develop a proper relationship. I was sad of course when it was raining and I was having to wave goodbye through the window.

Returning from our brief stay in relative countryside, I was wondering as we approached the unmistakeable intensity of London again just how Julian Assange was getting on. Forcibly exiled to HM Prison Belmarsh while previously uprooted pretty much out of choice from Australia, the famous WikiLeaks founder was incarcerated in the Category-A men’s prison a mile or so away from us since 2019. People forget that he is facing prosecution on an ancient statute never used before in a case of this kind. Because these are charges from the Trump-era, a growing number of people are wondering if Biden will ever make good on his pledge to defend the press. They wonder this as many of Julian Assange’s supporters regard him as a journalist who really should be covered by the first amendment.

London of course has been home to many royal exiles over the centuries. Only slightly more recently, we have had Agustin I, Emperor of Mexico. King Jaja of Opobo. Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia (whose gifted devotee Bob Marley when in London was one of London’s finest Jamaican exiles). Let us not forget King Zog of Albania, either.

It seemed last week that wherever I looked there was an exile of sorts waiting in the ether. I was considering for example watching Joseph Losey’s ‘The Servant’ again when I remembered he had been a victim of the McCarthy witch hunt and ended up living in exile in London, often working with Harold Pinter not just on film such as ‘The Servant’ but also ‘Accident’ and ‘The Go-Between’. Ridiculous though this sounds, Charles de Gaulle’s London exile was not so dissimilar, as it was also borne out of a desire to fight fascists, even if Churchill did maintain a kind of mocking upper hand with his rather unnecessary ‘franglais’. (During one contretemps with de Gaulle in Casablanca in January 1943, Churchill said ‘Si vous m’obstaclerez, je vous liquiderai!’) The tall French leader wrote his rousing ‘À tous les Français’ speech at one of my old haunts — The French House, in the arms of Dean Street in London’s Soho — where I actually first met the artist. Drinking, of course, to some, can be a form of exile.

Nor has this flow of exiles been only one way. Many English poets for example have left these shores for another, and not always on a sweet-tempered whim. In Byron’s case, this was because of an incestuous triste with his half-sister, or because of debts, or because of England’s brutish laws at the time against suspected homosexuality. Take your pick. Hassled by poor health as well as creditors, the poet Shelley — who of course ‘met a traveller from an antique land’ in his exile-heavy poem ‘Ozymandias’ — took his entire household to Italy in 1818. And some believe that Keats, ever the mentally dexterous outsider, wrote his best work in Rome in a room close to the Piazza di Spagna. Indeed, I remember wandering those streets as a sixteen year-old traveller having hitched there, in silent awe of the man and his work, knowing with great sadness that he went on to die in Rome aged twenty-five and was buried at the Cemitero Acattolico. Keats had said he only wanted ‘HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER’ on the oft-visited headstone. In the end, though, uncomfortably, it would in fact read: ‘This grave contains all that was mortal, of a young English poet, who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious powers of his enemies, desired these words to be engraved on his tomb stone ‘HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER’. Elaborate, and beside the point, to say the least.

Art always wins in the end though. Even when the Stones had to surrender 93 per cent of their earnings in taxes and became tax exiles, their first album from this period will forever be linked to a creative rather than commercial outcome, which it no doubt also was. Famously, the brilliant ‘Exile on Main Street’ was made with the use of a niftily operated mobile recording studio at a rented spacious villa in the South of France, then completed at Sunset Sound in LA. It is one of their best albums. Accordingly, I paused writing this to listen to the tracks ‘Shine a Light’ — ‘Berber jewellery jangling down the street’ — and ‘Loving Cup’.

When I moved without ceremony to New York for five years I also became an exile. This was after a briefer but no less appreciated period of time in Perugia in Italy, and the first of what years later would become several trips to South Asia. I wrote a couple of plays in New York, one of which was put on at the CSC Theatre. It was about a couple in exile on a fictitious Polynesian island that was later invaded by the Americans. What I was trying unsuccessfully elsewhere to get my head around with my more private writings was this awkward juxtaposition between a conflicted childhood and someone else’s war in Afghanistan. In truth, it is only recently that I have begun to understand how best to attempt this.

I am sure I would have known while in New York that there was a vast difference between living in exile in one of the finest cities on the planet at the time and ‘being barred from one’s native country, typically for political or punitive reasons’ as the dictionary would have it. Mine was hardly the exile of the Jews in Babylonia or the seven popes in Avignon. That said, there is something to be said for the removal of our cultural safety nets — such as an over-familiarity with one’s surroundings — in order to find out who we truly are. Having no parents had already removed one layer for me but maybe even then you can still have too many. Both the Chinese and Japanese have variations of ‘If you love your children, send them on their travels,’ while our own phrase over here, rather anxiously, is ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’. You could say any form of sacrifice is akin to a state of exile. What makes it so interesting is precisely that it has so many possible meanings.

I wonder if Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard will one day write about living in physical as opposed to cerebral exile, the latter being one of the themes of his six-volume autobiographical novels. I only say this because the artist is such a fan, though I have read some of his writings. In fact the artist had been reading him for years when suddenly she saw someone who looked exactly like him at our children’s old school. This person was looking around as a prospective parent. It seemed unbelievable that someone the artist admired so much and who was supposed to be living in Scandinavia could be so pensively wandering the hall and corridors of our local state school. Which is why she dismissed it as just an uncanny coincidence of looks in the end.

But then she saw him again in our local supermarket car park, just as he was placing a small child into a baby-seat. This was getting so weird, she laughed to me. But it had to be Knausgaard. Immediately, she threw caution to the rain and complimented him on his work. It was him. Having left Sweden where he moved to from Norway, he was now our neighbour. As a footnote, we still affectionately joke in the family about the time I pretend to have since saved Knausgaard’s life. This was after I came across him on foot while he walking down the road — in the road, that is to say, not on the pavement — towards the local railway station. I was walking in the opposite direction, uphill. A truck suddenly appeared behind him and he was so deep in thought he seemed entirely unaware of its looming presence. So I veered ostentatiously towards the wall and in so doing created an attractive enough space for him to step off the road and into just as the truck roared past.

Finally, I saw my New Yorker friend after he flew back into London from the ‘bombogenesis’ snowstorm in the States. We smiled about how successfully we had swopped roles. By living in London, he was now the one in exile. We used to meet often in New York when I was the only exile. One of the things he was back from seeing was his elderly parents, including a 99 year-old father still playing tennis who only last year finally stopped driving a car around Manhattan.

Now, there is a person showing no signs of exile.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

Exiled University of the South Pacific vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia says he is thrilled at the prospect of returning to Fiji.

Speaking to The Fiji Times from Los Angeles in the United States yesterday, he said Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka — when he was in opposition- made a commitment to pay Fiji’s outstanding debt of $90 million to USP and to allow him to return to Fiji.

“Mr Rabuka said it, National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad said it, and the Social Democratic Liberal Party leader also said it,” Professor Ahluwalia said.

• READ MORE: USP unions slam Fiji’s Sayed-Khaiyum for ‘damaging’ Pacific university
• Other USP saga reports

“So it’s part of all three parties’ manifestos and part of their public statements, so we as a university are delighted that this amount that has been outstanding for so long will finally come to the university.

“It’s excellent news, not just for the Fijian students but for the entire region because the region has been carrying Fijian students for quite a while and there will now be a chance for us to do a lot of things that we have deferred and not been able to do, particularly issues around maintenance.

“It also means we can now aggressively look for quality academic staff.”

Rabuka issued a statement on Boxing Day saying the prohibition order against Professor Ahluwalia had been lifted and he was welcome to travel to Fiji at any time.

Professor Ahluwalia and his wife Sandra Price claimed that on Wednesday February 3, 2021, 15 people made up of immigration officials and police stormed into their USP home and forcefully removed them at about 11.30pm.

They claimed they were driven the same night to Nadi International Airport and deported on the morning of Thursday, February 4, to Australia.

The FijiFirst government on February 4, 2022 issued a statement that the Immigration Department had ordered Professor Aluwahlia and his partner Sandra Price to leave Fiji with immediate effect following alleged “continuous breaches” by both individuals of Section 13 of the Immigration Act.

Government said under Section 13 of the Immigration Act 2003, no foreigner was permitted to conduct themselves in a manner prejudicial to the peace, defence, public safety, public order, public morality, public health, security, or good government of Fiji.

Fiji now ‘free country’
RNZ Pacific reports that Finance Minister Professor Biman Prasad said all three parties in the coalition had promised this in their election campaigns and manifestos.

The former FijiFirst government have withheld the payments since 2019 over a protracted battle with Professor Ahluwalia, now operating in exile out of Samoa.

“They didn’t like a man who was doing the right thing who exposed corruption within the university,” Professor Prasad said.

“And it has done you know, to some extent, terrible damage not only to the university, but also the unity in the whole region.”

In July, the two unions representing staff at the university said the Fiji government owes the institution F$78.4 million and the debt has increased since then.

“Well, I can’t tell you the timetable, but all I can say is…that the university will receive the appropriate funding, as well as the government will pay what is due as a result of the previous government withholding the grant to the university,” Professor Prasad said.

His revelation comes after the government statement by Prime Minister Rabuka inviting Professor Ahluwalia to return to Fiji.

Personal apology
Rabuka said he wanted to apologise to Professor Ahluwalia in person upon his arrival for the way he had been treated by Fiji.

The prime minister has also invited the widow of exiled Fijian academic, Professor Brij Lal, who passed away on Christmas Day last year to bring home his ashes for burial at Tabia near Labasa.

Professor Prasad said they look forward to welcoming home more Fijians and expatriates exiled during Voreqe Bainimarama’s 16-year-reign.

“Fiji is now a free country. We will welcome everyone who wants to come to Fiji. No one should fear about any kind of vindictiveness or harassment,” Professor Prasad said.

“That is what we promised during our campaign, and that is what this government will deliver.”

Felix Chaudhary is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with Fiji Times permission. This article is also republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The greenlight has been given to University of the South Pacific vice-chancellor, Professor Pal Ahluwalia, and Dr Padma Lal, to return to Fiji by Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka.

Professor Ahluwalia was deported in 2021 and Dr Lal — widow of the late leading Fiji academic Professor Brij Lal — was refused entry to Fiji along with her husband.

Exiled Professor Ahluwalia currently resides in Samoa and Dr Lal in Australia.

• READ MORE: How Fiji could help resolve the Pal Ahluwalia and USP crisis
• Professor Brij Lal: A champion of democracy and Fiji’s finest scholar

Rabuka has made it clear today that both of them are free to enter the country.

“I am ready to meet Dr Lal and Professor Ahluwalia personally,” he said.

“I will apologise on behalf of the people of Fiji for the way they were treated.”

Dr Lal had been prevented from coming to Fiji with her husband’s ashes for them to be taken to his birthplace at Tabia, near Labasa.

First anniversary
Today marks the first anniversary of Professor Lal’s death.

Rabuka said prohibition orders against Professor Brij Lal and Dr Lal, as well as Professor Ahluwalia, were “unreasonable and inhumane” and should never have been made.

He had promised his government would bring to an end the injustices suffered by Professor Ahluwalia, and Professor Lal.

“I received a clarification today from the Department of Immigration that neither Dr Padma Lal nor Professor Ahluwalia were the subject of written prohibition orders,” he said.

Josefa Babitu is a Fiji Sun reporter. Republished from the Fiji Sun.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Zamora, who founded elPeriódico in 1996 and still serves as president of the newspaper, was arrested on July 29. He remains in pre-trial detention in the Mariscal Zavala prison in Guatemala City, as prosecutors conduct a criminal investigation on charges of money laundering, blackmail, and influence peddling.

Zamora, his family, and his colleagues have claimed that the case is retaliation for elPeriódico’s reporting on alleged corruption involving Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and Attorney General Consuelo Porras.

Zamora’s son, José Zamora, who is also a journalist and currently works at Exile Content Studio, a Spanish-language entertainment and media firm, in Miami, spoke to CPJ in a video interview about his father’s case and the current state of press freedom and democracy in Guatemala.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In response to CPJ’s request for comment, Juan Luis Pantaleon, a spokesperson for the Guatemalan prosecutor’s office, said in an email that the case against Zamora is “not about any political persecution or any attack” on freedom of expression. CPJ emailed the office of the executive secretary of the presidency but did not receive a reply.

This is not the first time your father has faced harassment from Guatemalan officials.

José Zamora: My father has a career of more than 30 years in journalism, and he was the first journalist to start doing investigative journalism, with his team, in Guatemala. This has led to a series of attacks and harassment and persecution over the years: defamation campaigns, fiscal terrorism, and many others.

For example, they said the newspaper hasn’t been paying taxes for years. They came to audit the newspaper but did not find anything.

Then there were the lawsuits. At one point, there were 195 spurious lawsuits against my father and the outlet, some of them even misusing important laws, like the law against femicide, which is intended to protect women who face abuse from their partners. Several officials sued my father using this law, which is a total aberration.

And then you have the commercial boycott. The government and the president have threatened influential business people and basically prohibited them from advertising in the newspaper.

My father has also been subjected to threats, kidnappings, and bombings. In 2003, there was a kidnapping. They entered my parent’s house — my siblings and I still lived with my parents at the time — and held us hostage for about three hours.

In 2008, they tried again to kill my dad. They kidnapped him coming out of a restaurant, took him away, beat him, injected him with something to kill him, and then left him. Luckily that place was so cold that he got hypothermia. And hypothermia was, in the end, what saved him. Firefighters brought him in, thinking he was a corpse, and when they began to prepare for the autopsy, they realized that he had vital signs [and treated him].

But this imprisonment is totally new. They had been trying to do this for the last year, but it did not happen until now. Several times, different sources warned us that they were fabricating cases against him.

How is your father?

He is in an isolated cell, and in general, he is in good health and in good spirits. He wants to fight and continue doing journalism even while there. At some point, he did have some health problems — his cell was filled with bedbugs, which bit him and gave him an allergic reaction. But now he is generally in good health and is much better.

What was the newspaper publishing before your father was arrested?

President Giammattei has been in power for 130 weeks, more or less, and elPeriódico has published 130 investigations. So there has not been a week without reporting on some act of corruption in his administration.

In the country in general, Giammattei has led a systematic attack on democracy and has persecuted anyone who is considered a critic. The most recent of these systematic attacks on democracy is this persecution of the press. In the case of elPeriódico and my dad, things got worse in November. The newspaper published an investigation titled “La Trama Rusa” (“The Russian Plot”) on how the president made a business deal with a Russian company in which the state of Guatemala granted a concession to develop a mine, and that the president was [allegedly] paid for it. That was the breaking point.

Can you tell us more about your father’s case? What is he accused of?

In Guatemala, legal processes generally take years in terms of investigation and processes. But [the legal case against Zamora] was all set up in 72 hours. It based on a complaint from a “denunciante” [a man Zamora asked to help him but who later informed on the journalist].

My father is accused of money laundering and blackmail. What happened is that a serious businessman gave my dad 300,000 quetzales [US$38,050] to support the newspaper. My father contacted the [man who became the] “denunciante” [to put the money into his business’s bank account] and give him a check from his company. My dad wanted that check deposited into the account of Aldea Global, the company that owns elPeriódico. But when my father goes to deposit the check, [it bounced].

[Editor’s note: According to an interview with Zamora’s lawyer in Central American online outlet El Faro, the reason that Zamora did not deposit the donation directly into Aldea Global’s account, but asked the man who became the “denunciante” to write him a check from his account, was because this triangulation helped him protect the identity of the donor.]

[For] blackmail, the Public Prosecutor’s Office said that the whistleblower believed that my father’s funds had come from blackmailing someone, but there is no proof.

Can you tell us why your father has to spend 90 days in pretrial detention?

The judge gave the Public Prosecutor’s Office the maximum amount of time for the investigation, three months, and ordered [my father to] pretrial detention. My father meets all the requirements to be granted “substitute measures” [similar to parole] and be under house arrest. But they want him there in prison, because they want to humiliate him and make a public example of him. Even when they took him to the hearings, everything was excessive, as if they were taking one of the biggest organized crime bosses.

Everything has been very public, and this is just an example in a series of systematic attacks against democracy and against the press. My dad is an example, but the broader message is for everyone, and that is that they are going to persecute any critical voice.

How are elPeriódico’s journalists working at the moment?

They all believe deeply in their work, its importance for democracy, and in making a better country. So they continue to work, but it’s very challenging when the newsroom’s leader is gone. On the other hand, there is a financial issue. For almost 15 days, they froze the accounts. The journalists did not receive their salaries for almost three weeks. And that demonstrates a lot: not only the journalists’ strength and determination, and conviction because they continued to work in a very tense situation, but also without any income. Little by little, this is getting resolved, but it’s complicated.

What do journalists in Guatemala need in order to do their work freely?

What they need is freedom. A decent state should see the press as an ally. The truth is that they can’t know everything that happens in all state institutions. They should be transparent, but the state is massive. So the state should support and have a decent relationship with the press and allow them to do their job, because it would even allow them to stop corruption.

What do you want now for your father’s case?

The main request is that he should be released. The evidence is weak, and they haven’t been able to prove anything.

The second point: If they are going to detain him, they should grant him substitute measures, and he should be able to wait for the process to take place under house arrest.

And thirdly, they should not persecute the newspaper as a company. In doing so, they have attacked not only press freedom, but also all the journalists and the people who work at elPeriódico. They also went after the financial director Flora Silva and imprisoned her. She is another person who, at minimum, should also be under substitute measures and house arrest.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Dánae Vílchez.

Zamora, who founded elPeriódico in 1996 and still serves as president of the newspaper, was arrested on July 29. He remains in pre-trial detention in the Mariscal Zavala prison in Guatemala City, as prosecutors conduct a criminal investigation on charges of money laundering, blackmail, and influence peddling.

Zamora, his family, and his colleagues have claimed that the case is retaliation for elPeriódico’s reporting on alleged corruption involving Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and Attorney General Consuelo Porras.

Zamora’s son, José Zamora, who is also a journalist and currently works at Exile Content Studio, a Spanish-language entertainment and media firm, in Miami, spoke to CPJ in a video interview about his father’s case and the current state of press freedom and democracy in Guatemala.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In response to CPJ’s request for comment, Juan Luis Pantaleon, a spokesperson for the Guatemalan prosecutor’s office, said in an email that the case against Zamora is “not about any political persecution or any attack” on freedom of expression. CPJ emailed the office of the executive secretary of the presidency but did not receive a reply.

This is not the first time your father has faced harassment from Guatemalan officials.

José Zamora: My father has a career of more than 30 years in journalism, and he was the first journalist to start doing investigative journalism, with his team, in Guatemala. This has led to a series of attacks and harassment and persecution over the years: defamation campaigns, fiscal terrorism, and many others.

For example, they said the newspaper hasn’t been paying taxes for years. They came to audit the newspaper but did not find anything.

Then there were the lawsuits. At one point, there were 195 spurious lawsuits against my father and the outlet, some of them even misusing important laws, like the law against femicide, which is intended to protect women who face abuse from their partners. Several officials sued my father using this law, which is a total aberration.

And then you have the commercial boycott. The government and the president have threatened influential business people and basically prohibited them from advertising in the newspaper.

My father has also been subjected to threats, kidnappings, and bombings. In 2003, there was a kidnapping. They entered my parent’s house — my siblings and I still lived with my parents at the time — and held us hostage for about three hours.

In 2008, they tried again to kill my dad. They kidnapped him coming out of a restaurant, took him away, beat him, injected him with something to kill him, and then left him. Luckily that place was so cold that he got hypothermia. And hypothermia was, in the end, what saved him. Firefighters brought him in, thinking he was a corpse, and when they began to prepare for the autopsy, they realized that he had vital signs [and treated him].

But this imprisonment is totally new. They had been trying to do this for the last year, but it did not happen until now. Several times, different sources warned us that they were fabricating cases against him.

How is your father?

He is in an isolated cell, and in general, he is in good health and in good spirits. He wants to fight and continue doing journalism even while there. At some point, he did have some health problems — his cell was filled with bedbugs, which bit him and gave him an allergic reaction. But now he is generally in good health and is much better.

What was the newspaper publishing before your father was arrested?

President Giammattei has been in power for 130 weeks, more or less, and elPeriódico has published 130 investigations. So there has not been a week without reporting on some act of corruption in his administration.

In the country in general, Giammattei has led a systematic attack on democracy and has persecuted anyone who is considered a critic. The most recent of these systematic attacks on democracy is this persecution of the press. In the case of elPeriódico and my dad, things got worse in November. The newspaper published an investigation titled “La Trama Rusa” (“The Russian Plot”) on how the president made a business deal with a Russian company in which the state of Guatemala granted a concession to develop a mine, and that the president was [allegedly] paid for it. That was the breaking point.

Can you tell us more about your father’s case? What is he accused of?

In Guatemala, legal processes generally take years in terms of investigation and processes. But [the legal case against Zamora] was all set up in 72 hours. It based on a complaint from a “denunciante” [a man Zamora asked to help him but who later informed on the journalist].

My father is accused of money laundering and blackmail. What happened is that a serious businessman gave my dad 300,000 quetzales [US$38,050] to support the newspaper. My father contacted the [man who became the] “denunciante” [to put the money into his business’s bank account] and give him a check from his company. My dad wanted that check deposited into the account of Aldea Global, the company that owns elPeriódico. But when my father goes to deposit the check, [it bounced].

[Editor’s note: According to an interview with Zamora’s lawyer in Central American online outlet El Faro, the reason that Zamora did not deposit the donation directly into Aldea Global’s account, but asked the man who became the “denunciante” to write him a check from his account, was because this triangulation helped him protect the identity of the donor.]

[For] blackmail, the Public Prosecutor’s Office said that the whistleblower believed that my father’s funds had come from blackmailing someone, but there is no proof.

Can you tell us why your father has to spend 90 days in pretrial detention?

The judge gave the Public Prosecutor’s Office the maximum amount of time for the investigation, three months, and ordered [my father to] pretrial detention. My father meets all the requirements to be granted “substitute measures” [similar to parole] and be under house arrest. But they want him there in prison, because they want to humiliate him and make a public example of him. Even when they took him to the hearings, everything was excessive, as if they were taking one of the biggest organized crime bosses.

Everything has been very public, and this is just an example in a series of systematic attacks against democracy and against the press. My dad is an example, but the broader message is for everyone, and that is that they are going to persecute any critical voice.

How are elPeriódico’s journalists working at the moment?

They all believe deeply in their work, its importance for democracy, and in making a better country. So they continue to work, but it’s very challenging when the newsroom’s leader is gone. On the other hand, there is a financial issue. For almost 15 days, they froze the accounts. The journalists did not receive their salaries for almost three weeks. And that demonstrates a lot: not only the journalists’ strength and determination, and conviction because they continued to work in a very tense situation, but also without any income. Little by little, this is getting resolved, but it’s complicated.

What do journalists in Guatemala need in order to do their work freely?

What they need is freedom. A decent state should see the press as an ally. The truth is that they can’t know everything that happens in all state institutions. They should be transparent, but the state is massive. So the state should support and have a decent relationship with the press and allow them to do their job, because it would even allow them to stop corruption.

What do you want now for your father’s case?

The main request is that he should be released. The evidence is weak, and they haven’t been able to prove anything.

The second point: If they are going to detain him, they should grant him substitute measures, and he should be able to wait for the process to take place under house arrest.

And thirdly, they should not persecute the newspaper as a company. In doing so, they have attacked not only press freedom, but also all the journalists and the people who work at elPeriódico. They also went after the financial director Flora Silva and imprisoned her. She is another person who, at minimum, should also be under substitute measures and house arrest.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Dánae Vílchez.

Pro-CCP media

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin.

American whistleblower Edward Snowden was among 72 foreign-born individuals granted Russian citizenship on Monday in a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin, just over seven months into Russia's war on Ukraine.

"After two years of waiting and nearly 10 years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family."

Snowden—who exposed the mass surveillance practices of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)—has lived in Russia since the summer of 2013, when the United States revoked his passport while he was attempting to travel from Hong Kong to Ecuador.

Shortly after Russia granted him permanent residency rights, Snowden announced in November 2020 that he and his wife, Lindsay Mills—who gave birth to their first son that year, and a second son earlier this year—were seeking dual citizenship.

"After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son," Snowden explained. "That's why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we're applying for dual U.S.-Russian citizenship."

"Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love—including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the states, so the whole family can be reunited," he added. "Our greatest wish is that, wherever our son lives, he feels at home."

In a tweet noting that statement and sharing a family photo, the 39-year-old said Monday that "after years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our SONS. After two years of waiting and nearly 10 years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family. I pray for privacy for them—and for us all."

Snowden attorney Anatoly Kucherena told Russian state-owned RIA Novosti on Monday that Mills is seeking citizenship. The lawyer also said that Snowden will not be forced to participate in the recently announced "partial mobilization" to send troops to Ukraine, as he has not served in Russia's army.

Not long before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Snowden accused the global news media of "pushing for war." Since the invasion, he has faced some criticism for his lack of comment on the conflict.

Just after the war began, he said that "I'm not suspended from the ceiling above a barrel of acid by a rope that burns a little faster every time I tweet, you concern-trolling ghouls. I've just lost any confidence I had that sharing my thinking on this particular topic continues to be useful, because I called it wrong."

In response to the citizenship news on Monday, Evan Greer, director of the U.S.-based digital rights group Fight for the Future, tweeted that "if the Biden administration dropped the charges against Snowden, Putin wouldn't be able to use him for a PR stunt, just sayin'."

Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola said: "Let's be clear. Snowden sought citizenship in Russia because his government will not let him return to his home country without putting him on trial exposing mass surveillance that systematically violated the privacy rights of millions and even spurred modest reform."

Snowden—who potentially faces decades in U.S. prison for theft and Espionage Act charges—has previously said that he would return to the United States if he believed he would receive a fair trial.

A federal appeals court ruled two years ago that the NSA's warrantless surveillance of U.S. phone records—which Snowden exposed—was illegal. Snowden has continued to criticize years of impunity for the agency's violation of Americans' civil liberties.

"Our position has not changed. Mr. Snowden should return to the United States where he should face justice as any other American citizen would," Ned Price, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said Monday, also suggesting that the exile may be required to fight in Russia's war against Ukraine, despite his attorney's comments on the matter.

The Washington Post reported that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment, only saying that "since I believe there have been criminal charges brought against him, we would point you to the Department of Justice for any specifics on this."

Meanwhile, in Russia, when asked if Putin will meet with Snowden, presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reportedly said that "there are no such plans."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

American whistleblower Edward Snowden was among 72 foreign-born individuals granted Russian citizenship on Monday in a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin, just over seven months into Russia's war on Ukraine.

"After two years of waiting and nearly 10 years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family."

Snowden—who exposed the mass surveillance practices of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)—has lived in Russia since the summer of 2013, when the United States revoked his passport while he was attempting to travel from Hong Kong to Ecuador.

Shortly after Russia granted him permanent residency rights, Snowden announced in November 2020 that he and his wife, Lindsay Mills—who gave birth to their first son that year, and a second son earlier this year—were seeking dual citizenship.

"After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son," Snowden explained. "That's why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we're applying for dual U.S.-Russian citizenship."

"Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love—including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the states, so the whole family can be reunited," he added. "Our greatest wish is that, wherever our son lives, he feels at home."

In a tweet noting that statement and sharing a family photo, the 39-year-old said Monday that "after years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our SONS. After two years of waiting and nearly 10 years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family. I pray for privacy for them—and for us all."

Snowden attorney Anatoly Kucherena told Russian state-owned RIA Novosti on Monday that Mills is seeking citizenship. The lawyer also said that Snowden will not be forced to participate in the recently announced "partial mobilization" to send troops to Ukraine, as he has not served in Russia's army.

Not long before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Snowden accused the global news media of "pushing for war." Since the invasion, he has faced some criticism for his lack of comment on the conflict.

Just after the war began, he said that "I'm not suspended from the ceiling above a barrel of acid by a rope that burns a little faster every time I tweet, you concern-trolling ghouls. I've just lost any confidence I had that sharing my thinking on this particular topic continues to be useful, because I called it wrong."

In response to the citizenship news on Monday, Evan Greer, director of the U.S.-based digital rights group Fight for the Future, tweeted that "if the Biden administration dropped the charges against Snowden, Putin wouldn't be able to use him for a PR stunt, just sayin'."

Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola said: "Let's be clear. Snowden sought citizenship in Russia because his government will not let him return to his home country without putting him on trial exposing mass surveillance that systematically violated the privacy rights of millions and even spurred modest reform."

Snowden—who potentially faces decades in U.S. prison for theft and Espionage Act charges—has previously said that he would return to the United States if he believed he would receive a fair trial.

A federal appeals court ruled two years ago that the NSA's warrantless surveillance of U.S. phone records—which Snowden exposed—was illegal. Snowden has continued to criticize years of impunity for the agency's violation of Americans' civil liberties.

"Our position has not changed. Mr. Snowden should return to the United States where he should face justice as any other American citizen would," Ned Price, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said Monday, also suggesting that the exile may be required to fight in Russia's war against Ukraine, despite his attorney's comments on the matter.

The Washington Post reported that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment, only saying that "since I believe there have been criminal charges brought against him, we would point you to the Department of Justice for any specifics on this."

Meanwhile, in Russia, when asked if Putin will meet with Snowden, presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reportedly said that "there are no such plans."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

American whistleblower Edward Snowden was among 72 foreign-born individuals granted Russian citizenship on Monday in a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin, just over seven months into Russia's war on Ukraine.

"After two years of waiting and nearly 10 years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family."

Snowden—who exposed the mass surveillance practices of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)—has lived in Russia since the summer of 2013, when the United States revoked his passport while he was attempting to travel from Hong Kong to Ecuador.

Shortly after Russia granted him permanent residency rights, Snowden announced in November 2020 that he and his wife, Lindsay Mills—who gave birth to their first son that year, and a second son earlier this year—were seeking dual citizenship.

"After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son," Snowden explained. "That's why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we're applying for dual U.S.-Russian citizenship."

"Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love—including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the states, so the whole family can be reunited," he added. "Our greatest wish is that, wherever our son lives, he feels at home."

In a tweet noting that statement and sharing a family photo, the 39-year-old said Monday that "after years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our SONS. After two years of waiting and nearly 10 years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family. I pray for privacy for them—and for us all."

Snowden attorney Anatoly Kucherena told Russian state-owned RIA Novosti on Monday that Mills is seeking citizenship. The lawyer also said that Snowden will not be forced to participate in the recently announced "partial mobilization" to send troops to Ukraine, as he has not served in Russia's army.

Not long before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Snowden accused the global news media of "pushing for war." Since the invasion, he has faced some criticism for his lack of comment on the conflict.

Just after the war began, he said that "I'm not suspended from the ceiling above a barrel of acid by a rope that burns a little faster every time I tweet, you concern-trolling ghouls. I've just lost any confidence I had that sharing my thinking on this particular topic continues to be useful, because I called it wrong."

In response to the citizenship news on Monday, Evan Greer, director of the U.S.-based digital rights group Fight for the Future, tweeted that "if the Biden administration dropped the charges against Snowden, Putin wouldn't be able to use him for a PR stunt, just sayin'."

Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola said: "Let's be clear. Snowden sought citizenship in Russia because his government will not let him return to his home country without putting him on trial exposing mass surveillance that systematically violated the privacy rights of millions and even spurred modest reform."

Snowden—who potentially faces decades in U.S. prison for theft and Espionage Act charges—has previously said that he would return to the United States if he believed he would receive a fair trial.

A federal appeals court ruled two years ago that the NSA's warrantless surveillance of U.S. phone records—which Snowden exposed—was illegal. Snowden has continued to criticize years of impunity for the agency's violation of Americans' civil liberties.

"Our position has not changed. Mr. Snowden should return to the United States where he should face justice as any other American citizen would," Ned Price, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said Monday, also suggesting that the exile may be required to fight in Russia's war against Ukraine, despite his attorney's comments on the matter.

The Washington Post reported that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment, only saying that "since I believe there have been criminal charges brought against him, we would point you to the Department of Justice for any specifics on this."

Meanwhile, in Russia, when asked if Putin will meet with Snowden, presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reportedly said that "there are no such plans."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

“I lost my family, my job, my identity, and my country,” Afghan journalist Anisa Shaheed told CPJ in a phone interview. A former Kabul-based reporter for TOLONews, Afghanistan’s largest local broadcaster, Shaheed is one of hundreds of journalists who fled Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover of the country in August 2021, fearing she would face retaliation for her work. 

Despite everything she left behind, Shaheed remains confident that her credibility among millions of Afghans remains intact—and should be put to use. From exile in the United States, she continues to produce critical reporting on Afghanistan for the Independent Farsi news site, focusing on her home province of Panjshir, a historical stronghold of Afghan resistance to the Taliban. 

Foreign governments also provided crucial political support, leaning on successive Afghan governments to allow for a relatively high degree of free expression. The result was “one of the most vibrant media industries in the region,” writes journalist Samiullah Mahdi in a 2021 paper for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. 

That once-thriving Afghan media now faces widespread censorship and intimidation under the Taliban. Journalists who remain in Afghanistan have faced imprisonment, alleged torture, beatings, and threats. (Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.) Women journalists have largely disappeared from the media, particularly outside of urban areas, and in May 2022, the Taliban ordered female broadcast reporters to cover their faces on air, reflecting their aim to remove women from public life.

‘We do not feel disconnected’ 

While local reporters in Afghanistan struggle under immense pressure, many exile journalists are working to continue the journalism they were once able to pursue at home. “What is left out of 20 years of investment and sacrifice in the [Afghan] media is the power of freedom of speech,” says Harun Najafizada, director of the U.K.-based Afghanistan International, the first international news broadcaster focused entirely on Afghanistan. “That is enshrined in the exiled media.”

Launched on August 15, 2021, the day that Kabul fell to the Taliban, Afghanistan International broadcasts and streams Dari-language radio and television programs to Afghanistan and around the world. Najafizada and his partners were able to get it up and running so quickly, he says, because they’d been seeking funding for years prior to the Taliban takeover, and increasingly pushed financiers as each province fell to the group in early August 2021.

In 2001, the Taliban-led government banned the internet to curb the spread of information and images that were “obscene, immoral and against Islam,” thereby cutting off Afghans from the outside world. 

Now the Taliban itself uses the internet to amplify its messages on social media. Yet Namrata Maheshwari, Asia Pacific Policy Counsel at the digital rights organization Access Now, says her organization has received reports that the Taliban continues to implement internet shutdowns in certain regions to stifle protest and resistance. “Connectivity will also be impacted by the destruction of telecommunications towers [before the Taliban takeover], and the Taliban’s financial and technical ability to keep the internet running,” Maheshwari told CPJ via email.

 A struggle for information

The internet is necessary not only to send information into Afghanistan, but also to get information out. Journalists in exile depend heavily on sources inside Afghanistan for fresh information about what’s happening on the ground. Covering Panjshir, where the Taliban has a history of cutting phone and internet access, is particularly difficult when faced with such communications barriers, Shaheed says. 

Sources for exile journalists include former colleagues who remained behind after the Taliban takeover, some of whom now find it unsafe to openly continue their work. Still, they are loyal to the profession and want to assist the flow of reliable information, says Bushra Seddique, an editorial fellow at The Atlantic magazine and former reporter for local newspapers in Afghanistan. From 2016 to 2019, Seddique studied journalism at Kabul University, where she began to establish her own network of contacts. She says journalism was a popular specialization: in 2021, 309 students graduated from the school’s journalism program.

As a precautionary measure, Seddique asks her journalist colleagues to delete evidence of their communications. “If [the] Taliban checks your phone and sees you are connected with a journalist in the U.S., it can be dangerous,” she says.

Other avenues of information often are closed off to exile journalists—or anyone else. In 2018, the previous Afghan government established the Access to Information Commission, which created a mechanism for anyone to request public information. Zahra Mousavi, head of the Access to Information Commission from its inception until the Taliban takeover, told CPJ that while it’s encouraging that the commission has not yet been dissolved, its offices remain closed to the public and the media, and its website is inaccessible. Like Mousavi, other former members of the commission have fled Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, she told CPJ via messaging app.

The country’s Access to Information Law, approved under the previous government, “is no longer valued or implemented by the Taliban,” Mousavi said. While the commission might eventually continue its operations as an independent directorate or under the Ministry of Information and Culture, it will not have sufficient funds to operate, she added.

More generally, the Taliban has escalated efforts to curb and censor any information that challenges its narrative of peace, stability, and security across the country. Shafi Karimi, an Afghan freelance journalist now in exile in France, told CPJ that Taliban spokesmen, for instance, had declined to provide information about the number of children who lost their lives during the past harsh winter. Ali Sher Shahir, an Afghan journalist currently living in exile in Germany, says that when an explosion struck a high school in a mostly Shia Hazara neighborhood of western Kabul in April, the Taliban refused to provide any information about the blast or the victims. Taliban spokesmen “call us puppet journalists,” says Shahir. “They accuse us of working for the interests of specific countries and of creating propaganda against them.”

Exile journalists who spoke to CPJ agreed that the rise of citizen journalism has helped them counter the Taliban’s restriction on the free flow of information, particularly on social media platforms. “We have received many messages from people in Afghanistan. They want to report with us,” Zahra Joya, chief editor and founder of the women-focused news website Rukhshana Media, told CPJ via video call from a hotel in central London, where she is lodged with 400 other Afghans. Joya, along with other journalists who spoke to CPJ, believes that challenging extensive misinformation and disinformation—from both inside and outside of Afghanistan—is a large part of her mission now.

Still at risk

While hundreds of Afghan journalists are living in exile, reporting remains a privilege: Only a small fraction have been able to continue their work from abroad. Afghanistan International is privately funded, while Rukshana relies on private donations it received through crowdfunding following Kabul’s fall (some journalists there are volunteers). 

Karimi, along with three other journalists in France, has spent the last several months trying to raise funds to establish the Afghan Journalists in Exile Network (AJEN), which seeks to cover human rights, women’s rights, and press-freedom issues—topics that are heavily censored within Afghanistan. In addition to supporting journalists who remain in Afghanistan, AJEN would seek to provide opportunities for those who fled their homeland. Exile Afghan journalists in Pakistan, for example, are in urgent need of financial, psychological, and professional support, according to a May 2022 report by Freedom Network, a press freedom group in Pakistan. 

One such journalist—who currently goes by the pseudonym Ahmed—told CPJ that he fled to Pakistan in the fall of 2021 after facing numerous threats and a physical attack from one Taliban member. The attacker recognized him due to his previous reporting, Ahmed says, and beat and chased him while he was taking his sick baby to a clinic shortly after the takeover. Previously, Ahmed had covered the Afghan war for a local broadcaster, as well as for several U.S. government-funded media projects and foreign publications. As Ahmed awaits approval for a  special immigrant visa to the United States, a process that will likely take years, he feels it’s unsafe to work as a freelancer in Pakistan. He gets a small, unstable income from assisting foreign reporters conduct short interviews and other research for their reports. 

Since August 2021, CPJ has placed Ahmed’s name on numerous evacuation lists of high-risk Afghan journalists shared with foreign countries and regional bodies, but without result. Meanwhile, his family lives with other Afghan refugees in a small rented house, which loses electricity roughly five hours a day. Private education is too expensive for his children, who cannot attend local government schools. They stay at home instead.

Ahmed’s difficulties echo those of other Afghan journalists struggling to start lives in new countries. The Freedom Network’s “Lives in Limbo” report on Afghan journalists in Pakistan found that 63% of respondents, the majority of them experienced journalists, felt they did not have adequate skills to continue working in the profession outside their home country. Most said they had problems with finances, housing, and healthcare. Many have sought assistance from CPJ, saying they cannot get jobs because they don’t have work authorization. Those in neighboring Pakistan have told CPJ they still feel at risk from the Taliban because of their work in the media. 

Those journalists who have resettled in the West and continue reporting also face their own set of challenges. They fear Taliban retaliation against not only their sources, but also their family members who remain in Afghanistan. While journalists who spoke to CPJ said that they had not yet observed a case of retaliation against a family member, the perceived threat still looms. 

Shaheed, for example, says she wakes up nightly to check WhatsApp, fearing that family members left behind will be harmed in retaliation for her reporting on alleged Taliban atrocities in Panjshir. She also mourns her previous life as a broadcast journalist in Afghanistan, where her reporting impacted a population with a high level of illiteracy. “People would knock on the doors of Moby Group [the company that owns TOLONews] asking to speak only with me,” she said. Now she’s 7,000 miles away, and the only way they can reach her is through cyberspace.

Sonali Dhawan is an Asia researcher at CPJ. Previously, she served as a program officer with the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights and worked with Save the Children, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International USA.

Waliullah Rahmani is an Asia researcher at the CPJ. From 2016 to the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, he was founder and director of Khabarnama Media, one of the first digital media organizations in Afghanistan.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Sonali Dhawan and Waliullah Rahmani.

The post Letter From Crimea: Stalin, Putin and the Exile Tartars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

Returnees living in Golog (Chinese, Guoluo) and Ngaba (Aba) counties, Tibetan-populated regions in western China’s Qinghai province, have recently been called in by police without warning, a Tibetan living in exile told RFA this week.

“They are being asked about possible involvement in political activities,” RFA’s source said, citing contacts in the region and speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Frequent meetings are being held to tell them how to live ‘a decent life’ under Chinese government rule and to stay away from sensitive political issues, and they are also being questioned over the phone from time to time,” the source said.

As part of a broadening Chinese campaign of political education, Tibetans returning from exile to their former homes have been taken on excursions to Chinese cities to show them what the authorities call evidence of progress and development under Communist Party rule, the source added.

Tibetans returning from exile to Tibet’s regional capital Lhasa are kept under particular scrutiny, another source in exile said, with their cell phones regularly inspected and monitored and their movements restricted around politically sensitive dates like the July 6 birthday of exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Efforts by China to bring Tibetans back to Tibet have escalated in recent years, with Chinese authorities reaching out to Tibetans living in India and Nepal about their plans to return and asking them what kind of work they are currently doing, sources say.

“The Chinese government tried to send me money back when India was experiencing its worst wave of COVID cases, but I wouldn’t take their money,” said a Tibetan man now living in India but formerly from Qinghai. “They called me and tried to convince me to return, and they also interrogated my parents at their homes back in Tibet,” he added.

COVID status

Chinese authorities in Sichuan are meanwhile demanding that local Tibetans report the COVID status of relatives living outside the country, threatening them with the loss of housing subsidies and other government support if they fail to disclose the information, sources told RFA in earlier reports.

Tibetan families must also reveal the cell phone numbers and social media accounts of their relatives living outside of China, one source said.

China closely tracks communications from Tibetans living in Tibetan areas of China to relatives living abroad in an effort to block news of protests and other politically sensitive information from reaching international audiences, sources say.

Formerly an independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force more than 70 years ago, and the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers later fled into exile in India and countries around the world following a failed 1959 national uprising against China’s rule.

Tibetans living in Tibet frequently complain of human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at eradicating their national and cultural identity.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok and Lobsang Gelek.

Uyghurs demonstrated in the capital cities of European Union countries, Turkey, Australia, Japan, and Canada, and in New York and Washington, D.C., to commemorate the crackdown in Urumqi, which became a catalyst for the Chinese government’s efforts to repress Uyghur culture, language and religion through a mass surveillance and internment campaign.

“We gathered here to commemorate the massacre that occurred on July 5 in Urumqi and to remember the ongoing genocide taking place in East Turkestan today,” said Hidayetulla Oghuzhan, chairman of East Turkestan Organizational Alliance in Istanbul, using Uyghurs’ preferred name for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

“We call upon the international community to not to remain silent and to take action against this genocide,” he said.

In Paris, one protester told RFA that he lost many of his friends in the July 5 clash and that remembering that day was very important for him.

Smaller demonstrations were held in other cities.

About 15 members of the Australian Uyghur Tangritagh Women’s Association protested outside a mall in Adelaide to mark the anniversary of the massacre and demand that the Australian government ban the importation of goods made with Uyghur forced labor in the XUAR, according to India’s The Print online news service.

Muslims in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka and in Narayanganj district, about 16 kilometers (10 miles) southeast of the city, also staged protests against the Chinese government’s oppression of Uyghurs, according to the same news source.

About 200 people died and 1,700 were injured in three days of violence between ethnic minority Uyghurs and Han Chinese that began on July 5, 2009, in Xinjiang’s largest city, Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi), according to China’s official figures. Uyghur rights groups say the numbers of dead and injured were much higher, however.

The unrest was set off by a clash between Uyghur and Han Chinese toy factory workers in southern China’s Guangdong province in late June that year that left two Uyghurs dead. News of the deaths reached Uyghurs in Urumqi, sparking a peaceful protest the spiraled into beatings and killings of Chinese, with deaths occurring on both sides. Chinese mobs later staged revenge attacks on Uyghurs in the city’s streets with sticks and metal bars.

‘We mourn the past’

Dolkun Isa, president of Germany-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), called July 5 a day of mourning.

“We have to remember that day,” he told RFA on Tuesday. “That day is the turning point in from China’s ethnic segregation and discrimination policy to the beginning of the genocidal ethnic policy. 2009 is the starting point of the ongoing ethnic genocide since 2016.”

In late 2016 and 2017, authorities ramped up their clampdown on Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the XUAR through abductions and arbitrary arrests and detentions in what China called “re-education” camps or prisons.

An estimated 1.8 million members of these groups have been held in internment camps, where detainees who were later freed reported widespread maltreatment, including severe human rights abuses, torture, rape and forced labor.

The U.S. and the parliaments of the EU have said the repression of Uyghurs in the XUAR is a genocide and crime against humanity.

The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), based in Washington D.C., demanded the protection of Uyghur refugees and asylum seekers residing abroad.

“Saving Uyghur refugees is the least that the world can do for Uyghurs, as we experience the 6th year of an ongoing genocide,” UHRP Executive Director Omer Kanat said in a statement. “It is urgent that all countries recognize the threat posed to Uyghurs abroad, and develop their own resettlement programs on an emergency basis.”

Because China has sought the forcible return of some Uyghurs living abroad, UHRP said governments should immediately implement resettlement programs for those at risk of refoulement — forcing refugees to return to a country where they will likely face persecution.

UHRP called on the U.S. Congress to pass the Uyghur Human Rights Protection Act, which would make Uyghurs and other persecuted Turkic peoples eligible for priority refugee processing by the U.N., designating them as “Priority 2” refugees of special humanitarian concern.

The Washington, D.C-based Campaign for Uyghurs said the Urumqi Massacre was a reminder of the brutality of the Chinese government and the loss that Uyghurs have experienced in their fight for equality.

“The world no longer believes China’s whitewashed tales stating the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is innocent and a victim in the Urumqi massacre,” Rushan Abbas, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. “While we mourn the past, we continue to fight for the living, fight for the future of this free and democratic world. Justice is on our side reclaiming this correct history.”

“We labor ensuring those who perished in 2009 will not have sacrificed their lives in vain,” she said. “With courage and hard work, justice shall prevail.”

Translated by Mamatjan Juma for RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mamatjan Juma for RFA Uyghur.

Ear Channa had been living in Norway after he was granted asylum there in 2005 for criticizing the Cambodian government’s attempts to solve a border dispute with Vietnam.

While abroad, he came to support the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), which Cambodia’s Supreme Court dissolved in 2017. The move allowed Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) to claim all 125 seats in the National Assembly during general elections the following year, kicking off a five-year crackdown on political opponents to the CPP.

The Candlelight Party grew over the past year to become Cambodia’s largest opposition party. Candlelight officials have complained for weeks about their party’s candidates being harassed by officials supporting the ruling CPP.

Ear Channa came back to Cambodia last week to serve as the vice president of Candlelight's organization in Takeo province in the country’s south.

He was arrested while trying to apply for a passport in Phnom Penh and sent to detention in Prey Sar Prison on charges of conspiracy to commit treason for his actions two years ago, when he allegedly disturbed the social order to such a degree as to affect the nation’s security.

Candlelight Party Vice President Son Chhay told RFA’s Khmer Service that Ear Channa is the second person affiliated with the party to have been arrested after voluntarily repatriating. He expressed concern over the arrest, calling it another example of intimidation against his party.

“Why are they making these kinds of arrests during the election campaign period?” he said. The campaign period started on May 21 and will end on June 3. “This is all intimidation to disturb the election.”

CPP spokesman Sok Ey San said the arrest and the election were not related.

“This is not pressure against an opponent. It has nothing to do with the election. Don’t connect this case to the election campaign,” he said, and cited the pending 2020 warrant.

Sok Ey San also said that an active election campaign period cannot prevent the court from issuing warrants or arresting criminals.

Monk excommunicated

In another move against the opposition, a Buddhist monk in the northern province of Siem Reap said he was removed from his office for his support for the Candlelight Party.

Heng Kim Lay raised funds for the party which caused several pagodas to deny him entrance. He left the party on May 28, but the pagodas refused to bring him back into the fold.

“As a monk, I have political rights, and I should not be a victim,” he told RFA. Supporters have urged him to flee to Thailand, he said, but he has decided not to.

RFA was unable to reach Ministry of Cults and Religions spokesman Seng Somoni for comment. 

Removing a monk for his political views is illegal, according to Am Sam Ath of the Cambodian League for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights NGO.

“Monks have the right to support any political party. He has done nothing wrong,” he said.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

The Chinese government has repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s India-based exile government, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), of pushing for independence, Tsering said. “But contrary to what the Chinese Communist Party says in their propaganda, the Dalai Lama and the Middle Way approach contain no elements of separatism at all.”

Tsering’s remarks followed Beijing’s condemnation of a visit this week by Uzra Zeya, U.S. special coordinator for Tibetan issues, to Dharamsala, India, seat of the CTA, and of her meeting with the Dalai Lama on Thursday in which she promised U.S. support for greater freedoms for Tibetans living under Chinese rule.

Speaking to RFA, Tsering said the Chinese government’s constant protest of the CTA’s diplomatic engagement with other countries has only helped to publicize the Tibetans’ struggle around the world.

“The Chinese government may fool their own citizens, but they cannot fool the global audience,” Tsering said. “Our Middle Way policy is an approach adopted in consideration of resolving the issue of Tibet peacefully and of bringing about peaceful coexistence between the Tibetan and the Chinese people,” the exile leader added.

Formerly an independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force more than 70 years ago. Tibetans frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at eradicating their national identity and culture.

In the debate over how best to advance Tibetans’ rights, the CTA and the Dalai Lama have adopted a policy approach called the Middle Way, which accepts Tibet’s present status as a part of China, but urges greater cultural and religious freedom, including strengthened language rights, for Tibetans living under Beijing’s rule.

Uzra Zeya now travels to Kathmandu for high-level talks in Nepal, where Nepal’s government since 1995 has stopped issuing refugee cards to Tibetans fleeing across the border from Tibet.

Nepal is seen by China as a partner in its Belt and Road Initiative to boost global trade through infrastructure investment, and Nepal’s government has cited promises of millions of dollars of Chinese investment in restricting Tibetan activities in the country.

Nepal’s close political ties with China have left the estimated 20,000 Tibetan refugees living in the Himalayan country uncertain of their status, vulnerable to abuses of their rights, and restricted in their freedoms of movement and expression, rights groups say.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Palden Gyal.

From exile in Australia, Tursun did his best to counter China’s efforts to wipe away Uyghur culture by creating artistic works that governmental policies could not destroy.

On Sept. 2, 2018, he raised the curtains on the Twelve Muqam Festival at Sydney’s Riverside Theatre, where he performed the “Rak Muqam,” the first suite of the “Twelve Muqam,” a quintessential Uyghur work that includes sung poetry, stories and dancing.

In doing so, Tursun was continuing a musical tradition one thousand years old. Until that day, muqam had never been performed on a major stage in Australia.

Tursun is among a group of Uyghur artists, now living in different parts of the world, who are all working to preserve their identity and culture and call greater attention to the plight of their people back home.

A time of unrelenting darkness

Tursun, who plays several instruments, including the Uyghur dutar and sattar, is joined by singer Rahima Mahmut in the U.K. and artist Gulnaz Tursun (no relation to Shohret Tursun) in Kazakhstan in using art to push back against a sense of hopelessness that pervades the Uyghur exile community.

The three expressed similar sentiments about the purpose of their works during interviews with RFA, saying it was their duty to instill hope and confidence in Uyghurs through their artistic performances and creations.

Shohret Tursun, who has lived in Australia since 1999, said he’s dedicating his life to preserving and disseminating the cultural relics like the “Twelve Muqam,” which is a symbol of the Uyghur nation. He has played in Australia, Japan and in other countries. The performance of his Australian Uyghur Muqam Ensemble in Sydney on July 20, 2019, was streamlined by Uyghurs around the world.

Mahmut sings mournful melodies of Xinjiang to give voice to the Uyghurs unable to speak out. And Gulnaz Tursun creates works of art on canvas to inspire Uyghur teenagers to hope for a better future at a time of unrelenting darkness.

Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained an estimated 1.8 million of Uyghurs and other native Turkic peoples in a vast network of internment camps for “re-education,” while others outside the prison and camp systems live under constant high-tech surveillance and monitoring.

“The Chinese Communist Party has covered our homeland in blood,” Shohret Tursun said in a speech during the opening ceremony of the Muqam Ensemble.

“China is oppressing us to an unprecedented level, restricting our religion, banning our language, devastating our culture and arts. They are murdering our Uyghur artists. Today, we have done everything we can to found the Australia Uyghur Muqam Ensemble as a way of honoring our ancestors and paving a new path for our descendants.”

Tursun told RFA that he hopes to inspire a new generation of Uyghur performing artists around the world to carry on the torch of Uyghur musical and singing traditions.

‘Music is a tool’

In addition to being a performing artist, Rahima Mahmut is the U.K. representative of the World Uyghur Congress and an advisor to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international, cross-party alliance of legislators and parliamentarians working to combat the rise of authoritarian China.

For the past 20 years, Mahmut has been using her artistic talent to make the Uyghur voice known through music, while drawing the attention of the international community to the crisis in Xinjiang.

“There is no place that is like a person’s home,” she said. “You cannot compare [home] to anything else. It has been five years since my contact with my family was cut off. Now I can’t even remember the faces of the people I love most, but music is a tool that allows me to turn suffering into strength.”

Mahmut said she always loved to sing but she majored in petrochemical engineering at Dalian University of Technology near China’s Pacific Coast. As she searched for a job after graduation, she experienced firsthand the unequal treatment of Uyghurs at the hands of Chinese state institutions.

She planned to work in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi), but she could not get a job there due to severe state discrimination against Uyghurs. She also could not find an acceptable job offer in her hometown of Ghulja (Yining).

But it was the massacre of Uyghur youth in Ghulja, where she had been born and raised, on Feb. 5, 1997, that drove her decision to leave Xinjiang for the U.K.

“The hope for the preservation of our people, the preservation and flourishing of our culture and history, and the future existence of our homeland, can be a reality if we fight for these ideals in our lifetimes,” Mahmut told RFA. “This is why I always say that hopelessness is of the devil. We must be hopeful. Our arts provide us with hope.”

“There is a proverb among our people: Despair is the work of the devil!” she said. “Our art also gives us hope, so I have tried to give hope and confidence to our people during these times of tribulation through art and performance.”

Mahmut, who has lived in the U.K. since 2000, has performed Uyghur songs at major concerts and cultural festivals in the U.K. and across Europe and the United States.

She’s says her life as an activist began on her first day in the U.K., when she explained the Uyghur persecution to her taxi driver.

Symbolic songs

Today, Mahmut speaks about the Uyghur genocide with U.K. government officials, members of Parliament, representatives from Jewish, Muslim and Christian institutions, major U.K. universities, media organizations such as the BBC and Al Jazeera, and documentary filmmakers.

She has also worked as an interpreter at the Uyghur Tribunal in London, which issued a nonbinding determination on Dec. 9, 2021, that China was committing genocide against the Uyghurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang.

Mahmut said her urgency to showcase the beauty of Uyghur art and music to the world intensified in 2017 when the Chinese government forced assimilation campaign began in earnest.

In addition to performing on stage in the Uyghur language, Mahmud also translated the powerful messages within Uyghur songs, explaining for instance the significance of grief expressed in the lyrics.

She said she recently released a recording of the Uyghur folk song “Lewen Yarlar” (Beautiful Lovers) to remind her audience of the suffering Uyghurs are experiencing and the persistence of their love for their homeland.

The song describes the lives of Uyghur refugees after they fled communist Chinese aggression and oppression.

“‘Lewen Yarlar’ is one such symbolic song,” Mahmut said. “The lyrics go: ‘We found a place in the mountains, finding none in the garden, refusing to bow to the enemy.’”

One of the most powerful songs Mahmut often sings during her performances is “Yearn for Freedom.” The song was adopted from a poem by the late Uyghur poet, writer and political thinker Abdurehim Otkur (1923-1995), a towering figure in modern Uyghur history whose ideas on struggling for national freedom still reverberate among the Uyghur people.

Otkur expressed the Uyghurs longing for freedom:

Neither have I patience, nor forbearance,
A boiling pot is now my beating heart,
An erupting volcano is my heart’s desire
From that volcano I yearn for freedom.

The Uyghur spirit

Visual artist Gulnaz Tursun, who was born into a Uyghur family of intellectuals in the village of Bayseyit in Almaty, Kazakhstan, said she also wants to instill confidence in young Uyghurs through her artistic creations and to encourage them to have faith in the future.

“Believe, the dawn of freedom shall arrive!” Gulnaz Tursun said when asked about the message she wants her paintings to convey to Uyghurs.

“I want to give our children the confidence that we are not helpless, that the Uyghurs are also a great people who have built powerful empires in history, and that the Uyghurs will be able to overcome these difficult times and have a future of freedom,” she said.

After graduating from a Uyghur high school in her village, Gulnaz Tursan attended the Ural Tansykbayev Institute of Crafts and Arts in Almaty in 2002 and was admitted the same year to the Faculty of Design of the Kazakh Academy of Architects and Construction. She graduated with honors and embarked on a career in the art world, participating in many exhibitions of the works of young artists.

Speaking about the impact of the Uyghur genocide on her work, she said the darkness that has befallen Uyghurs in Xinjiang prompted her to shift her style to one that seeks to inspire optimism and confidence in Uyghurs’ future.

In the process, she said, she has created and distributed a number of inspirational digital works on social media, including “Hope,” “Don’t Forget Your Identity,” “Spring,” “The Cute Child of My Motherland’s Free Future” and “Unity.”

With her painting “Spring,” for instance, Tursun said she wants to convey the powerful message that dark clouds from the sky will disappear, and blue sky will arrive.

“Our birds will fly high and free again. Our fruit trees will blossom again. And we shall enjoy the fruits of freedom again,” she said.

Tursun’s previous artistic creations depicted daily Uyghur life, such as woman fetching water or having a conversation over tea. But since 2017, her paintings have mostly been about “inspiring and motivating the young people to have faith for a bright future by reminding them the glorious history of our nation,” she said.

“In order to have positive impact on our young generation, every good thing starts with confidence, so I made designs with confidence-boosting slogans like ‘Have Faith, the Dawn of Freedom Shall Arrive,’” she said.

“I created these artworks to instill confidence in our freedom for the future generation,” she said. “These artworks I created are all based on Uyghur spirit and Uyghur characteristics.”

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gulchehra Hoja, Nuriman Abdureshid and Mamatjan Juma.

Tsering — the Sikyong or elected head of Tibet’s India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration — began his visit on Tuesday with talks held with Uzra Zeya, the State Department’s Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues. The Department also hosted a lunch for Tsering attended by ambassadors from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries.

Participating in Tsering’s meeting on Thursday with Pelosi were International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) board chairman Richard Gere and acting president Bhuchung Tsering; Zeegyab Rinpoche, abbot of the India-based branch of Tibet’s Tashilhunpo monastery; U.S. congressman Jim McGovern; and Namgyal Choedup, representative of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Speaking to RFA after the meeting, Choedup noted this week’s visit to Washington was the first by Tsering, a former speaker of Tibet’s exile parliament in Dharamsala, India, who won a closely fought April 11, 2021 election to become Sikyong held in Tibetan communities worldwide.

Choedup described Thursday’s talks as “decisive and constructive,” calling Tibetans grateful for Pelosi’s continued support. “The meeting also discussed collective decisions on future courses of action regarding how to resolve the Sino-Tibetan conflict,” Choedup said.

Formerly an independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force more than 70 years ago, and Tibetans frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at eradicating their national and cultural identity.

“We are trying to burst the myths or narratives that the Chinese government has been presenting for many decades about Tibet being a part of China, which is not true,” said ICT board chairman Richard Gere, also speaking to RFA on Thursday.

“And we are trying to push for a genuine dialogue [between China] and His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” Gere added.

The Dalai Lama and Tibet’s India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration have proposed a “Middle Way” approach to talks with Beijing that now accepts Tibet’s status as a part of China but urges greater freedoms for Tibetan language, religious, and cultural rights.

Nine rounds of talks were previously held between envoys of exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and high-level Chinese officials beginning in 2002, but stalled in 2010 and were never resumed.

Congressional supporters of the Dalai Lama “would love to have the Dalai Lama address a joint session of the U.S. Congress by video," said representative from Texas Michael McCaul, a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

”The American people stand with the Tibetan people and with the Dalai Lama, who is one of the greatest spiritual leaders of our time,” McCaul said.

Penpa Tsering ends his Washington visit Friday evening with a panel discussion held at George Washington University on the Tibet-China dialogue and a public talk with the D.C.-area Tibetan community. He will then visit Tibet communities in Philadelphia and New York before moving on to meetings in Canada.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA's Tibetan Service.

Tsering – the Sikyong or elected head of Tibet’s India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration – will be in Washington until April 29 at the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and will be following his talks there with visits next week to Canada and Germany.

Monday’s meeting with Uzra Zeya, Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues, was followed by a lunch hosted at the State Department and attended by seven foreign ambassadors, including ambassadors from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Special Coordinator Zeya has been active in supporting Tibet’s struggle for greater freedoms under China’s rule ever since her appointment to the role last year, Tsering said in remarks following their discussions.

“She had her first virtual meeting with the Representative of the Office of Tibet in Washington D.C., and has met with other groups such as the International Campaign for Tibet and the Tibet Fund, and has also been interviewed by various Tibetan media outlets such as Radio Free Asia,” Tsering said.

Former State Department special representatives were never so visible or spoke so openly in raising concerns over Tibetan issues, Tsering said.

Discussions on how to resume talks between China and Tibet’s exile government will continue “and cannot be resolved in one day,” the Sikyong said, reiterating the CTA’s support for a “Middle Way” approach that accepts Tibet’s status as a part of China but urges greater freedoms for Tibetan language, religious, and cultural rights.

“We urge the Tibetans inside Tibet not to lose hope, as we in exile will continue to do our best to advocate for Tibet,” Tsering added.

Nine rounds of talks were previously held between envoys of exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and high-level Chinese officials beginning in 2002, but stalled in 2010 and were never resumed.

Also meeting with Zeya on Monday, Zeegyab Rinpoche — abbot of the South India branch of Tibet’s Tashilhunpo monastery, seat of Tibet’s missing Panchen Lama — said that he and Tsering urged Zeya in their talks to “take a stronger stand and strengthen efforts to resolve the Tibetan issue and His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet.”

The U.S. must now also implement the Tibet Policy and Support Act, U.S. legislation pushing for U.S. access to Panchen Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who vanished into Chinese custody as a young boy in 1995 after being recognized by the Dalai Lama as the previous Panchen Lama’s successor, Zeegyab Rinpoche said.

Following the Panchen Lama’s disappearance, the Chinese government quickly put forward its own candidate, Gyaincain Norbu, calling him the “real” Panchen Lama. Norbu remains widely unpopular among Tibetans, who consider him a puppet of Beijing.

A significant religious figure

April 25 marked the 33^rd birthday of the missing Panchen Lama, and was celebrated by Tibetan exile communities around the world. It was also observed this year by a large gathering in Ladakh, a northwestern Indian territory that shares many Buddhist traditions with Tibet.

Commenting on Monday’s observance, Thiksey Rinpoche — a former member of the Indian parliament’s upper house — called the Panchen Lama “a very significant religious figure not just for Tibetans but for Buddhists everywhere.”

“Tibet and Ladakh share similar religious and cultural traditions, and any problems faced by Tibetans are also problems faced by all Himalayan communities,” Thiksey Rinpoche said.

“The [well-being of] the Panchen Lama remains a critical issue,” agreed Jamyang Tsering Namgyal, a member of India’s parliament. “It is also obvious that the Chinese government will object if the Dalai Lama himself is reincarnated in India, and as an Indian I feel we must be concerned about this.”

“This is not just a concern for Tibetans alone. The Indian government must address this issue too,” Namgyal said.

In a statement Monday, the U.S. State Department urged authorities in the People’s Republic of China to account for the missing Panchen Lama’s whereabouts and well-being, “and to allow him to fully exercise his human rights and fundamental freedoms, in line with the PRC’s international commitments.”

“The United States supports Tibetans’ religious freedom and their unique religious, cultural, and linguistic identity, including Tibetans’ right to select, educate, and venerate their own leaders, like the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, according to their own beliefs and without government interference,” the State Department said.

Formerly an independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force more than 70 years ago, and the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers later fled into exile in India and other countries around the world following a failed 1959 national uprising against China’s rule.

Tibetans living in Tibet frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at eradicating their national and cultural identity.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA’s Tibetan Service.

Tsering – the Sikyong or elected head of Tibet’s India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration – will be in Washington until April 29 at the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and will be following his talks there with visits next week to Canada and Germany.

Monday’s meeting with Uzra Zeya, Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues, was followed by a lunch hosted at the State Department and attended by seven foreign ambassadors, including ambassadors from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Special Coordinator Zeya has been active in supporting Tibet’s struggle for greater freedoms under China’s rule ever since her appointment to the role last year, Tsering said in remarks following their discussions.

“She had her first virtual meeting with the Representative of the Office of Tibet in Washington D.C., and has met with other groups such as the International Campaign for Tibet and the Tibet Fund, and has also been interviewed by various Tibetan media outlets such as Radio Free Asia,” Tsering said.

Former State Department special representatives were never so visible or spoke so openly in raising concerns over Tibetan issues, Tsering said.

Discussions on how to resume talks between China and Tibet’s exile government will continue “and cannot be resolved in one day,” the Sikyong said, reiterating the CTA’s support for a “Middle Way” approach that accepts Tibet’s status as a part of China but urges greater freedoms for Tibetan language, religious, and cultural rights.

“We urge the Tibetans inside Tibet not to lose hope, as we in exile will continue to do our best to advocate for Tibet,” Tsering added.

Nine rounds of talks were previously held between envoys of exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and high-level Chinese officials beginning in 2002, but stalled in 2010 and were never resumed.

Also meeting with Zeya on Monday, Zeegyab Rinpoche — abbot of the South India branch of Tibet’s Tashilhunpo monastery, seat of Tibet’s missing Panchen Lama — said that he and Tsering urged Zeya in their talks to “take a stronger stand and strengthen efforts to resolve the Tibetan issue and His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet.”

The U.S. must now also implement the Tibet Policy and Support Act, U.S. legislation pushing for U.S. access to Panchen Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who vanished into Chinese custody as a young boy in 1995 after being recognized by the Dalai Lama as the previous Panchen Lama’s successor, Zeegyab Rinpoche said.

Following the Panchen Lama’s disappearance, the Chinese government quickly put forward its own candidate, Gyaincain Norbu, calling him the “real” Panchen Lama. Norbu remains widely unpopular among Tibetans, who consider him a puppet of Beijing.

A significant religious figure

April 25 marked the 33^rd birthday of the missing Panchen Lama, and was celebrated by Tibetan exile communities around the world. It was also observed this year by a large gathering in Ladakh, a northwestern Indian territory that shares many Buddhist traditions with Tibet.

Commenting on Monday’s observance, Thiksey Rinpoche — a former member of the Indian parliament’s upper house — called the Panchen Lama “a very significant religious figure not just for Tibetans but for Buddhists everywhere.”

“Tibet and Ladakh share similar religious and cultural traditions, and any problems faced by Tibetans are also problems faced by all Himalayan communities,” Thiksey Rinpoche said.

“The [well-being of] the Panchen Lama remains a critical issue,” agreed Jamyang Tsering Namgyal, a member of India’s parliament. “It is also obvious that the Chinese government will object if the Dalai Lama himself is reincarnated in India, and as an Indian I feel we must be concerned about this.”

“This is not just a concern for Tibetans alone. The Indian government must address this issue too,” Namgyal said.

In a statement Monday, the U.S. State Department urged authorities in the People’s Republic of China to account for the missing Panchen Lama’s whereabouts and well-being, “and to allow him to fully exercise his human rights and fundamental freedoms, in line with the PRC’s international commitments.”

“The United States supports Tibetans’ religious freedom and their unique religious, cultural, and linguistic identity, including Tibetans’ right to select, educate, and venerate their own leaders, like the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, according to their own beliefs and without government interference,” the State Department said.

Formerly an independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force more than 70 years ago, and the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers later fled into exile in India and other countries around the world following a failed 1959 national uprising against China’s rule.

Tibetans living in Tibet frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at eradicating their national and cultural identity.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA’s Tibetan Service.

As she got older, her mother would tell her more and more about the back story, bringing it up in the normal course of conversation or if they were in the car and the girl asked a question about her grandparents still in Xinjiang.

“I felt really sad,” the girl said about when her parents starting telling her about the crackdown.

The girl, who spoke on condition of anonymity and did not want to identify her parents to avoid endangering relatives in Xinjiang, said that the pain hit home with her when schoolmates would talk about where they were from originally.

When the girl thought about her family coming from Xinjiang, other questions would arise, such as why her grandmother would never come to visit her family in the U.S.

Her voice grows weaker and begins to trail off whenever she is asked about her hometown.

“It does affect my voice,” the girl told RFA. “Sometimes if people ask me where I’m from, it’s going to be sometimes difficult because they don’t know much about us [Uyghurs], and because they think that China is like a perfect place. They don’t know about the government and everything.”

“They’re going to think you’re crazy, she added.

It’s never easy for teenagers and children to discuss tragedies in their families, nor is it easy for parents to broach such topics with their offspring.

Uyghurs, who are being persecuted as an ethnic and religious group by the Chinese government, face a common challenge of figuring out how best to talk with young people about the 21st-century atrocities occurring in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

Uyghur children, born and raised in the diaspora, are asking their parents why they can’t see their grandparents, why Uyghurs in Xinjiang face genocide, and why they can’t visit their homeland.

Uyghur adults living abroad, frustrated by the inability to stop the atrocities despite widespread and credible reports about right abuses those living in Xinjiang face, say they are unsure about how to discuss the genocide with their children and sometimes falter when asked why it is happening.

At least 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are believed to have been held in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017, purportedly to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities.

Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers. The government has denied repeated allegations from multiple sources that it has tortured people in the camps or mistreated other Muslims living in Xinjiang.

The United States and parliaments of several Western countries have declared that China’s repression and maltreatment of the Uyghurs amount to genocide and crimes against humanity.

What should they be told?

Although children’s questions may seem simple to parents, what they are actually asking is about the history of Uyghurs, Chinese politics, and how to ensure the existence of Uyghurs abroad, said Suriyye Kashgary, co-founder of Ana Care, a Uyghur language school in northern Virginia with about 100 students ranging in age from five to 15 years old.

“They always ask questions like “Why isn’t my grandma here? Why isn’t my grandpa here? Where are my relatives? My grandpa isn’t around. My grandma isn’t around. Where are my relatives?” she said

“What I’ve been able to learn is that [many of] the children are a bit confused because some parents answer their kids’ questions, while some parents don’t speak with them in much detail at all,” she said.

While some Uyghur parents do not disclose information to their children about the genocide, others do talk about it and take them to local demonstrations against China’s repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

“There are many disagreements over whether it’s OK to explain some things to the children or not,” Kashgary said. “Some people argue that we shouldn’t let [the genocide] negatively impact their psyches, that children shouldn’t be sad about these things, and that they shouldn’t live under such stress from a young age.”

At her school, Kashgary expects teachers to be comprehensive, balanced, and vigilant as they work with the children, given the teachers’ need to be well-informed on a range of topics, she told RFA.

Uyghurs in the diaspora, who are indirect victims of China’s genocide, have been demanding justice by exposing the oppression of their families to others, including to the media.

But as a collective group of genocide victims, they have not been able to fully shield their children from the emotional suffering and negative psychological influences of the ongoing atrocities targeting Uyghurs.

Zubayra Shamseden, four of whose family members were killed or tortured by the Chinese government as part of the Ghulja Massacre in 1997, and who has relatives currently being held in internment camps in Xinjiang, works as China’s outreach coordinator for the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project and as a Uyghur human rights activist.

“When it comes to the Uyghur genocide, it’s a fact that it is tearing up and impacting the lives of Uyghurs on the outside in the diaspora as well,” she said. “It’s not just adults — the shadows of the Uyghur genocide are affecting children and teenagers.”

Shamseden says that Uyghurs in the diaspora are dealing with a kind of emotional genocide and that trying to hide the genocide from the children will not solve the issue.

“It is likely only those parents who are unable to accept [the genocide] psychologically or deal with it properly themselves who worry that letting their children know about it may place undue psychological pressure on them,” she said. “In fact, children can learn about [genocide] in many different ways.”

Shamseden’s children, who were born and raised outside Xinjiang, also have become activists, participating in events protesting the Chinese government’s crackdown on Uyghurs.

“Parents have a responsibility to show children the way, lead them down [the right] paths, take them to proper activities,” she said.

Part of their identity

Kashgary, who has been a Uyghur language instructor for nine years, believes that understanding the widespread atrocities and genocide is an important part of Uyghur children learning about their identity and the world.

It is important for Uyghur children to learn about their history, culture, and the current situation in Xinjiang so they can understand the challenges facing their families and the ethnic group as a whole, she said.

Kashgary said she takes extra care to ensure that classroom instructors avoid encouraging racism or hatred when discussing difficult and sensitive topics like genocide and to provide students with scholarly, fact-based materials.

Uyghur language schools around the world all face the obstacle of how to educate children about the genocide with a lack of standardized materials and appropriate manuals for the student’s psychological well-being.

Teaching Uyghur children about genocide is a difficult task for educators and parents alike.

Nevertheless, it is important to raise Uyghur children in the diaspora so that they know about the genocide facing Uyghurs, they are taught to support Uyghur activism, and work in support of human, social, and political rights, Shamseden said.

Testimonies by Uyghurs who have been detained in internment camps but later freed have been particularly influential in the global response to the crisis.

Camp survivors have real-life experience in understanding the psychological impact of the genocide and its effect on victims’ families, including children.

Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who was detained in one of the camps but now lives in Paris, said she has never hidden the brutal, abusive treatment she experiences from her daughters and that she takes every opportunity she can to tell her story.

“The Chinese [authorities] told me I couldn’t speak about anything, that if I said anything my relatives in the homeland would end up threatened and in danger, that I needed to think about the people who were going to stay behind in the homeland,” Haitiwaji said.

But Haitiwaji noted the importance of speaking about the horrors of the camps as China wages a disinformation campaign to whitewash and justify the genocide, and said that Uyghur parents must protect their children from the propaganda by telling them the truth.

“Even now — more than two years since I came here — whenever we’re eating or drinking tea, if some words or movements come up that remind me of the camp, I immediately, at the right moment, tell the story,” she said. “I talk about the situation. I haven’t hidden anything.”

“Look at the slanderous things the Chinese government is writing about us,” she said. “Of course, if I don’t explain things to my kids, I wonder whether they’re going to believe the slander.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespeople have dismissed reports about the genocide of the Uyghurs as the “lie of the century” and denied all accusations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

All Uyghur parents must tell their children about the genocide and rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang, Haitiwaji said.

“If we don’t tell them, they’re going to know nothing about the oppression our people are facing,” she said. “They might even come to believe the brainwashing lies of the Chinese government.”

Upstanders, not bystanders

Psychologist Nechama Liss-Levenson, who has a private practice in Washington, D.C., has published numerous scholarly articles on family relationships and how children deal with trauma and loss.

She recently began taking part in the Uyghur Wellness Initiative, a collaborative program sponsored by groups including the Uyghur Human Rights Project and Uyghur American Association, to treat and prevent the effects of genocide on the mental health of diaspora Uyghurs.

“The Uyghur genocide affects every Uyghur,” she said. “We all know it’s not easy to teach kids about genocide and other terrible tragedies.”

Such discussions cannot be one-time events, but rather part of ongoing conversations along with teaching children about what they can do so they do not feel powerless, she said.

“One thing that I think is important is to teach children about resilience and activism — without using these words — so that they don’t feel completely helpless,” Liss-Levinson said. “One of the things that you might teach them — not all at once but over many conversations at different ages and stages — is that in their lives here at school, they should be upstanders and not bystanders.”

Thomas Wenzel, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria who has conducted research on the effect of the Uyghur genocide in exile communities, said Uyghur parents in the diaspora struggle to deal with the genocide as well, wondering what has become of relatives in Xinjiang and despairing over shortcomings in efforts by the international community that have not yet ended the repression.

“When parents are distressed, it is more difficult for them to focus on the children. … The children feel it, and they feel abandoned,” he said.

Wenzel suggests that Uyghur diaspora communities collectively tackle the issue.

“It’s important that it’s a community process,” he said. “From psychology and psychiatry, we know now that if something very bad like genocide or war happens, it’s very important that the community starts the process to confront integrate what has happened, that there is a community project.”

Wenzel cited the example of communities in Myanmar where traditional storytellers with hand puppets acted out negative events, followed by group discussions.

“They brought it out into the open, and there was a space to work on it,” he said. “It’s important that this is by the whole community so that everyone is supporting each other, and no one is left alone.”

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gulchehra Hoja.

I remember that day — February 25, 1986. I was then a teenager. My family stood outside the iron gates of Malacañang Palace among a massive wave of people armed with yellow ribbons, flowers and rosaries.

After a four-day uprising, we heard on the radio that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family had fled the country.

Ramming through the gates of the now forlorn presidential palace, people found signs of a hurtled retreat. Hundreds of pairs of shoes, gowns and other evidence of the Marcoses’ profligacy had been abandoned. Documents and bullets were scattered on the floor.

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They’re gone, the Marcoses!

People burst into song. The poignant “Bayan Ko” (My Country) — the metaphor of a caged bird that yearns to be free — was the anthem of the EDSA revolution: People Power.

The Marcoses had been obliterated from our lives.

Or so we thought.

My generation — we were called “The Martial Laws Babies” — is beginning to realise now that only the glorious part of Philippine history is being obliterated.

‘Bongbong’ Marcos the frontrunner
Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., only son and namesake of the late dictator, is the frontrunner in the Philippines’ upcoming presidential election in May. Polls in January and February show Marcos Jr. ahead in the race with 60 percent of the national vote.

He was 29 when the family was ousted and sent into exile in Hawai’i. He had since returned to the Philippines, where he served as governor of Ilocos Norte, as congressman and senator.

Now he is aiming to go back to his childhood playground — the Malacañang Palace.

His campaign has revived “Bagong Lipunan” (The New Society), the anthem of martial law. I shudder. It summoned the dark years.

Now as an adult, watching how North Koreans live now gives me a perspective of how we were brainwashed into subservience during the martial period when the media was controlled by the regime.

Political opinions had no place in the public sphere. Dissidents disappeared, plucked out of their homes by military men, never to be seen ever again. Those who had heard of these stories of desaparecidos had to zip their mouths. Or else.

The government slogan “Sa Ikakaunlad ng Bayan Displina Ang Kailangan” (For the Nation’s Progress Discipline is Necessary) was forever stuck in our heads.

Marcos family’s extravaganzas
My generation lived through different political eras. We grew up watching the Marcos family’s extravaganzas. They acted like royalty.

Imelda Marcos paraded in her made-for-the-queen gowns and glittering jewelry, suffocating Filipinos with her absolute vanity amid our dystopian society.

“People say I’m extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?” she said.

“Bagong Lipunan” was constantly played on the radio, on TV and in public places. It was inescapable. Its lyrics were planted into our consciousness: “Magbabago ang lahat tungo sa pag-unland” (Eveyone will change toward progress.)

Marcos created a fiction depicting his purported greatness that fuelled his tyranny.

During the two decades of media control, the brainwashing propaganda concealed what the regime represented — world-class kleptocrats, murderers and torturers.

Marcos Jr. gave no apology, showed no remorse and offered no restitution. And why would he? Maybe no one remembers after all. None of the Marcoses or their cronies ever went to jail for their transgressions.

Marcos rewarded many times
Marcos Jr. has been rewarded many times, repeatedly elected to various positions. And now as president?

It’s perplexing. It’s appalling. And for people who were tortured and the families of those killed, it’s revolting.

Marcos Jr. appeals to a fresh generation that doesn’t hear the shuddering beat of “Bagong Lipunan” the way my generation does.

The Philippines’ median age is 25. Their lack of a personal link to the martial law experience perhaps explains their historical oblivion.

But history is still being written. Pre-election polls are just polls. The May 9 ballot will decide a new chapter in history.

As Filipino journalist Sheila Coronel said, “A Marcos return is inevitable only if we believe it to be.”

Mar-Vic Cagurangan is editor-in-chief and publisher of the Pacific Island Times in Guam. This article is republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The Washington visit will be followed by visits to Canada and Germany, the Sikyong, or elected head of Tibet’s India-based Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), added.

“We have received an official invitation from the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who has been a strong supporter and advocate for Tibet,” Tsering told RFA.

“We will also be meeting with the State Department’s special coordinator for Tibetan issues Uzra Zeya and with many other government and non-governmental officials.”

“Over the last decades, and especially under the leadership and authoritarian policies of Chinese president Xi Jinping, we have seen Tibetans face more and more religious and cultural repression aimed at wiping out the Tibetan identity,” Tsering said.

A CTA report detailing what Tsering called the “urgent issues” surrounding Tibet’s environment and language and human rights situation, and prepared for submission to Xi Jinping, is being temporarily held back for “a number of reasons,” the Sikyong said.

“One of these of course is the ongoing concern over Russia and Ukraine,” he said.

CTA departments and a Permanent Strategy Committee established by the Sikyong are now working together to push again for a resumption of a Sino-Tibetan dialogue on Tibet’s status under Chinese rule, Tsering said.

Nine rounds of talks were previously held between envoys of exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and high-level Chinese officials beginning in 2002, but stalled in 2010 and were never resumed.

Divisions persist in the Tibetan exile community—about 150,000 people living in 40 countries—over how best to advance the rights of the 6.3 million Tibetans living in China, with some calling for a restoration of the independence lost when Chinese troops marched into Tibet in 1950.

Penpa Tsering, a former speaker of Tibet’s exile parliament in Dharamsala, won a closely fought April 11, 2021 election to become Sikyong held in Tibetan communities worldwide.

The fifth elected CTA leader, Tsering replaced Lobsang Sangay, a Harvard-trained scholar of law, who had served two consecutive five-year terms as Sikyong, an office filled since 2011 by popular vote.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lobsang Gelek.

In 2002, Mohsin Abbas was a reporter at the Daily Pakistan when he said he was arrested and abused during then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s campaign of surveillance and harassment of the press. (Abbas did not share further details out of concerns for the security of family members who remain in the country.)

He fled Pakistan for Canada, where he continued to work in journalism, including for the BBC. Fast forward 20 years, and Abbas took on a new journalistic project this year as publisher of the Tilbury Times, a Tilbury, Ontario, newspaper that was closed in 2020 after its parent company shed several publications due to COVID-19 revenue woes.

The 136-year-old newspaper, which Abbas transformed from a print weekly to a news site, publishes local crime and business news, and international news with a local angle, such as a recent interview with a Canadian family with ties to Ukraine. 

“If newspapers disappear, the well-being of the community decreases,” Mohsin, 47, said. 

In addition to the Tilbury Times, Abbas has also relaunched two other local Canadian news publications that shuttered in recent years: the LaSalle Post Reporter, previously the LaSalle Post, and Lakeshore News Reporter, previously Lakeshore News.

In a phone interview, Abbas spoke to CPJ about restarting the Tilbury Times and the importance of community reporting. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to restart the Tilbury Times? 

I heard a program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC] about a local newspaper going out of circulation. I felt a [kindred spirit] with the people in the community who wanted their stories to be told. It reminded me of when I was a child in Pakistan and didn’t see my own community reflected in stories from larger publications. Local stories were being lost and so I decided to step in and try to help.

How did you go about reopening it and hiring a staff?

When I first came up with the idea, it felt like nobody believed it would work out: an outsider coming into a small community to revive a paper. We started from scratch. I remortgaged my home to pay for startup costs. I also connected with local non-profits that archived all the previous editions of the Tilbury Times, so we have a sense of legacy. After the CBC published an article about my efforts, more people began reaching out to help: former employees, people from across Canada, and even people overseas.

Have Tilbury residents been welcoming of your initiative?

People have been very supportive. The more we publish, the more engagement we get from locals. People want to see their stories, their concerns reflected in their local paper. I’m learning so many things I never knew— for example, I never realized what a big issue internet connectivity is in rural areas. If we want to stay a strong democracy, we need to have local newspapers. Local news is an important pillar of society.

It’s about telling people’s stories. We’re not making a lot of money, but we’re making an impact. We’re able to inform people outside of Tilbury about the town. We’re getting clicks on the newspaper’s website from people in Toronto and the United States. We’re opening people’s eyes about the town and new opportunities in it. The local community has also [rallied behind] the paper. The more we publish, the more locals who are writing in with questions and things they want us to look into. It’s very satisfying experience.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Katherine Jacobsen/CPJ U.S. and Canada Program Coordinator.

The post Stefan & Me: Lessons In Exile from Reality appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.