A Cambodian court has charged two Chinese nationals with the torture and murder of a South Korean social media influencer whose body was found on the outskirts of Phnom Penh earlier this month.
Byun Ah-yeong, also known as BJ Ahyeong, was an influencer for popular South Korean streaming service AfreecaTV, and that she had more than 250,000 Instagram followers, Agence France-Presse reported. Media reports say she was 33.
Two Chinese, Lai Wenshao, 30, and Cai Huijuan, 39 were charged with murder, court spokesman Plang Sophal told local media.
Lai and Cai testified that Byun had gone into seizures and died while receiving treatment at their clinic on June 4, and they had abandoned her body, AFP said, citing a police report.
If they are convicted, they could face life in prison.
Lai and Cai’s clinic had been operating without a license, Sok Sambath, the governor of Phnom Penh’s Boeung Keng Kang district, told RFA’s Khmer Service.
“We shut the clinic down,” he said, but declined to answer questions inquiring as to how they could have been allowed to open without a license, only saying that they had started before he took office.
Police Chief Sar Thet told RFA that according to the police investigation, “the couple injected [something] into a South Korean lady and she died.”
The incident may have happened because of improperly administered anesthesia, Quach Mengly, a Cambodian physician, told RFA.
The Ministry of Health hasn’t effectively taken action against unlicensed medical clinics and this has caused several patient deaths as of late, Yong Kim Eng, president of the local PDP-Center NGO, told RFA.
He said that the incident could scare off foreigners who want to seek medical treatment in Cambodia.
“[Cambodians] are [also] afraid of using local clinics,” said Yong Kim Eng. “They seek treatment outside of the country, so we are giving money to foreign countries.”
Soeung Sengkaruna, spokesman for the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association urged the authorities to conduct a thorough investigation to find the real cause of death to restore public trust in Cambodia’s medical services.
“The related authorities and the ministry of health need to investigate this case,” he said. “We want to find out whether it was a malpractice or the providers’ lack of skill.”
Translated by Samean Yun. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.
New York, June 8, 2023—In response to the Wednesday, June 7,ruling by the Pietermaritzburg High Court prohibiting former South African President Jacob Zuma from continuing the private prosecution of journalist Karyn Maughan, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement urging the former president to accept the ruling:
“The unanimous ruling of three high court judges, including a punitive cost order, is a legal smackdown for former South African President Jacob Zuma and a massive victory for Karyn Maughan to continue her journalism freely without the sustained harassment campaign that Zuma, his family, and his supporters have waged both online and within the legal system,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “We urge the former president not to appeal the judgment. Zuma took an oath to uphold the Constitution when he became president, and he should accept the constitutional right to media freedom that the court has so eloquently upheld.”
The case began in September 2022, when Zuma’s legal team filed criminal charges which launched a private prosecution against Maughan in connection to her August 2021 News24 report on Zuma’s medical condition. The court found that the alleged confidential information that Zuma claimed was unlawfully given to Maughan was in fact public and had already been filed in court three times by the time she published them.
On Wednesday, the Jacob Zuma Foundation, the former president’s personal foundation,tweeted that he would appeal the “bizarre judgment.”
In their ruling, the judges labeled Zuma’s attempt at privately prosecuting Maughan an “abuse of process” and a violation of the right to media freedom recognized in the South African Constitution. The judges also noted that the media’s right to freedom of expression “is not just (or even primarily) for the benefit of the media: it is for the benefit of the public.”
“Such [a] right we agree encompasses the right of journalists to report freely on matters of public interest without threats and without intimidation and harassment,” the judges wrote. The judges said it was evident in Zuma’s affidavit and tweets by his associates and his daughter that the former president harbors “great hostility” towards Maughan.
Prosecutors have previously criticized Zuma for his “Stalingrad Strategy” in attempting to delay his trial over alleged corruption in an arms deal for nearly 20 years.
Southeast Asian nations will hold their first joint military exercises in the South China Sea, ASEAN chair Indonesia said Thursday, amid rising tensions between Beijing and Washington in the disputed waterway and Taiwan Strait.
The non-combat drills will take place near Indonesia’s Natuna Islands in September as a show of unity among the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Indonesian military officials said.
“All [ASEAN countries] have confirmed that they will attend,” Julius Widjojono, a spokesman for Indonesia’s armed forces, told BenarNews, adding the drill would be an annual event. However, there had been no confirmation from Myanmar on whether it would take part, Julius said. Strife-torn Myanmar is persona non grata at major ASEAN meetings.
China claims nearly the entire South China Sea, including waters within the exclusive economic zones of Taiwan and ASEAN member-states Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. While Indonesia does not regard itself as a party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone in and around the Natunas.
Indonesia’s military commander Adm. Yudo Margono, who proposed the ASEAN drill during a meeting of the bloc’s defense forces chiefs on Wednesday in Bali, said the exercises would enhance regional stability.
“Indonesia will continue to promote a safe, peaceful and stable region free from any threats and disturbances that threaten the sovereignty of the states,” Yudo said in a statement Wednesday.
“A safe sea will automatically boost our countries’ economy.”
‘Strong message to the major powers’
The ASEAN drill, dubbed ASEAN Solidity Exercise, or Asec01N, will involve army, navy and air force units from the member-states, and Timor Leste, an observer state. The exercises will focus on maritime security and search-and-rescue operations.
Khairul Fahmi, a military and security analyst at the Jakarta-based Institute for Security and Strategic Studies, said the exercise was a good initiative by Indonesia.
“This is a concrete form of defense diplomacy to build trust, reduce concerns and misunderstandings between countries, especially ASEAN. Plus, there will be many challenges and threats to Indonesia’s national interests,” Fahmi said.
He said Indonesia’s initiative also affirmed its sovereign rights in the North Natuna Sea, which China claims as part of its historical rights marked by a nine-dash line that overlaps with other countries’ exclusive economic zones.
“This is part of ASEAN’s efforts to jointly play a more strategic role in maintaining regional stability,” Fahmi said.
“At the same time, it sends a strong message to the major powers that have interests in the region, especially in the North Natuna Sea, not to ignore ASEAN.”
China has built military installations on some of the islands and reefs it controls in the South China Sea. In 2016, an international tribunal ruled that China’s claims had no legal basis under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), but Beijing rejected the ruling and continues to assert its presence.
Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia have accused China of disrupting their oil and gas exploration activities with frequent incursions by Chinese coast guard and maritime militia ships, leading to confrontations. ASEAN and China have been negotiating a code of conduct for years to manage disputes peacefully, but progress has been glacial.
The United States, which is not a claimant but is in a defense treaty with the Philippines, has challenged China’s claims by conducting “freedom of navigation” operations in the waterway.
While officials from some ASEAN states have expressed worry about the possibility of war breaking out between the superpowers over Taiwan, Washington and Manila earlier this year struck a deal to give U.S. forces expanded access to military bases in the Philippines – a move that angered China.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Tria Dianti for BenarNews.
New York, June 7, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists on Wednesday expressed concern that a South African high court judge’s temporary injunction, if made final, against the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit investigative outlet, could imperil the country’s investigative journalism, journalists’ confidential sources, and whistleblowers.
In April, amaBhungfane published a series of articles based on leaked documents about South African businessman Zunaid Moti and the Moti Group of companies, which he led as CEO until resigning in March. The Moti Group alleged a former employee stole those documents.
On May 30, the Moti Group launched an urgent application to be heard in secret, in terms of a legal process where no notice needs to be given to the other party concerned, to force amaBhungane to return the documents in its possession and to bar it from any further reporting on the company. On June 1, Judge John Holland-Muter granted an interim order effectively gagging amaBhungane until the matter could be argued in open court on October 3 and ordering it to return the documents within 48 hours, according to a report by the outlet and a statement by the industry body South African National Editors’ Forum. AmaBhungane’s lawyer was only informed about the interim order after it was granted.
“We hope that when the matter is fully ventilated in open court, investigative journalism in the public interest and the protection of confidential sources that are key to exposing massive alleged corruption in South Africa and elsewhere will be vindicated and not eroded,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “Not to do so would mean any party can stop investigative journalists from exposing corruption or any other matter of public interest by claiming that the information relied upon is stolen, endangering the lives of whistleblowers or confidential sources by forcing disclosure.”
Quintal has been an amaBhungane board member since October 2013.
David Frankel, executive director of The Sentry, a U.S. outlet that collaborated with amaBhungane on its investigations into the Moti Group, in an email to CPJ described amaBhungane’s reporting as “public interest journalism of the purest kind.”
“Questions about Moti Group’s apparent payments to firms linked to the President and Vice President of Zimbabwe, a cozy relationship with an official at a major South African bank, and the financial motives behind donations to a Presidential candidate in Botswana–these are all important and appropriate subjects for investigative journalism,” Frankel said.
To protect its sources and not hand over the documents, as well as to continue reporting on the Moti Group, amaBhungane sought an urgent reconsideration of the order on Saturday morning, June 3, ahead of that evening’s deadline to return the documents.
Judge Stephan van Nieuwenhuizen dealt only with the order to return the documents and granted a variation of the order. As a result, amaBhungane would not be compelled to hand over the documents, although the bar on publishing further articles would remain until the case was eventually heard in court.
Van Nieuwenhuizen reportedly said he could not understand how Holland-Muter granted the interim order and criticized Moti Group’s legal representatives for being “unreasonable.”
“While we are disappointed that the gag order issued against us–unjustifiably and abusively in our view–remains in place for now, we will fight this in due course and believe today’s variation was necessary to protect our sources,” amaBhungane tweeted after the revised order was issued.
In its court papers filed on June 6 challenging the interim order, which CPJ reviewed, amaBhungane said that Section 16 of the South African Constitution permitted journalists to receive information from sources on a confidential basis.
“Regardless of the manner in which information has been obtained by a source, it is not unlawful for journalists to hold any information provided by a source, provided they do so in the public interest,” the outlet wrote in those court papers.
Journalists had a right and duty to keep their source material and the identity of anonymous sources confidential, the document said, adding that it was unlawful and unconstitutional to order a journalist to hand over their source material or identify a source to any other party.
“A prior restraint on journalist publication can only be granted in exceptional circumstances and never without notice,” the documents said, adding that it was “unlawful and unconstitutional to interdict a journalistic publication without notice, whether on an interim or final basis.”
AmaBhungane is expected to return to court within the next few weeks.
In an opinion article published Sunday, Zunaid Moti said the legal dispute was “in no way about supposedly ‘gagging’ media” but “preventing journalists from reporting upon stolen information.”
In that article, Moti accused amaBhungane of having “used the flimsy excuse of ‘public interest’ to participate in theft; published stolen, altered documents and convoluted conspiracy theories as fact; and has even gone as far as to share private banking details and other personal information on public platforms.”
This justification was repeated in a statement to CPJ by the Moti Group’s lawyer Ulrich Roux, which said the June 1 order was not a “gagging order” against the media and amaBhungane but had to be seen in the context of a “clear case of theft committed by an ex-employee,” who downloaded more than 4,000 “editable” Moti Group documents before resigning.
The statement said these documents included proprietary information and intellectual property, which could cause significant monetary damages to the group if confidentiality was not maintained, adding that the papers were not in the public interest and denied that the former employee was acting as a “whistleblower.”
In televisioninterviews, Moti said the secrecy of the June 1 hearing was necessary because he believed amaBhungane could have concealed or destroyed the documents if they had received prior notice about the group’s court action.
In an opinion column published Monday, William Bird, executive director of the local press rights group Media Monitoring Africa, labeled the June 1 interim court order a “travesty of justice” and said, “Even if we accept this argument, had amaBhungane sought to delete the documents, they could still have concealed the material even after the order was granted.”
A Chinese J-16 fighter jet last week carried out “an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” near an American reconnaissance plane that was flying above the South China Sea, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.
The incident, which occurred Friday, follows a near collision of Chinese and American jets late last year over the same contested waters.
A video released by the U.S. military shows the Chinese fighter jet approaching the American plane at a high altitude before turning sharply, veering away suddenly and disappearing in the distance. The cockpit of the American plane appears to shudder as the Chinese jet passes.
The pilot of the Chinese jet “flew directly in front of the nose of the RC-135, forcing the U.S. aircraft to fly through its wake turbulence,” the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement, vowing to continue flying above the waters Beijing claims as sovereign territory.
“The United States will continue to fly, sail, and operate – safely and responsibly – wherever international law allows, and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Joint Force will continue to fly in international airspace with due regard for the safety of all vessels and aircraft under international law,” it said. “We expect all countries in the Indo-Pacific region to use international airspace safely and in accordance with international law.”
Beijing claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea despite a 2016 ruling in a case brought by the Philippines at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that rejected China’s expansive claims.
Six other Asian governments have territorial claims or maritime boundaries in the South China Sea that overlap with the sweeping claims of China. They are Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. While Indonesia does not regard itself as party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.
The United States is officially neutral in the dispute but rejects China’s vast claim and has called for sovereignty claims to be resolved peacefully. U.S. forces also frequently carry out “freedom of navigation” operations through international waters in the sea, which includes shipping lanes in the South China Sea through which more than $5 trillion of goods pass each year.
RFA has sought comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns for RFA.
A Chinese J-16 fighter jet last week carried out “an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” near an American reconnaissance plane that was flying above the South China Sea, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.
The incident, which occurred Friday, follows a near collision of Chinese and American jets late last year over the same contested waters.
A video released by the U.S. military shows the Chinese fighter jet approaching the American plane at a high altitude before turning sharply, veering away suddenly and disappearing in the distance. The cockpit of the American plane appears to shudder as the Chinese jet passes.
The pilot of the Chinese jet “flew directly in front of the nose of the RC-135, forcing the U.S. aircraft to fly through its wake turbulence,” the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement, vowing to continue flying above the waters Beijing claims as sovereign territory.
“The United States will continue to fly, sail, and operate – safely and responsibly – wherever international law allows, and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Joint Force will continue to fly in international airspace with due regard for the safety of all vessels and aircraft under international law,” it said. “We expect all countries in the Indo-Pacific region to use international airspace safely and in accordance with international law.”
Beijing claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea despite a 2016 ruling in a case brought by the Philippines at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that rejected China’s expansive claims.
Six other Asian governments have territorial claims or maritime boundaries in the South China Sea that overlap with the sweeping claims of China. They are Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. While Indonesia does not regard itself as party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.
The United States is officially neutral in the dispute but rejects China’s vast claim and has called for sovereignty claims to be resolved peacefully. U.S. forces also frequently carry out “freedom of navigation” operations through international waters in the sea, which includes shipping lanes in the South China Sea through which more than $5 trillion of goods pass each year.
RFA has sought comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns for RFA.
Earlier this month, the Philippine Coast Guard deployed five 30-foot navigational buoys near islands and reefs within its territory in the South China Sea, saying the move highlighted the nation’s “unwavering resolve to protect its maritime borders.”
Within two weeks, China had deployed three navigational buoys of its own, positioning two near Manila’s beacons at Irving Reef and Whitsun Reef, to ensure “safety of navigation.”
The tit-for-tat deployments signaled a new front in a long-running dispute over sovereignty of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, one of the world’s most important sea trade routes that is considered a flashpoint for conflict in the Asia-Pacific.
But the buoys also underscored an increasingly proactive approach by the Philippines in enforcing its maritime rights, analysts say.
“Such a move illustrates Manila’s awareness of the changing nature of regional geopolitics,” said Don McLain Gill, a Manila-based geopolitical analyst and lecturer at De La Salle University.
“The Philippines also recognizes that no other external entity can effectively endorse its legitimate interests other than itself.”
The Philippines deployed five 30-foot navigational buoys near islands and reefs within its territory between May 10 and 12. Credit: Philippine Coast Guard/Reuters
China claims nearly all of the South China Sea and has for years militarized artificial islands, while deploying coast guard boats and a state-backed armed fishing fleet around disputed areas.
In 2016, an international tribunal ruled in favor of Manila and against Beijing’s expansive historical claims to the region, but China has since refused to acknowledge the ruling.
The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and Taiwan all have claims in the sea — and Manila’s buoy deployment prompted an official protest from Hanoi.
Since taking office in June last year, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has been more vocal in condemningChina’s aggressive actions in the region and has restored traditional military ties with the United States.
Raymond Powell, the South China Sea lead at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, said the recent deployment of buoys showed the Philippines’ newfound determination to “proactively assert its maritime interests.”
‘A war of buoys’
While Marcos Jr. was praised by some for the deployment, others have criticized the move as needlessly provocative.
Filipino security analyst Rommel Banlaoi said the unilateral action heightened security tensions and could have “unintended negative consequences.”
“What the Philippines did was problematic because the international community recognizes the South China Sea as disputed waters,” said Banlaoi, who chairs the advisory board of the China Studies Center at New Era University’s School of International Relations.
“This might trigger a war of buoys,” he said in an interview last week with local radio station DZBB.
The Philippines National Security Adviser Eduardo Año said the deployment of buoys was meant to enforce the 2016 arbitral ruling in the Hague.
“This is not a provocation. What we call provocations are those who conduct dangerous maneuvering, laser pointing, blocking our vessels, harassing our fishermen,” he told reporters in an interview, referring to recent Chinese actions in the South China Sea.
Jay Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea, said the installation of the buoys demonstrated the Philippines was exercising jurisdiction over its waters for purposes of improving navigational safety.
“Such buoys are harmless devices that warn all other ships of potential hazards and should in no way be regarded as provocative or threatening,” Batongbacal told BenarNews.
He asked why critics were silent about China building artificial islands, installing anti-air and anti-ship missiles, and deploying missile boats and large coast guard vessels that actively interfere with Philippine boats in its maritime territory.
Angering Vietnam
Not only did the buoy deployment set off another round of recriminations between Beijing and Manila, it also triggered a rebuke from Vietnam, which claims parts of the Spratly Islands as its own.
When asked about Manila’s action, Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pham Thu Hang said Hanoi “strongly opposes all acts violating Vietnam’s sovereign rights.”
Analysts say, however, the spat is unlikely to escalate, as Vietnam has far bigger issues to deal with in terms of China’s incursions into its territorial waters.
A Chinese survey ship, escorted by China Coast Guard and maritime militia, was found lingering within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone for several days from May 7, often within fifty nautical miles of its southern coast.
Workers prepare a navigational buoy for deployment in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea on May 15, 2023. Credit: Philippine Coast Guard/Reuters
Powell said the incursions were “much more provocative than the Philippines’ buoys.”
“I think Vietnam’s pro-forma protest over the latter will be noted and largely forgotten, both in Hanoi and in Manila,” Powell told BenarNews.
Vietnam’s reaction to the Philippines’ move was natural “due to its potential political ramifications at the domestic level,” said Gill. But he added that Southeast Asian nations had a track record of settling maritime disputes in an amicable manner.
In 2014, for example, the Philippines and Indonesia settled a maritime border dispute after two decades of negotiations by using international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
“Unlike China, Southeast Asian countries have illustrated a rather positive track record of being able to compromise and solve bilateral tensions between and among each other given the countries’ collective desire to maintain stability in the region,” Gill said.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Camille Elemia for BenarNews.
After the Civil War, a new form of slavery took hold in the US and lasted more than 60 years. Associated Press reporters Margie Mason and Robin McDowell investigate the chilling history of how Southern states imprisoned mainly Black men, often for minor crimes, and then leased them out to private companies – for years, even decades, at a time. The team talks with the descendant of a man imprisoned in the Lone Rock stockade in Tennessee nearly 140 years ago, where people as young as 12 worked under subhuman conditions in coal mines and inferno-like ovens used to produce iron. This system of forced prison labor enriched the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad company – at the cost of prisoners’ lives.
At the state park that sits on the former site of the Lone Rock stockade, relics from the hellish prison are buried beneath the soil. Archeologist Camille Westmont has found thousands of artifacts, such as utensils and the plates prisoners ate off. She has also created a database listing the names of those sent to Lone Rock. A team of volunteers are helping her, including a woman reckoning with her own ancestor’s involvement in this corrupt system and the wealth her family benefited from.
The United States Steel Corporation helped build bridges, railroads and towering skyscrapers across America. But the company also relied on forced prison labor. After U.S. Steel took over Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in 1907, the industrial giant used prison labor for at least five years. During that time, more than 100 men died while working in their massive coal mining operation in Alabama. U.S. Steel has misrepresented this dark chapter of its history. And it has never apologized for its use of forced labor or the lives lost.The reporters push the company to answer questions about its past and engage with communities near the former mines.
The myth of U.S. democracy is on the verge of shattering.
In the region where cotton was king and prisons have succeeded the throne, this myth’s falseness is particularly evident in the U.S. South, the epicenter of the nation’s plantation and chattel slavery economy where the majority of Black/African-descended people still exist today. This region is also the land where Jim Crow law/segregation law once ruled and whose specter determines how resources are still allocated today. It’s also the region in which workers are least unionized and often hyper-exploited, with community members disproportionately subject to state violence such as incarceration or deportation.
Given these deathly conditions, the seats of power in our region are filled by those who benefit from these systems and uphold them, oppressing Southerners both historically and presently. In response, Southern freedom fighters have been fighting to build a grassroots democracy that is directly informed by the needs of our region, beginning at the local level. In so many ways, the efforts of Southern freedom fighters are an extension of freedom fighters in the Global South who share experiences of exploitation in the workplace, state violence and increased rates of incarceration, and have led organizing fights that inform strategies in the U.S. South. Formations like the Southern Movement Assembly are uniting U.S. Southern grassroots organizations with comrades across the Global South, particularly Central and South America, to develop a people’s democracy across colonial borders.
The Highlander Research and Education Center, where I work, is a Southern movement school, building democratic participation in the U.S. South and Appalachia through grassroots organizing, leadership development, and movement building. Highlander, which was established 90 years ago, has helped fuel the Southern fight for liberation against white supremacist capitalism.
Highlander supported the integration of labor unions in the 1930s and 40s, was a meeting place for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s and held trainings for civil rights activists during the sit-ins of the 1960s, and Highlander’s Education Director Septima Clark initiated the Citizenship Schools that expanded access to voting rights for Black people.
Although Highlander may be best known as the place where Rosa Parks trained before the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and where Martin Luther King, Jr. attended workshops that contributed to being red-baited as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, we know that many of the same issues these freedom fighters battled continue to face our communities today.
My work as Highlander’s electoral justice researcher and educator seeks to build capacity for today’s Southern freedom fighters and their communities to govern themselves as we move toward building a truly democratic world beyond capitalism and white supremacy.
This work goes beyond maximizing participation in the U.S. electoral system. This work seeks to build Southern communities’ capacity to collectively define their problems, learn and understand current power structures as they exist, and develop collective solutions based on the experiences and abilities of each community member.
There is strategic value in engaging elections, but strategies for grassroots democracy must extend far beyond Election Day. While we understand that participating in this U.S. electoral system is presently inevitable, we also understand it is equally, if not more, vital to build parallel systems that are truly democratic and accountable to every community member.
This work is reflected when we see People’s Movement Assemblies being utilized to build political power in cities such as Nashville, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Lexington, Kentucky; and so many more Southern cities.
People’s Movement Assemblies are grassroots, democratic gatherings inspired by the World Social Forum in 2003, where collective decision-making spaces facilitated action plans that sparked international protests, leading to the Global Day of Action that year with millions of people worldwide taking to the streets to speak out against the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. These assemblies are used by communities to collectively assess their problems, determine their strategies, assess who has the power to materially change their conditions, and create grassroots solutions to bring their vision for a life-affirming world into reality. The Southern Movement Assembly, a regional formation that has been seeking to build grassroots democratic power across the South for 10 years with Southern freedom fighters and their communities, is inviting Southern community organizations to utilize People’s Movement Assemblies in their work throughout Summer 2022 to build collective power, community governance and action plans for organizing throughout the Global South.
In the midst of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections for gubernatorial and legislative seats, Highlander has developed the People Practicing Power workshop intervention. During this workshop series, organizers and their community members are learning methods for self-protection during Election Day from racialized, fascist terrorism; the process for developing a policy demand into a law; and creating or joining efforts to build democratic institutions rooted in solidarity economy principles.
“Solidarity economy” is an umbrella term for institutions and practices that are grounded in mutualism, cooperation, democracy, pluralism and building a world beyond racial capitalism.
The U.S. South is often seen by those outside the region as a right-wing stronghold and a recipient of charity. Our practice of rooting our work in the creation of solidarity economies acknowledges Southerners’ long history of not only surviving under white supremacist capitalism, but leading the charge to develop people-centered democracies and economies within the U.S.
The U.S. empire is crumbling due to the destruction created by capitalism. As this empire takes its last breaths, it doubles down on its centuries-old fascist violence domestically and abroad. From the ashes of this empire’s burning, people are using tools of community governance and solidarity economies to build a world beyond colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. There is a new world coming, we’re building it together, and the time is here to usher it in.
Under the slogan “Build the Workers Assembly Movement! Organize the South!” nearly 80 workers from eight Southern states gathered in Durham, North Carolina, for a Southern Workers Assembly Organizing School over the weekend of April 29 to May 1. Workers came to the School from Atlanta; New Orleans; Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond and Tidewater, Virginia; Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville and Eastern North Carolina; northern Kentucky; and elsewhere.
Over the last year, the network of areas building Workers Assemblies across the South has grown substantially to include nine different cities, the development of several industry-based councils — including Amazon, health care and education workers — and interest in developing assemblies in additional locations as well.
China has accused the U.S. of intensifying spying activities in the disputed South China Sea after the U.S. Navy deployed three of its ocean surveillance vessels in the region.
An aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, also entered the South China Sea on Friday, ahead of the large-scale Philippines-U.S. joint military exercise Balikatan 22.
Data provided by the ship-tracking website MarineTraffic show the ocean survey ship USNS Bowditch is currently operating in Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), 60 nautical miles east of Danang and about 90 nautical miles south of China’s Hainan Island.
At the same time, another ocean surveillance vessel, the USNS Effective, is in waters northwest of the Philippines, 250 nautical miles from Scarborough Shoal, which China calls Huangyan Island.
The third ocean surveillance ship, USNS Loyal, is in the sea east of Taiwan.
China’s state-run Global Times said they are “spy ships” that carry out reconnaissance in support of anti-submarine warfare against China. They have been in the area since March 17, it said.
“The U.S. Navy has frequently sent spy vessels near China in recent years, but it is unusual to see so many of them present at the same time,” Global Times said.
Amid the raging war in Ukraine, the deployment of the ships may serve as an indication of the U.S. commitment in the Indo-Pacific.
A file photo showing ocean surveillance ship USNS Effective sitting in dry dock at Yokosuka, Japan, Sept. 13, 2007. The ship is currently deployed to the South China Sea. Credit: U.S. Navy
‘Spy ships’
The USNS Bowditch is a Pathfinder-class survey ship that has often been deployed in the South China Sea. The USNS Effective and USNS Loyal are both Victorious-class ocean surveillance ships.
The ships measure water conditions and deploy underwater drones that take very detailed measurements of water temperature, salinity, the acoustic environment and the water’s chemical make-up. They also conduct very detailed surveys of the ocean bottom.
“The ships’ data can be used to detect submarines and identify ships’ noises, so from China’s perspective they are spy ships,” said Carl Schuster, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former director of operations at the U.S. Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.
“China’s survey ships do similar operations so in many ways, China’s description of the American ships provides an insight into how China uses its survey ships,” he said.
MarineTraffic also shows that a Chinese survey vessel has just been deployed.
China’s homegrown third-generation, spacecraft-tracking ship Yuanwang-5 is currently in waters east of Taiwan, some 255 nautical miles from the island.
It’s unclear where the ship, described by the Chinese military as “a backbone in China’s maritime tracking and measuring network,” is heading.
China has four Yuanwang-class tracking ships in active operation, including Yuanwang-5 which entered service in 2007.
Some security analysts, like Paul Buchanan at the Auckland, New Zealand-based 36th Parallel Assessments risk consultancy, say the Yuanwang-class ships are “dual-platform spy ships.”
Buchanan has previously been quoted by the NZ Herald as saying the ships are used for intelligence collection and tracking satellites. He said 60 to 70 per cent of their work is looking for other people’s signals and 30 per cent is the satellite work. Buchanan also said the U.S. and China use their signals collection ships partly to track rival submarines.
In another development, the American expeditionary mobile base USS Miguel Keith entered the South China Sea on March 21, the Beijing-based South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a think tank, said.
This is the first time the USS Miguel Keith entered the South China Sea since its deployment to the West Pacific in October 2021, the SCSPI said.
The 90,000-ton ship that can serve as a strategic platform and command center is the second-biggest ship type in the U.S. Navy after aircraft carriers.
It is unclear if the USS Miguel Keith will join the Balikatan 22 joint exercise between the U.S. and Philippine armies taking place from March 28 to April 8 across the Luzon Strait.
With over 5,000 U.S. military personnel and 3,800 Filipino soldiers, the U.S. Embassy in Manila said that Balikatan 22 will be “one of the largest-ever iterations of the Philippine-led annual exercise” which this year coincides with the 75th anniversary of U.S.-Philippine security cooperation.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
How to solve the territorial disputes in the South China Sea that have flummoxed diplomats for decades and stoked fears of superpower conflict?
Actually, it’s quite simple, according to British scholar Bill Hayton. Just acknowledge that the current occupiers of each feature have the best claim to sovereignty over it.
Hayton, associate fellow in the Asia-Pacific Program at Chatham House, a U.K. think-tank, shared his views in a recent commentary in “Perspective,” a publication of the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.
He argues that researchers now “know enough about the history of the South China Sea to resolve the competing territorial claims to the various rocks and reefs.”
The basic facts of the South China Sea disputes are well-known. Six parties – Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam – have competing territorial claims. China holds the biggest claim, up to 90 percent of the sea, demarcated by a so-called nine-dash line. It says it has historical rights to the area – a position rejected by an international tribunal in 2016 that Beijing has refused to acknowledge. China’s stance has also put it at loggerheads with Western powers, particularly the U.S.
The disputes are not just about claims to the tiny islets and reefs scattered across the South China Sea, but also claims to jurisdiction over maritime zones associated with these features.
Because of that, a seventh country, Indonesia, also has a stake. Although it does not regard itself as a party to the South China Sea dispute, China claims historic rights to parts of the sea overlapping Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.
Hayton says that of the six formal claimants, all claim at least one islet, and “a few islets are claimed by at least five states.” The rival claims have always been thought to be “too complicated to ever sort out.”
“There are too many rocks and reefs, too many claimants, too much history. Trying to understand and disentangle all the overlapping claims is just impossible, or so people thought,” said Hayton.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.
“Territorial issues in the South China Sea only started in the beginning of the 20th century so you don’t have to look at thousands of years of history.”
The Chinese-built base at Fiery Cross Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands, pictured in an Aug. 20, 2021, satellite image. Credit: Planet Labs Inc.
The role of the International Court of Justice
“The real problem is different claimants have framed their claims to claims to island groups. It would be very hard to try to work out who has the best claim to the whole island group,” Hayton explained.
China and Vietnam, for example, claim the whole of the Paracel and Spratly island chains.
“But once you try to disentangle and desegregate the claims and look at who has the best claim to specific features, then things become a lot easier.”
“No particular country, or state or regime ever controlled the whole of the South China Sea,” he said.
In Hayton’s opinion, breaking down expansive claims to entire island groups into specific claims to named features would open a route to compromise and the resolution of the disputes.
The scholar pointed out that there have been successful precedents in Southeast Asia. Indonesia and Malaysia resolved their dispute over the islands of Ligitan and Sipadan in 2002; as did Malaysia and Singapore over three sets of uninhabited rocks in the Singapore Straits in 2008. In both cases, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) played an important role.
“By ruling out vague claims to sovereignty “from time immemorial” and demanding specific evidence of physical acts of administration, the ICJ also gave the South China Sea claimants a route out of their impasse,” Hayton suggested.
The historical evidence of physical acts of administration on the disputed rocks and reefs suggests, with a few exceptions, that the current occupiers of each feature have the best claim to sovereignty over it, according to the British scholar.
The main exception would be the Paracel Islands where Vietnam occupied about a half until China took over in 1974 after a bloody battle that saw 74 Vietnamese soldiers killed.
“Southeast Asian states have an interest in recognising each other’s de facto occupation of specific features and then presenting a united position to China,” Hayton added.
In the case some countries are unwilling to make use of the ICJ and international law, he suggested that non-governmental organisations could get involved to create a so-called ‘Track Two Tribunal’. Track two typically describes informal or unofficial discussions by people outside of government to help find solutions to complex diplomatic issues.
Hayton said they could “collect rival pieces of evidence, test the claimants’ legal arguments, and present the likely outcomes of any future international court hearing to the claimants and their publics.”
A file photo showing Vietnamese activists during a gathering to commemorate the 42nd anniversary of China’s occupation of the disputed Paracels in the South China Sea, in Hanoi, January 19, 2016. China took full control of the Paracels in 1974 after a naval showdown with Vietnam. Credit: Reuters
‘Difficult tasks’
Hayton, however, admitted that the process would not be easy.
“Populations in different countries would be claiming that this is some terrible sell-out but frankly, all of the countries are working on the basis that this is the status quo that they’re going to accept. They need to turn that into a political commitment,” he said.
Hayton’s proposal “would have merit in an ideal world,” said Mark Valencia, a scholar at the Chinese National Institute for South China Sea Studies.
“But unfortunately we do not live in an ideal world and nationalist-infused domestic politics would likely prove a fatal stumbling block to acceptance and implementation of this proposal,” Valencia said, adding that most politicians in Southeast Asian countries “would try to stay as far away as possible.”
The maritime analyst also warned that since China would not accept and adhere to a formal arbitration ruling against it for maritime space, “it is highly unlikely to accept the verdict of an unofficial Track Two Tribunal regarding territory.”
Furthermore, the idea that each claimant keeps what it currently occupies and drops its claims to other features has been proposed before without any takers, he said.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
In an unusually bold move, the Vietnam government has commemorated the 34th anniversary of a battle against the Chinese navy in the South China Sea with a ceremony led by the prime minister and a front page editorial Monday in the ruling party’s mouthpiece.
Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh made an unprecedented visit to the Memorial for the Johnson South Reef Battle in the south-central province of Khanh Hoa province at the weekend. He paid tribute to the 64 Vietnamese soldiers who were killed in the incident on March 14, 1988. Chinh was the first top Vietnamese leader to lead such a commemoration of the fallen soldiers.
Johnson South, or Gac Ma in Vietnamese, is a reef in the Spratly islands in the South China Sea. In mid-March 1988, the Vietnamese navy sent two transport ships and a landing ship to try to claim some of the reefs in the disputed Union Banks, including Johnson South.
While the Vietnamese soldiers were moving construction material onto the reef and putting up a flag, they came under fire from the Chinese troops. According to China, the Vietnamese opened fire first.
In just a couple of hours, 64 mostly unarmed Vietnamese soldiers were killed and nine were captured, the largest loss suffered by the Vietnamese military at sea since the end of the Vietnam War. Johnson South Reef has been under China’s control since.
For a long time, the battle was not talked about in public and up to now, is still not included in the school curriculum. When mentioned by Vietnamese state-controlled media, they tend to omit the word “China” and replace it with “foreign forces.” Vietnamese leaders have seemingly wanted to avoid offending China, and for the public not to dwell on the command mistakes that might have led to the defeat.
Netizens and activists, however, have been asking on internet forums why the soldiers were not armed and why were they not allowed to fight back.
A screenshot of Nhan Dan daily’s frontpage on March 14, 2022. The main article at the foot of the page is an editorial with the headline: “Eternal glory to the sea defenders.” Credit: Nhan Dan.
Front page news
Things have changed this year.
Nhan Dan daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, on Monday ran three articles on the Johnson South Reef battle and the Spratlys on its front page.
The main article, titled “Eternal glory to the sea defenders,” condemned the Chinese navy for being “a blatant force, ignorant of justice and reason,” and said their military action was totally unprovoked.
Another report covered an “incense-offering ceremony to commemorate the martyrs on the 34th anniversary of the Gac Ma Battle” in Danang.
The top article reported on Prime Minister Chinh’s visit to Khanh Hoa province, the administrative headquarters of Vietnam’s Spratly islands.
Chinh was quoted as ordering the local government to develop the Spratlys into “an economic, cultural and social center” in the South China Sea.
“This is a clear message of maritime sovereignty and self-reliance,” said a Vietnamese analyst who doesn’t want to be named as he is not authorized to speak to foreign media.
Another political analyst and prominent blogger, Huy Duc, wrote on his Facebook page: “This [the prime minister’s order] is a strategic step towards setting up our ‘policy fortress’ to defend Vietnam’s sovereignty at sea and our islands.”
“No country can pick its neighbors but a dignified nation would never be imprisoned by geography,” Duc said.
Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, D.C., said that the Vietnamese government is “trying to signal resolve, especially as the world is pre-occupied with the war in Ukraine.”
“I think you also have to look at it in the context of the war in Ukraine,” Abuza said.
In his opinion, the Vietnamese government has been “overtly pro-Russia and abstained on the U.N.vote against Moscow due to their long historical relations and the fact that they are one of the largest consumers of Russian weaponry.”
“And yet the [Ukrainian] war should leave the Vietnamese very nervous,” Abuza warned.
“(President Vladimir) Putin‘s justifications to launch an offensive war on the flimsy basis of having once controlled that territory and historical affinity sets a very dangerous precedent for Chinese aggression in Southeast Asia, in general, and Vietnam, in particular,” he said.
China claims sovereignty over all of the Spratly islands, where Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have claims.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
North Korean state media on Friday reported the results of this week’s presidential election in South Korea, surprising citizens not used to hearing political news from the South so soon after the new leader was chosen, the residents told RFA.
“Yoon Suk Yeol, a candidate of the conservative opposition ‘People Power Party’, won by a narrow margin in the 20th ‘presidential election’ held in south Korea on March 9,” the state-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Friday on the English-language version of its website.
A Korean version similarly emphasized the name of the party and the word “president.”
The brief report did not mention Yoon’s 0.8 percent margin of victory or his opponent, Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Democratic Party.
The website of the Rodong Sinmun newspaper carried the same Korean-language report.
The citizens did not expect to see news in their local media so soon after the election, a resident of the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA’s Korean Service Friday.
“Authorities are usually reluctant to publicize information about South Korea’s democratic, free election system,” said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.
“Usually when a conservative party candidate is elected, the name of the winner is not mentioned, or it is reported late. That is why today’s Rodong Sinmun report… is regarded as unusual,” she said.
While some residents in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong reacted to the news with indifference, others were jealous, a resident there, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told RFA.
“They could not hide their envy at the democratic system in South Korea in which the Supreme Leader is directly elected by the people,” said the second source, using the term by which North Koreans call their generational, dynastic leaders.
“Retired officials and college students who confirmed the results of the 20th presidential election in South Korea had a bitter look on their faces. We also have elections here in North Korea. However, there is only one candidate, pre-selected by the party, and we have to vote for the only candidate.”
Yoon will be sworn in as the South Korean president on May 10, 2022. Analysts predict that his North Korea strategy will be more hawkish than his predecessor Moon Jae-in, who prioritized engagement with the North.
Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jieun Kim.
A Chinese military aircraft crashed in the South China Sea earlier this month, the Taiwanese intelligence agency said Thursday, providing a possible explanation for China’s closure of a part of the Gulf of Tonkin near Hainan island.
Chen Ming-tong, director general of the National Security Bureau, told the Parliament’s Foreign and National Defense Committee that the crash prompted the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to set up a navigation exclusion zone in the adjacent waters to carry out search-and-rescue, and also military training.
Chen didn’t provide any further details, citing sensitivities surrounding the source.
He did however warn that as the world is focused on the war in Ukraine, China is taking advantage of the situation to “test the limits of the U.S. and other South China Sea claimants.”
On March 4, the Hainan Maritime Safety Administration issued a navigation warning banning ships from entering an area in the Gulf of Tonkin that was closed for military drills until March 15.
Part of the area lies within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry protested, asking China to respect its EEZ and continental shelf.
China’s Foreign Ministry replied, saying that “it is reasonable, lawful and irreproachable for China to conduct military exercises on its own doorstep.”
Vietnam and China reached an agreement to demarcate their share of most of the Gulf of Tonkin in 2000 but their negotiation on the mouth of the gulf has stagnated.
China has not acknowledged any plane crash recently and continues to conduct daily incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone.
A Chinese military spokesperson said at the annual session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing on Wednesday that the PLA will not tolerate any “Taiwan independence” move.
Wu Qian reiterated the threat that the PLA would “hit every time” there are such moves, according to the state-run Global Times.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
An audio drama inspired by Reveal’s 2017 investigation into a deadly explosion at a Mississippi shipyard, produced by our partners at documentary theater company StoryWorks. This deconstructed mystery is based on real accounts, real events and real people.
This episode was originally broadcast in December 2019.
For the Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center, the last straw was the COVID-19 pandemic, which strained the critical access hospital’s already-precarious finances past the breaking point. In Florida, two hospitals closed inpatient non-emergency services after being bought out by the HCA hospital chain. In Tennessee and West Virginia, financial problems combined with the strain of the pandemic led two more rural hospitals to shut their doors.
Of the 20 rural hospitals that closed in 2020, 13 were in the South, according to data from the Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which defines a closed hospital as one that no longer offers inpatient services.
Black girls are being pushed out of school and into jails at alarming rates, but this issue often is overlooked because youth incarceration reform focuses so much on boys. Reporter Ko Bragg explains how the cycle begins and what researchers hope will break it.
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**How does a seventh grader end up in solitary confinement in an adult jail? Reporter Ko Bragg takes us to Mississippi to learn about a set of laws that automatically send kids into the adult legal system for certain crimes.
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In 1996, Eddie Wise, the son of a sharecropper, purchased a farm with a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Twenty years later, the USDA foreclosed on the property and evicted him. Reveal investigates his claim that he was discriminated against because of his race.
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Myths of the Civil War and slavery are being kept alive at Confederate monuments, where visitors hear stories of “benevolent slave owners” and enslaved people “contented with their lot.” Plus, an artist finds herself in the middle of the creation of New Mexico’s most controversial historical monument.
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Myths of the Civil War and slavery are being kept alive at Confederate monuments, where visitors hear stories of “benevolent slave owners” and enslaved people “contented with their lot.” We team up with The Investigative Fund and discover how public money is supporting this false version of history.
Plus, an artist finds herself in the middle of the creation of New Mexico’s most controversial historical monument.
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Approaching 2018’s midterms, the country has its eyes locked on Georgia’s governor’s race. It’s a close contest between Stacey Abrams, a former state congresswoman who could become the first-ever black female governor in America and Brian Kemp, a tough-talking Trump loyalist with a penchant for the Second Amendment. The race has become a battleground for many of America’s most pressing concerns about democracy – from voter suppression to election security.
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